Mr. Speaker, to set the record straight, we voted in favour of every piece of legislation he just cited. The only place where we found fault was that lumped into the mandatory minimum sentences, they also included theft over $5,000, which means if that some teenager were to steal a car worth $5,001, that crime would fall under this category for mandatory minimum sentences. Nobody in their right mind would object to sentences for certain heinous violations that he outlined with great sensation.
The second thing is that we do not really need more apologists for the big banks in Ottawa here. They have plenty of champions.
The one thing for which I will give due credit to the former prime minister, Jean Chrétien, is that he opened the door for the legislation that we are seeing today on while-collar crime, which would put white-collar criminals in jail, when he banned political contributions from businesses, unions and corporations under Bill C-24. It was no longer necessary to suckhole to Bay Street. It was no longer necessary to treat bankers with kid gloves, because the bankers used to be the biggest donors to both the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. The Liberal Party, to its credit, decided to end that.
Nobody should be able to buy an election. Nobody should be able to buy public policy. Nobody should be able to buy soft sentencing for white-collar criminals.
Now there is nothing stopping us from treating white-collar criminals as what they are, a scourge on society who do far more damage, one could argue, than the kid who steals the hubcaps off a BMW. The guy who drives that BMW might be guilty of far more heinous offences. We should reserve a jail sentence for him, not just for the kid who steals the hubcaps.