Mr. Speaker, let me tell the member what former victims' ombudsman, Steve Sullivan, said about the government when he testified before the public safety committee on April 20. He said:
—we have asked that the government refocus its efforts and its priorities on trying to meet the real needs of victims of crime. Sentencing and the “get tougher on crime” agenda will not meet the real needs of victims of crime, who are suffering every day, who call our office every day, who have trouble making their mortgage payments because they have lost their job, whose kids are acting up in school because they can't get counselling. These are real challenges that victims of crime face every single day. Obviously we need to have prisons, and we need to have programs for offenders who are in prison.
The government fired its own ombudsman.
I will take no lectures from silly comments like the one I just heard. Clearly the government did not listen to a word I said. It does not understand or comprehend, not a whit, what we are talking about. It reduces to the lowest form of argument, name calling and simplification and straw man arguments, which typifies the government's approach.
We need to have an intelligent, mature, fact-based discussion, something the government is proving incapable of, whether it is on crime, the long form census or any other issue that the government acts ideologically on. It ignores evidence of what real Canadians want, what Canadians need and what they want to say for communities, and it is not a George Bush style approach that will cost them billions of dollars and make them less safe in our communities. That is the Conservative approach.
The New Democrats do not accept that.