Yes, I am getting old, Mr. Speaker. There are only five MPs in this House who are older than I am, so I will take my time getting up.
The member opposite, speaking on behalf of the Liberal Party, misses a whole bunch of points. One thing he said, to which I took great offence, was that he mentioned that our party just wants all of them to go to jail. This is not accurate. It is a downright misrepresentation. I will tell him personally and all who are in the House and anybody else who will listen that I think the saddest thing in the world is for people to get into in crime and end up wasting their lives in jail. That is absolutely true.
There is a maximum security institution in my riding. I visited it a number of times even before the boundary changes put it in my riding. It is incredibly sad in there. No one knows how I wish that every one of those people, mostly young people, although some are older, would have had a decent, moral education when they were growing up so that the type of activity they were involved in was just so wrong they would not contemplate doing it.
Where do we get the idea that it is all right to bludgeon a person to death? We get that in our society. Where does that come from? That would be impossible for me. I venture to guess that it would be impossible for my children because of what we have taught them about what is right and what is wrong.
I think that is the part that is missing in our society. In regard to anything moral, we have decided that we cannot impose our morals on anybody. However, we impose morals on people when somebody comes up to a member of my family and kills them. That has happened. It is not acceptable. That is an imposition of morality. Teaching of a morality and having them make their own choices because they have been taught correctly is valid and good.
I take great umbrage at that remark of the member.
I went to a youth incarceration centre and saw 13 year olds and 14 year olds who were there because they knifed somebody. Where did they get that idea?
This is not the venue in which we can contemplate this, but I absolutely believe that we need to do more to prevent people from going to jail.
When they do go to jail, we give them a sentence and we say, “Yes, they have another chance”. They go out and do it again and we say, “Okay, one more chance”. We are talking about serious crimes here, not just petty theft or things like that, as bad as that is. We are talking about attacks on human beings, brutal attacks. We are saying to them that obviously after someone has been convicted the third time, that person is a dangerous offender. Unfortunately, as much as we regret it, we tell criminals that for the good of society and the protection of law-abiding citizens, they are going to find some way to spend their lives usefully behind bars because we cannot trust them.
To me that is dreadful, but it is a valid choice we have to make if we are going to have a society in which our citizens feel safe.
The member is just wrong in his approaches and some of his statements.