Mr. Speaker, I realize I will be cut off here by other proceedings, but I might as well begin some debate.
I have tried to follow the debate as best I can and I am disappointed that there has been some fairly wilful attempt to misconstrue, or perhaps even mislead, in relation to previous electoral commitments.
It is a fact that in the last Parliament a bill was introduced by the government that would have doubled the mandatory minimums for firearms crimes from the then existing one year minimum to two years. In fact, the election commitment and debate, as I recall it, referred to that explicitly, the doubling of those mandatory one year minimums to a two year mandatory minimum.
Some members have tried to suggest that this election commitment involved much more than that. The election commitment did not, and any attempt to suggest that is misleading of what the facts were.
Members are entitled to their own views. They may wish to misconstrue, and I suppose they are entitled to do that. However, as a long-time Liberal sitting in the House, a member who was active in this envelope prior to the election, I want to state that the commitment to double the mandatory minimums was related to precisely that, to doubling the one year minimum to a two year minimum, and not anything more than that.