Mr. Speaker, the member talks about the interconnection of these issues far more broadly than even I have, and I think this broad view is important.
When I was in Regina, I had an opportunity to tour the worst areas with the former police chief. He took me to neighbourhoods where children were growing up in homes with no heat, where a meal was a scarce thing, where they had to walk through streets that were unbelievably violent, where, even when I was there, the police had to call in paddy wagons because there had been a shooting. Can members imagine somebody trying to learn in an environment without food or heat? The chief told me about another home where, for six months, raw sewage was being dumped into the basement because they had no solution. And somebody says, “Well, pick up your bootstraps kid and make a go of it”.
If we want to stop crime, we cannot allow children to live in those conditions. If we are interested in making our communities safer, then we have to go to the places where crime originates.
My colleague makes an important point when he talks about how disproportionately represented aboriginal and first nations peoples are in our prisons. They are 10 times more likely than anybody else to be in a prison. This is a national disgrace and we have to look at the reason for it.
More often than not, the reason is that first nations youth do not believe there is a future for them. They have lost hope. They do not feel that this country has opportunities for them to be successful, to set goals and realize them. As long as they lack that hope, as long as they lack that belief that they can cross through and have a successful future, then we will continue to see this kind of disproportionate representation in our prisons.
The terrible thing about the way this debate has been cast is that it makes it seem as though criminals are just these bad people and all we have to do is hit them harder, with bigger sticks, and all of our problems will go away. However, when we look at the underlying assumptions, when we have an honest conversation about what community safety is about, we get a real and honest picture of what needs to be done. Remarkably, it can be done at a fraction of the cost.