Mr. Speaker, I would like to think I am exceptionally sensitive to victims of crime. It does not matter whether the person is an immigrant, a permanent resident or a Canadian citizen, when a crime is committed there needs to be a consequence.
To get a better appreciation of that, I would encourage all members of Parliament to talk with victims of crime. Doing that helps all us to better appreciate what it is to be a victim. That is one of the reasons I say that we should be preventing some of these crimes from happening.
One of the things we can do with Citizenship and Immigration to do just that is to start looking at the number of people here in Canada who do not have legal status. Here we are not talking about hundreds of people, but thousands. A percentage of those people are, no doubt, committing crimes, but this is something that the government has done absolutely nothing about. I suspect there are many victims' advocates who would say to the Government of Canada: “Shame on you for not dealing with that particular issue”. We should be dealing with it and the best way to do that is by dealing with resource issue in regard to border controls and immigration services.