Mr. Speaker, the tough-on-crime agenda of the Conservative government belies the fact that it is not smart on crime. We on this side of the House want to be smart on crime. We want to prevent crime before it happens instead of merely announcing that we are going to punish people for longer.
I, as a Canadian, would rather that there were fewer crimes against children than more, but the evidence is there in front of us, and the minister agrees, that sexual crimes against children have gone up. As Statistics Canada reports, it is one of the very few crimes in the entire ambit of crimes against Canadians that has actually gone up in the past few years. The overall rate of crime is going down generally, but somehow, we have it wrong, and I mean “we”, because we are all parliamentarians. We have not successfully managed to find a way to treat the crimes in such a way as to prevent their happening in the first place or to prevent the recidivism that goes on when these criminals are eventually released.