Madam Speaker, it is extremely distressing to families of murder victims to be told by the prosecutor that they are not going to proceed with an attempt to convict the person on that particular murder because that person has already been convicted of two, three or more other murders. It obviously does not happen very often. As I said earlier, we have very few multiple murders. They tend to be in the range of two rather than the Pickton type of situation.
The reality is that in most cases where there are multiple murders and the courts have not proceeded with all the cases, it is usually not because of financial resources. That is probably true in the Pickton case, but in most cases it is because the evidence on the other murders, even though the prosecutor is convinced of the person's guilt, leaves serious reservations as to whether there is going to be a conviction. That tends to be the situation. Fortunately for our society it happens rarely.
Let me make one more point about that. I have been doing some work recently on suicide. The psychologist I was working with most closely raised the issue that serial killers are much more common in North America than they are in any other place in the world, which I found interesting. It is not just the United States, although we tend to point the finger at them. North America has more multiple murderers in the form of serial killers than any other continent.
It is one of the issues that I believe we do need to look at more closely, more so in the United States but also in Canada.