Mr. Speaker, my colleague's comments and questions are thoughtful. First and foremost, I am not going to speak this afternoon about comments made by one person. If we did that in this House, in fact, we would be here for a whole lot longer than 26 or 27 weeks out of the year. I think what we do in this chamber is speak directly to the commitment that we make prior to an election. The government of the day has to try to ensure that it keeps those commitments once it has made them.
The foundation of the bills that the hon. member speaks about, both Bill C-9 and Bill C-10, did not come to the House on the basis that right after the election they were important to do or they might be done or they perhaps should be introduced. They were built on the foundation of the Minister of Finance's tour prior to the election, a tour on what safe streets and our communities should be built on.
The input we received from across the country allowed us to prepare the foundation for what these two bills would be built on. Then we included the foundation of those bills in our platform so that the people of this country would know that when we went out to talk about safe streets, justice and prevention, this would be built upon that foundation.
On January 23, the election happened. We set forth one of the first two pieces of legislation to be moved, Bill C-9 and Bill C-10, and specifically the one we are dealing with today, ensuring that serious criminal activity having anything to do with a minimum sentence of 10 years would look toward and be specific to ensuring that it would not be house arrest but would be significant jail time. I think we have addressed that from start to finish.
With respect to the second part of the question, the hon. member who asked the question was not able to ensure that he directed the question in such a way that it spoke to the fact that the provincial governments are responsible for legal aid, in fact. They are responsible to carrying that out. It is not the federal government that carries out that responsibility. However, I will say to the hon. member across that I think his comment and his question were well put and that on this side of the House we supported legal aid prior to these two pieces of legislation and we will be supporting legal aid after their implementation.