Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak in this debate. It seems to me that the agenda is a little thin and so the government has gone back to its law and order agenda.
I want to talk about my riding. In some respects this is the kind of issue that the government thinks it is resolving. I have a riding in the east end of Toronto. I do not know how well members know Scarborough or the east end of Toronto, but Scarborough is the centre of the universe. My particular section of Scarborough is interesting in that below Kingston Road are some of the nicest homes one can buy in all of Toronto. It is a lovely area. Some of the homes run upwards of $2 million. North of Kingston Road, which is a rough dividing line, are some of the more impoverished areas in all of the greater Toronto area.
One of the more impoverished areas is Markham and Eglinton. In a very small area are approximately 17,000 people in a series of high rises. Many of them are new to this country but certainly what they all have in common is that they do not have a lot of income. The United Way identified that particular area, which is called Scarborough Village, as an area that was in need of assistance. There were a number of other areas around the GTA that got special attention from the United Way.
The United Way comes into an impoverished area and what would be, statistically at least, a high crime area and says to the community, “This is a problem. The community is not functioning. What should we do here?” It does community assessment, assesses community needs and identifies community leaders.
In the process of working in that community for a year and a half to two years it has done the assessment. It has developed things like community events. It has developed a functioning community centre. The United Way has assisted the community in pulling itself up by the boot straps.
We have to bear in mind that a fair number of these 17,000 people are just desperate to make the rent. That is about as good as it gets for them. They have come from afar. They are struggling with the language. They are struggling with a diminished status vis-à-vis what it would have been like in their former countries. That creates social problems between spouses. It creates social problems between one generation and the next. Sometimes the kids adapt fairly easily and do not necessarily respect their parents who are having more difficulty adapting.
It is a bit of a fertile ground for crime. We as the larger community have been concerned, but the specific community of Scarborough Village has been concerned also.
I have gone to quite a number of meetings. I have met with folks who think that something needs to be done. The police are very involved in this process. They are very keen on seeing the community heal itself, have respect for itself and reduce itself from a high crime area. Not once did they ever talk about minimum mandatories. Surprise, surprise. They did not talk about minimum mandatories. They did not really think that there was that much wrong with the Criminal Code. I can see areas where we might want to do reverse onus on gun crimes, the guns and gangs task force and things of that nature which have actually been useful in terms of getting some of the bad apples off the street, but minimum mandatories is certainly not one of the things that they actually talked about.
That seems to me to be just about the classic statement of how wrong-footed this particular government is on the issue of security and safety in our communities. The Conservatives missed the boat.
The Conservatives missed the boat because they think that getting tough on crime, which means this kind of draconian sentencing, taking away the discretion of judges, eliminating the ability of a judge to shape a sentence to fit the crime under all the circumstances, is the way to go. They do not think that minimum mandatory is the way to go.
My colleague earlier talked about particularly disadvantaged people and how this kind of draconian one size fits all approach to the crime somehow or other would reduce crime. Unfortunately for the government, there is not a statistic, there is not a jurisdiction, there is not a study in the world that actually shows that. Minimum mandatories have virtually no impact on crime.
If in fact the government were seriously interested in doing something about crime, actually reducing recidivism, in fact getting criminals in particular back into a functioning element of society, it would get behind the guns and gangs initiative, it would get behind organizations like the United Way.
I have a suggestion, and I have suggested this in other instances. Of the enormous amount of money that is going to be spent on housing all these criminals by virtue of this minimum mandatory legislation, which I am told would be something in the order of about $220 million to $250 million over the next five years, I would suggest that my riding's portion just be directed to the United Way.
I have a little bet going with the government that if we were able to put that money into the United Way, we would have a lower crime rate. That money would be of more use than throwing folks in jail and throwing away the key. That does not seem to be a favoured view these days. People want to be tough on crime.
Our position in the Liberal Party is we want to be smart on crime. We want to do what works. What a strange concept.
It has been shown that having minimum mandatories does not work. In fact there are apparently something like 25 jurisdictions in the United States that have backed away from minimum mandatories because they have experienced it and it does not work. Recidivism is up and they are spending enormous sums of money on keeping people in jail.
I can see how this legislation works for those who are pro jail and for those who want to develop more and more jails so that we are housing more and more people. I guess it is some form of solution for homelessness.
My suggestion would be that the money be given to the United Way and organizations such as that to develop the community, to allow the community to develop. The best policing of the community is the community itself. Statistic after statistic, study after study shows that minimum mandatories fall disproportionately on disadvantaged groups.
I do not have a particularly large aboriginal population in my riding, but what I do have is a large black population in my riding. When we talk to the community leaders, they are very concerned about black crime, particularly black on black, and youth crime. What they need and what they are crying out for is community development, the ability to do some parent substituting, basketball courts, community centres, homework programs. They are asking for facilities where they can access the Internet, facilities where they can access all kinds of services that we tend to take for granted. They are not talking about amending the Criminal Code to get minimum mandatories, because they know that is just a useless exercise.
I respectfully say to the government that this exercise in minimum mandatories is frankly an exercise of hot air. The government could have allocated the money to facilities such as I am suggesting here.
Mr. Speaker, I see that you are standing for some very good reason.