Madam Speaker, I certainly want to thank the hon. member for York West for her contribution in this debate.
I am always amazed when opponents of our safe streets and safe community agenda cherry-pick statistics to oppose our legislation. I say “cherry-pick” deliberately because if we pick 1970 as a reference point official crime statistics are down. However, if we pick 1960 as a reference point they are up and they are up considerably.
More relevantly, I wonder if the hon. member knows that in 2009 one in four Canadians reported being a victim of a crime and only 31% of those people reported those crimes to the police.
The real issue is not if crime is up or down. It is whether the level is tolerable. In 2010, even official police statistics showed two million crimes in Canada, 440,000 of which were violent.
Are those acceptable numbers?