The member is not sympathetic to that, but I would ask him to take a petition around and talk to people.
The NDP critic was in Athens, Ontario, the other day. The member may have never been to Athens, Ontario, but I have been there many times and it is not really a hotbed of NDP votes. I can assure everyone of that. That whole area has had a strong Conservative base for many years. As a matter of fact, voting Liberal in that area is really stepping out. The people there are not happy about the situation with the prison farms. It runs contrary to common sense.
The issue is that the Conservatives have obviously been in government a little too long, because they are starting to lose their grip on common sense. That is fine. If they want to ignore the prison farm issue and continue to close them down, then they do that at their peril because that issue is going to be around for some time to come.
Another principle underlying sentencing is proportionality. The sentence imposed by the court must be proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender. Another sentencing principle is that aggravating and mitigating factors have to be taken into account because there must be similar sentences for similar offences.
One of the reasons conditional sentences came about in the first place 13 years ago is that there was not a consistency across the country in terms of sentencing. For the same offence, a person would get a certain sentence in one province and someone in a neighbouring province would get a different one.
This certainly is a time to take another look at the Criminal Code. As a matter of fact, the NDP critic from Windsor—Tecumseh has talked about that repeatedly, that as a Parliament we should sit down and do a rewrite of the entire Criminal Code. That is fundamentally what should be going on in this case rather than just making piecemeal reforms.
I have many more points to make, but perhaps I can make them in the following debate throughout the day.