Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Saint Boniface for her great intervention today. We are really lucky to have a woman of her calibre here, with her experience in the field, working with the police forces, working with victims and having an understanding of why we need to have tougher sentencing in this country.
In my riding people are always appalled at the idea that somebody could break into and enter a person's house, violate that person's home and then get a condition whereby they can go and return to their own home to live out their sentence in the comfort of their home while the other person's place has been violated and gutted.
We just went through an experience in my riding where one person went out and committed a whole series of acts of arson, burned down about three houses, attempted to burn down a couple of others and then got to spend time in conditional sentencing.
The victims of those crimes are saying that they do not have a house anymore but that individual gets to go back and serve out their sentence in the comfort of their own home. That is so wrong on so many levels.
I am asking the hon. member for Saint Boniface to talk about how she sees this coming into effect and actually providing the victims with some retribution and feeling that they have that ability.
We are getting a lot of questions from the NDP, and yet in Manitoba the NDP provincial government supports this type of legislation. The Minister of Justice there is very much in support of being tougher on crime. I wonder why his federal cousins are not on the same page.