Madam Speaker, what we have here is a huge mistake that could potentially cost the Canadian treasury $5 billion. The repressive measures that were taken throughout the United States did not help lower the crime rate. In some cases, there was even an increase in serious crimes. The government wants to invest $5 billion of public funds in a solution that will worsen the problem. And that does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars that the provinces will have to spend to expand prisons and meet the demand that will be created, for no good reason, by the current government.
The current government is boasting that it has a majority, but it is forgetting to keep in mind that approximately six out of ten Canadians did not vote for extreme right-wing values, such as being tough on crime. So the government wants to drop $5 billion without even having a clear majority that agrees with the basic principle.
I want to come back to the so-called contempt for victims the bleeding hearts on the left here have, according to our Conservative friends across the way. There is a dynamic that escapes me. They are applying tough on crime policies, but there is ample evidence over a number of decades from a number of places in North America that such policies do not reduce crime. It does not work. There may even be an increase. I want to know how increasing the number of victims is a form of respect for victims.
Can we tell the woman who, statistically speaking, will be abused—and would not have been with a policy that reduced the crime rate—that she can take comfort in the fact that the person who abused her will spend an extra six months in prison thanks to the bill the Conservative government passed two years beforehand? Is that how we show respect for victims, by creating the necessary conditions to produce more victims in the coming decades?
We are entering a spiral of crime. This reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, a movie that was extremely popular a very long time ago, in which—