Mr. Speaker, we will support this bill to send it to committee. I think that everyone in the House agrees that this is an extremely important issue. As everyone knows, the NDP and all parties and politicians have always had zero tolerance for sexual assault or assault of any kind against children.
That being said, the devil is often in the details. My colleague from Hamilton East—Stoney Creek raised an interesting point, and earlier, my colleague from Manicouagan gave us a very good overview of the bill itself. Basically, people have kind of forgotten Bill C-26 because the last time we talked about it was in June, when we debated it for a few hours late at night, close to midnight. I remember rising in the House then to discuss this bill. The Minister of Justice was marketing it as a panacea, with the new database on high-risk sex offenders.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice made it clear in his speech that a few minimum sentences will be increased. Let us not get carried away. Sometimes minimum sentences are increased from six months to one year. It is nothing to write home about. We know through jurisprudence that high-risk offenders are given much longer sentences than that. That is not the problem.
I would like the parliamentary secretary to put his notes aside. How can we keep our communities safe when, essentially, the problem is not knowing that these people are free, but the fact that they are free, period? That is what escapes me. How can we keep our communities safe by being a little tougher, and not with things like Bill C-26, which seems to be all razzle-dazzle? How can we realistically ensure that a dangerous sex offender does not end up in our communities?