Mr. Speaker, while I appreciate hearing from the parliamentary secretary the statistics and the analysis, it would be nice to know what the government was prepared to do. Maybe he could get to that.
There are a number of things we could be doing. We should ensure that we collect the right statistics and that we have consistency so that all of our police forces are doing the same kind of reporting with the same understanding. If we have good statistics, we can understand what is going on and make good policy and determine the effectiveness of policy.
We also have to make sure that the police, prosecutors, and judges understand the sentencing provisions of the Criminal Code and understand its usefulness in dealing with the whole question of hate crimes. This is a sentencing tool that is available to them in the criminal justice system and can be used effectively.
We need to make the sentencing provisions more explicit, especially around transgender and transsexual Canadians so that they are explicitly included in this law and have this recourse.