Mr. Speaker, to hear the government members talk, they suggest that they are doing everything they can for victims, although nobody can see the evidence of that. They can hold a press conference and say, “This is what we are doing”, and everybody will believe them because they got it into the papers. So it must be right, but the fact of the matter is that scholars everywhere are looking at the Canadian example, tracking what is happening on the arrest side, the conviction side, the detention side, and then the rehabilitation side.
If members can imagine this just for a moment, we had a justification a few minutes ago by a member of the government who said that we need to keep people in jail longer so we can give them a better education as to what makes a good citizen. Can members believe that? He said that two years is not enough, that we cannot rehabilitate a criminal in two years. Why not look at the situation that says we are doing something right because our arrest rate is going down? Our conviction rate is high but compared to every place else, everybody comes here and says, “You have a peaceful society”.
Yes, there are problems. Nobody is suggesting there are not, but all of the scholars and evidence tell us that we are moving in the right direction. The government wants to reverse that.
If it is important for people to have an opportunity for rehabilitation; that is, to accept a value of productivity in a society, of integration in a community, of the opportunity to make a contribution to a larger society, why not make the investments in those areas that are associated with an infrastructure that is already there: schools, community centres, social community affairs and events?
Something that we struck a little while ago was taking youth at risk and putting them to work with some of those journeymen and masters in their trade. That was working. No, the government wants to keep them in jail a lot longer because maybe by repeating the old mantra that if people commit sin, they shall be punished, that if they commit an error, we are going to damn them to hell, and if they contravene the conventions, which have not been put down, then we are going to banish them forever.
Rehabilitation is the ethic that the member for Abbotsford said defined a justice system. That is where we should be putting our resources. That is where we should be putting our focus and that is where the government is not going. Shame on it.