Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate my colleague on his speech.
I was told that Bill C-9 was relatively complex and technical. From what my colleague says, the issues of the bill are very clear. I would like to speak to them, because he has made it clear.
The government is denying the judiciary the option of conditional sentencing: it is creating an arbitrary list of crimes that will automatically result in prison terms.
As my colleague put it so well, they are increasing punishment with little thought to rehabilitation. A society's prime objective should be to ensure the security of its citizens. We in the Bloc Québécois support this objective.
The government is also going to allocate more resources to this repressive system. The provinces will be obliged to invest more in building prisons. This, too, will be to the detriment of prevention.
Perhaps I could suggest to my colleague that there is a certain view of society behind Bill C-9? It is not unlike that of the current administration of the United States. According to this vision, security is achieved less by social programs, the fight against poverty and the creation of jobs than by repression, the construction of prisons and the establishment of police forces. In addition, the Conservative government is not only adopting this model for itself, but it is turning it into an instrument of partisan politics. The announcement of harsher sentences may appear very simple to the public, whose feeling of insecurity, however, is not supported by statistics, as my colleague pointed out.
So this is a sort of right-wing populism that spells extreme danger for the future of Canadian and Quebec democracy. I would therefore like to hear my colleague's comments in this regard.