Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Mirabel. I also really enjoy working with him. He is a brilliant man who excels at numbers, which is not my forte.
I agree with him on that point. I also believe that, despite Bill C-16, this is not going to succeed in the short or medium term. Again, we can lie to ourselves and pass 300 bills on the issue, but the only way to resolve the problem of trials being held within a reasonable time frame is to ensure proper funding.
We see the current state of our roads and it is appalling. We wait in our hospitals endlessly, from 24 to 48 hours in the emergency room, just to be seen. Children in schools have next to no services, because we lack the funds to hire specialized staff. When the government passes a budget, that obviously comes first. It is also obvious that justice is not quite as compelling. The government is going to put money into roads, schools and hospitals first. I would never blame anyone for that. However, we are going to have to tackle the justice problem, because if we cannot administer justice within a reasonable time frame, people are going to get fed up and take action in a way that no one here would want to see happen.
Bill C-16 and its time calculation method will help for a while, yes. I certainly hope so. Deviating from the time limits set for serious crimes is what we proposed, and I still agree. However, we must never lose sight of the fact that these are temporary proposals meant to last only until we really manage to get the problem under control and until it never again takes longer than 18 or 30 months to hold a trial anywhere in Quebec or Canada.