Madam Speaker, I am honoured, as always, to rise in the House for the issue of violence, gun violence and protecting communities.
I would like to start by telling Kaylie Smith, 16 years old, from Cobalt that we love her. She was the victim of a horrific trauma and an attempted femicide recently in our community of Cobalt. I want to thank first responders, police and everyone who came out for Kaylie. She is going to make it, but what struck me after that horrific violence was how our community came together, not in rage but to understand that we have to be there to support one another. We love Kaylie; she is going to make it.
The issue of guns and safety is one of the favourite political Punch and Judy shows that I have seen over my 20 years in Parliament. My Liberal and Conservative colleagues get their straw men up, jump up and down, and throw rocks and slogans. Today, we are debating a report that is two years old. It is a great report; it is a powerful report, but nobody has wanted to act on it until now. It is about interrupting government business, so suddenly we are dealing with the issue of guns and gangs, something we need a strategy on.
I want to talk about how this plays out in northern Ontario, where we are seeing levels of gun violence that have never existed before. It is a complex issue how we have gotten to this place. A triad of damage has been done to rural Canada that has caused the unprecedented level of violence we are seeing.
When I say violence, I am talking about young gang members who are coming into very small communities, like Kirkland Lake and Timmins, up the James Bay coast, to prey on people suffering from addictions. We dealt with the Hells Angels 10 years ago. They were organized gangs; they were big gangs, but what we are dealing with now are gangs that have a certain level of chaos. When I talk to frontline workers and OPP officers I have known for years, they say they just want to survive and get home at the end of the day. That is not something we have ever heard in northern Ontario before.
First responders do not know what they are going to see when they go on a trauma call. I have talked to frontline mental health workers who, when they are going into homes to try to keep someone alive, often need flak jackets and backup because they do not know if there are gangs there; they do not know what they are going to see.
We can take a very simplistic approach and blame the Prime Minister from Papineau for his soft-on-crime agenda, and then get a couple of Conservative bumper stickers that say we are going to fight the crime, do the time and axe the wax, all that talk, or we can talk about how we are in a situation that has made our communities vulnerable to chaos and predatory violence.
It begins with the walk-away that began under Brian Mulroney, which was then totally delivered by Paul Martin with his walk-away on housing. When I was younger, I worked with men coming out of prison. I worked with refugees. I worked with addicts on the street. The first step was to get them into housing, and the first housing we got them into were crappy boarding houses in the crappy neighbourhoods in South Riverdale. If we could get them in there and sobered up, just for a month, we could get them on the list for social housing.
I remember my good friend Robert, who had one of the worst levels of addiction I had ever seen. I did not think Robert would make it to the end of the month, but we finally got him into housing. Robert had caused an enormous cost to the health system. Every night we were at emergency wards, psych wards or detox clinics. We got him into safe housing in a rotten boarding house. We got him into safe housing in the public system. Robert lived for the next 20 years and never went to the hospital again.
That was from the public investment in housing, and the great lie—