Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to finish my address to Bill C-475.
Once again, I want to congratulate the member for having gone through a long and torturous experience with this bill. As I indicated before, while this bill probably should have been a government initiative, I am happy that he, as a private member, has been able to take it this far and hopefully finish the process. We should be doing more of this. The role of private members' in this House should be enhanced more so than it is even at this point, but there has been an improvement from what it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Dealing with the whole drug issue in this country, it is really a question of following the money. For too long we have concentrated our efforts on tracking down small time dealers at the street level who sell little bits of drugs here and there. The reality is that the money gets funnelled right back to organized crime in this country.
It was not until the late 1950s that the Mafia was even recognized as such in the United States, and after that the RICO laws came into place. It took many years for the Americans to recognize that the Mafia even existed and had to be controlled. The U.S. brought in the RICO laws and have had some success in dismantling organized crime groups.
We have to concentrate on dealing with issues like the proceeds from criminal activities. We have to seize the proceeds from crime so we can take away the incentive for criminal organizations to be involved in crime. I pointed out in the past that today's type of organized criminal is not the biker guy out for a Sunday drive. Normally these people are living in million dollar houses and do not even drive a bike in many cases. We have to concentrate on making tough laws against white collar criminals and concentrate on these organized criminals.
One other point I want to mention once again is in regard to the pill making machines. The United States has told us that it is concerned that a lot of the methamphetamine traffic is now headquartered in Canada because we do not regulate pill making machines. We should be following the American example and require these pill making machines to be registered and tracked when any repairs are made. This is just one more way that we could control this issue.
The member for Halifax mentioned the other day that the Americans are controlling the supply of things to make methamphetamine. An individual can only buy a certain amount of supplies and he or she must have a reason for buying any large quantity of supplies. That is what we need to look at.