Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question.
As I touched on in the short time I had to speak against this bill, everything that we see on crime coming into this House from the government is about punishment. There is nothing about looking at the root causes of crime and ways of preventing crime.
We know what the root causes of crime are. Enough studies have done over the last 25 years. Even the United States is moving away from the idea of throwing people in jail, locking them up and throwing away the key and building more jails and filling them with people.
We need to understand what causes people to turn to crime. We need to look at populations that are the highest represented in jails and find out the reasons for that. We need to look at how to assist them to live different lives.
I talked about soccer fields, after-school programs, helping aboriginal people to get an education. I talked about looking at justice in culturally sensitive ways, looking at why people commit crime and preventing it at the outset. If we do catch people who have become criminals, let us look at how we can rehabilitate them. Let us look at how we really help victims, which is what this bill is about, and not simply put it on the shoulders of the offenders, especially if there is no offender.
The government is shirking its responsibility to help victims of crime by not putting forward its own solid and clear programs to help people who are victims of crime.