Mr. Speaker, I want to assure the House that I am very much interested in the bill on victims' rights, but I am a little concerned about the emphasis on restitution, because the government at times slips over into an emphasis on the offender rather than the victim. People have to be lucky to be offended against by someone who has enough resources for restitution to do them any good.
I wonder whether in committee we will be talking about efforts to make sure compensation is available to all victims with some kind of federal-provincial deal on victims' criminal injury compensation funds, which do not exist in Newfoundland or in the territories and are under severe caps in most of the provinces. If people are not lucky enough, in that odd sense, to have an offender who has resources, sometimes there is no compensation available through restitution. I hope we will be discussing this at committee.