Mr. Speaker, welcome back. I find that our summers go by awfully quickly, that is for sure.
It is nice to come back and talk about some important issues that Canadians are facing day in and day out. As we see the days proceed ahead of us, we are going to have a lot of good and hopefully healthy debate on the issues that we know Canadians are very much concerned about. As much as possible, we will try to put them into a perspective that gets us a better understanding of where the Conservatives are on a number of policy fronts, because they do send confusing messages.
Let us take a look at Bill C-379 as an example. What we see is a bill that likely Stephen Harper would not have introduced. Why? If we look at his former legal adviser, Ben Perrin, he did not speak very positively about Conservative members of Parliament in regard to the legislation they are proposing today.
When we think of auto theft, we have to realize that not just one jurisdiction is ultimately responsible. Let me give a tangible example. In the province of Manitoba, we had very serious auto theft taking place in and around 2004 to 2008. We had thousands of vehicles being stolen every year, and no province in the country, on a per capita basis, was doing any worse than Manitoba.
What we found was that a provincial initiative made the difference. It was about working with MPI, Manitoba Public Insurance. It was about looking at how Ottawa might be able to complement some of the actions that would help us bring the rate down. However, let there be no doubt that it was not about any single level of government, and the lead government in this situation was in fact that of Manitoba.
I understand and hear about the issue of stolen vehicles in Ontario in particular. I can say that my Liberal colleagues talk about it at great length because they understand how important it is. That is why we had the national summit.