Mr. Speaker, I would like to reassure the member for Wild Rose and tell him that in Quebec, people who attack children are put in prison, and that if they do it again, they will certainly spend long years in prison.
Unfortunately, that is perhaps the big difference between us. My personal experience is totally different from his. I raised children. They went to the park. I did not always go with them, and I would even say that most of the time I did not go with them. They were never attacked. There are attacks, but they are relatively rare.
I remember the newspapers of those days, and last weekend I was watching the movie Monica la Mitraille. By the way, I recommend the movie to everyone because it is a very good Quebec film. There was a real machine-gun Monica. I saw her in court when I was a young man. That was the era of armed bank robberies. The movie also shows how a young person turns into a criminal. In any event, I remember the beginning of my law practice. There were bank robberies every week. Today, bank robberies have almost totally stopped because preventive measures have become much more effective.
If we are afraid that children walking in a park will be attacked, it would be much cheaper and much more effective to pay for supervisors so that the children can play in safety. I am convinced that measures for preventing crime are effective.
My colleague does not believe that crime is on the decline because he does not read the statistics. He does not trust the people who compile data on crime. He says that people do not report crimes. In my experience, someone whose child has been attacked or a woman who was injured on the street generally complains to the police. Obviously, that is the basis for the statistics.
Increasingly, sex crimes are being reported. When I was young, the crime of incest was almost never reported. Today, it is. A great many sexual assaults, such as touching or sexual harassment were not reported. In contrast, today they are; but rape and violent crime are reported as often as they always were.
I would really like to know whether the member for Wild Rose is aware of someone who knows a girl who was violently attacked and who refused to report it to the police because she thought they would do nothing.