Mr. Speaker, I would have thought that the member could have taken a little bit of time to write a new speech from his Bill C-9 speech, but apparently not.
In both speeches he used the phrase over and over again, “create a problem that does not exist”. I hope he is willing to defend that comment, if somebody decides to maybe send a ten percenter into his riding or put it in the newspaper or something, for all those people in his riding who have been the victims of crime and who do not feel very safe in their homes.
If he wants to make the case that somehow this is, as he said, just propaganda; there is no real problem; it is all being imagined; it is only those scary Conservatives that are somehow creating a problem that does not exist; then frankly, I think this is nonsense.
He referred to these studies and that somehow they do not make the case. Let me just quote from one of them. This is right from the study. It says:
A study of the effects of New Jersey's 1981 Graves Act, which mandated a minimum prison sentence for anyone convicted of one of several serious crimes while using or carrying a firearm, found that the proportion of New Jersey homicides involving firearms decreased significantly between 1980 and 1986.
The hon. member says that somehow this is somewhat ambiguous. I do not know what is ambiguous about that. It goes on to say:
Gun homicides, the study found, decreased significantly in all six cities after mandatory sentencing laws were enacted. Assaults and armed robberies decreased somewhat in certain cities.
Stephen Levitt, who some say is the most brilliant young economist in the U.S. and has studied with Daniel Kessler, did study that proposition 8 law in California. Maybe the hon. member could tell me how this could be misinterpreted. He wrote:
Our results suggest that criminals respond to the severity and not just the certainty of sentences, a result that is predicted by the economic model of crime but has proven elusive empirically. This suggests that the increasing reliance on sentence enhancements in both state law and the federal sentencing guidelines may represent an effective means of reducing crime.
Let me conclude with this comment. Let us say, for example, that I am a potential gun criminal and I am thinking of committing a crime with a gun. The member is saying I am not very smart and maybe that might be true, and that I do not take into account the fact that if I go out and commit this offence, maybe it is a third offence, with this new law I will get five years instead of three years. So, if I do not take that into account and I commit the crime anyway, this new law will give me five years instead of three years under the old law. The member implies that somehow this is not working. I may commit this offence or maybe I may re-offend. Frankly, I do not care if--