Mr. Speaker, the member asks an intriguing question. I also have days where I wonder why there is such disrespect for a justice system that is so obviously working. As I said earlier, the judges are of the highest quality. The police are well-equipped and well-staffed. They are, by and large, free of corruption, which is not true in other countries. We have some of the lowest crime rates of any place in the world. Our recidivism rates are among the lowest and frequently declining. We have all kinds of facilities and yet the government comes along with these minimum mandatory laws.
I sat on the justice committee for six years. I would like to say that minimum mandatories and conditional sentences work. If that were the magic bullet would we not have jumped all over it in the past six years? The problem is that they do not work. There is no evidence to support that minimum mandatories actually reduce crime. Just like this bill, there is no evidence to support that it will reduce crime.
We have this distortion of priorities, which is to put everyone who commits a crime in jail at a huge amount of money on an annual basis and we will all feel a lot better. What happened to that $1 million, $10 million or hundreds of millions which the government has not come clean on? What happens to all that money? It sure does not go into policing or into legal aid. It sure does not go into improvements in the justice system or into any diversionary programs. It does not do anything that would actually deal with the problem of crime in our communities.