Fortunately, Mr. Speaker, as a society, we know the causes of crime. We have itemized them and studied them. A parliamentary committee published a report that itemized the causes of crime.
This particular piece of legislation, and some of the others before the House, actually does not address any of those causes. It only attempts to deal with sentencing. I mentioned the myth that tweaking the sentencing will reduce the causes of crime but it will not. This pattern of activity, the increasing of sentences, does not help solve crime. It is a massive employment program for prison constructors and correction officials.
The myth of public protection is attached to it but it is actually a massive federal-provincial download because most of these mandatory minimum sentences we are talking about now will need to be dealt with by the provincial reformatories, not the federal prisons.
We are mandatorially sending all these people into provincial correction institutions and the provinces need to pick up the tab. That is a federal-provincial downloading exercise, one of the biggest ones I have seen.
All of this debating and tweaking of sentencing will not reduce crime because it does not address the real causes.