Mr. Speaker, I also hear those concerns from people in my community.
Police officers work hard to find and arrest dangerous offenders in our communities, and to their shock and dismay they see these same offenders back on the street sometimes days and weeks later. They shake their heads and ask themselves why they are even doing this.
The discretion that allows these individuals to be back on the street so quickly is definitely a case for concern. It is also demoralizing for many police officers, especially when they consider the amount of paper work and other steps that need to be taken to get these people before a judge in the first place.
I completely concur with my colleague's concerns. I am confident that the reforms we are making here will make a tremendous difference because we will be taking these people off the streets.
In my previous work as an attorney, I would often hear individuals say that house arrest was a joke. Offenders could be on the street, do whatever they want, and if anybody stopped them they simply had to say they were on their way to a job interview or to a doctor's appointment. They essentially had all the freedoms that they would otherwise have if they were not behind bars.
That is the concern that Canadians are expressing to us. They feel that if somebody commits a crime they have to do the time. Canadians feel that the slap on the wrist that criminals have been getting up until this point is simply not acceptable.