Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege to speak to this issue. Highway robbery is something we use as a pejorative a lot of the time. However, yesterday I saw on Facebook that some folks were, in fact, stopped on the highway. Someone thought that people were in distress, and it turned out that they actually wanted to rob equipment out of his trailer, right on the highway near Clyde, Alberta, in the southern part of my riding. We think of highway robbery as something that is unreal, yet it is happening in rural Canada right now.
I have gone throughout my riding and have held round tables. I have met with multiple municipalities on the rural crime issue. It only seems to be getting worse lately. Therefore, this study my fellow member for Lakeland is calling for could not be more timely at this point, and I commend her for that.
One of the things that was brought up by a number of people I met with that I thought was interesting is that this is not an RCMP issue, per se. We need to give them all the tools they need to solve these crimes. We need to make sure that they are properly resourced. We need to make sure that all of this happens. However, at the end of the day, this is not an RCMP issue; this is a societal issue that we have to deal with at all levels. Canada is our country. Every one of us who lives here makes up Canada. We have to decide how we want this to work out.
One of the guys I met with asked what we are doing at an educational level to reduce crime. We are not going to fix this problem overnight, but we ought to be thinking about the carrots and the sticks in our system. Are the sticks big enough? Are the carrots in the right place? It was interesting to have that discussion with a lot of people. A lot of people are feeling that the carrots are definitely in the wrong place when it comes to incentives in our system, and they really feel that there is no stick whatsoever in our system.
We watch folks drive through our communities or come through our communities with reckless abandon, in some cases. For example, I recently heard of a gentleman who moved into the old folks home in town and came back to his farm a couple of weeks later. If it were not for the fact that the dishwasher would not fit through the door, it would have been gone. Everything else was gone. The fridge and the freezer were gone. His furniture was gone. His firearms collection was gone. Everything was gone. The house was clear, as if someone had moved out. This is the kind of impunity with which rural crime is happening.
Beyond that, vehicles going missing is a daily occurrence. In some cases, particular families will have their entire fleet of vehicles stolen. One gentleman who came to visit me told me that within six weeks, he had three vehicles stolen, two out of his yard and one right out of his own garage. One was at the mechanic's shop and was stolen right out of the yard there.
This particular study could not have come at a more timely time. I hope we not only look at what the police response is going to be but also at what the whole societal response will be, because Canada is our country, and we do not want to turn it over to criminals.