Madam Speaker, I will pick up on some of the comments that my colleague from Ontario brought up earlier on the cut-off of $1 million.
What makes $900,000 below the mark, not as important as $1 million? That is a significant amount of money. As I said earlier, I know of people, who I will not bring up here for reasons of privacy, but they were seniors defrauded of close to $100,000. It was absolutely devastating. The rest of the family now has to carry these people through the rest of their years. How embarrassing is that for someone who has been a victim of fraud? Those who are at the extreme low level of the pool of morality, if I could use that term, victimized these people.
Is it strong enough? No, it is not, and that is one of the issues, plus the fact that this needs to be publicized. We also need to put strong enforcement measures in place.
We talk about statistics all the time, but sometimes we have to put a face to this and look at ways to make changes, amendments, to further this legislation into the future. Down the road as the circumstances change, when it comes to the fraudulent behaviour of some people, the legislation has to be flexible and nimble enough to take care of this.
Talking about statistics, for example, 10,001 cases were found guilty in 2006-07. There were 88,286 incidents of fraud reported. That is a big number. Behind those numbers are families and individuals, absolutely devastated.