Mike Scott

[Aboriginal Affairs, May 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in the leaked briefing document the minister warns his cabinet colleagues that after 18 months of confusion: "The federal government cannot postpone the development of an effective and practical treaty policy".

Obviously the minister has no such policy. Will the the minister promise that if he ever does manage to develop a coherent policy he will share it with minor players like Parliament and the Canadian people?

[Aboriginal Affairs, May 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in the secret briefing document mentioned by the member for Calgary Southwest the minister states: "By responding to treaty issues the federal government will avoid being placed in a position of trying to explain why it is not keeping its red book promises."

Clearly the minister is cynically going through the motions. He is following an incoherent and unprincipled approach.

In light of the revelations in the secret briefing document, will the minister admit he does not actually have an effective and practical treaty policy?

[Lobbyists Registration Act, May 1st, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak today in opposition to the Lobbyists Registration Act.

When American President Calvin Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts prior to becoming president, the local Polish community wanted him to appoint one of theirs as a judge. There was one lady in particular, a lobbyist, who came to see the president on a regular basis. She pestered him again and again but she could not get him to make the appointment. She showed up at his office on a regular basis and could not get him to make this appointment. Finally an entire delegation of notables descended on him in his office. They came to see him to try to persuade Mr. Coolidge to make this appointment.

When they arrived at his office, Mr. Coolidge sat and stared at the floor. After an uncomfortable silence he said "New carpet". The whole delegation hastily agreed it was a wonderfully new carpet and that he had gotten his money's worth. After a while he said "It cost a lot of money". The delegation again assured him that it was a very beautiful carpet and that indeed he had gotten his money's worth. Finally he looked up at them and said "She wore out the old one trying to get you that judge". They left.

The same Calvin Coolidge wrote in his memoirs that when one is in politics, nine out of ten people who come to lobby you want something they ought not to have. "If you just ignore them", he said, "after three or four minutes they will run out of things to say and they will leave".

If Mr. Coolidge were still in office, we might not need to register lobbyists. We might not need this act. If Mr. Coolidge were still in office, we might not need an ethics counsellor. Old Silent Cal was his own ethics counsellor, and he sure knew how to deal with lobbyists.

Calvin Coolidge did not think that it was the business of government to seize property from the average citizen and redistribute it to the shrill. Unfortunately-I say that judiciously-we have made much progress since then. Now our governments dispose of huge sums of money. Our federal government spends $160 billion a year, and that means that anyone can get very rich on even a small amount of it if they manage to persuade government to dole out the favours.

There are a lot more plums to be shaken from the tree of government. Our governments now relentlessly regulate the economy. If you can get a regulation changed in your favour it means more to you than making a better mouse trap, hiring a better employee, or finding a new and better way of doing an old task. We have seen that with the recent changes to TV regulations. Even when the policy change is a good one, we have to worry about how it was done. Government simply has too many favours at its disposal.

When people lobby government, they almost invariably want something they can get by going to Canadians and asking them for it. They can come to my house and ask me for donations for the various enterprises for which they are looking for funding. They can go to other Canadians, but most Canadians probably would tell them to go play in traffic. What do they do? They come to Ottawa to lobby government for the funds they are looking for.

If we substitute the word "force" for the word "government", we can see how government can achieve what these people are looking for, because government has the means and the power to force people to give up part of their incomes through taxation and take that money and redistribute it to these people who come lobbying in Ottawa.

We have swarms of lobbyists trying to influence government. That means we need laws to regulate them. Unfortunately, this bill does not do the job. This bill does not define lobbying strictly enough and enables people to lobby in everything but name.

It is even worse when we come to ethics counsellors. It is a shame that we need them. I would much rather have politicians who know right from wrong. I lament the day that we went from morals to ethics. It has all been downhill ever since.

If we are to have an ethics counsellor, let us have one with some independence. Let us have the ethics counsellor who is described in the red book, who reports directly to Parliament. Let us have an ethics counsellor who can tell the Prime Minister "No, you are wrong", without fear of getting fired from his job. Let us try to swat the swarm of flies buzzing around Parliament Hill picking up scraps off a bloated budget and carrying them off.

Let us not forget that the reason we have people seeking unseemly favours from government in unseemly ways is that government has become too big. Let us not forget that government has the power to reward friends and supplicants in a way it simply should not. Let us work on putting government back in its box.

Let us remember that if men were devils government would not be possible, but if they were angels it would not be necessary. Let us remember that political philosophy should be occupied not with the question "Who gets to the front of the trough?", but with the question "How can government be strong enough to protect the lives, liberties, and property of its citizens without being strong enough to menace them?" Then we would not have to worry about who the cabinet is meeting with today, who the Prime Minister is related to, or any other questions. That would be real lobbying and ethics reform.

Let us defeat Bill C-43 and get on with that.

[Agriculture, March 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I rise in the House today in support of the motion of my colleague and friend, the member for Moose Jaw-Lake Centre.

I do not think I need to spend a lot of time explaining why overlap and duplication are not good. We talk about that all the time in the House. My colleagues have dealt with or will deal with various issues concerning jurisdictional problems that exist in the agricultural industry at this time. However there is one aspect of the matter that I want to discuss in the time allotted to me today, that is the general thrust of the bill.

Members of the House have heard me refer on many occasions to the recent observation by the Auditor General that there is widespread failure in our national government to carry out proper evaluation of legislation. We see a problem; we pass a law. We see another problem; we pass another law and so on. We never ask ourselves whether the problems we see are the sorts of things that can be solved by legislation at all. Often they are not. Nor do we really ask ourselves whether it is the right piece of legislation. Often it is not. The old line parties all too often fail to ask whether many of our problems are not the result of legislation in the first place and not a lack of legislation.

During the debate on any given bill the government says it is a good bill and the oppositions say it is not a good bill. However the government, having more members, will make sure that it passes in the House. The government keeps on saying it is a good bill and the opposition keeps on saying it is bad. Neither of them says how it should be measured.

When another election comes along both sides promise a lot more laws to solve a lot more problems, real or imaginary. However how often do say they will get rid of a law? I leave aside the promises of current government members to abrogate NAFTA or eliminate the GST because by now everybody knows they were just kidding. That is what I am supposed to say.

The result is that we keep getting more laws. We do not revisit them. Government bills on the whole ought to contain sunset clauses. Every law should have a sunset clause that would require it to cease to exist after five years unless it was specifically reauthorized. That would mean that Parliament would spend a lot less time passing new laws because it would be too busy re-passing old ones.

It would be good because it would be much easier for government to get rid of a law that had been a mistake if it could just quietly not re-pass it. It would be a lot easier than having to stand and say: "Gee, we goofed. We are sorry", which is what it would have to do now. I am in favour of a sunset clause because I do not believe that we need a whole horde of laws, certainly not a whole horde of new ones. We need to get rid of some old ones.

For instance, we were saved forever from scary guns that go bang by drastic gun controls in the 1970s. Now we are considering even more drastic gun control legislation. Should we instead be pondering whether to bother re-enacting the old law or whether the whole enterprise should be scrapped? Maybe we

should stop measuring political success by the number of laws passed and start measuring it by their quality.

American humorist P. J. O'Rourke talked about this point in his book entitled "Parliament of Whores". After quoting the purposes of the U.S. constitution, which are "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of a liberty to ourselves and our posterity", he asks: "Are we done yet? When can we quit passing laws and raising taxes? When can we say of our political system let's stick a fork in it and see if it is done?"

Our federal government exists to provide peace, order and good government. That is a bit of circle, a government that exists to produce good government. When can we stick a fork in the government and say stop passing laws; we have enough and they are the right ones? The essential first step would be to stop passing new laws all the time and start spending some of our time evaluating the old ones.

I urge the House to support Motion No. 314. Let us stick a fork in our agricultural policy and ask whether it is done. If it is not thoroughly cooked, let us ask if it is even cooking. Let us make sure we have not put a roast in a shoe box instead of an oven. Let us start evaluating our laws to see if they are working and abolish or replace old ones that do not work before we pass new ones. Let us start right here with this motion.

[Indian Affairs, March 23rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of Indian affairs. Ovide Mercredi and a select group of Indian chiefs in Alberta seem to know more about the minister's secret report on self-government than the House does or the Canadian people do.

Will the minister table this report in the House today?

[Property Rights, February 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I then ask the unanimous consent of this House to refer this important motion to the Standing Committee on Human Rights and the Status of Disabled Persons for further consideration.

[Property Rights, February 24th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I ask the unanimous consent of this House to make this important motion votable.

[Property Rights, February 24th, 1995]

moved:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should initiate an amendment to section 7 of the Constitution Act, 1982, to recognize the right of the individual to enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

Mr. Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise in the Chamber to move that in the opinion of this House the government should initiate an amendment to section 7 of the Constitution Act, 1982, to recognize the right of the individual to enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Nothing is more important to a system of government than this.

In rising in this Chamber today I am following many people of greater stature and ability than myself who have fought for this most fundamental right. I follow, however unworthily, in the footsteps of those who have made the glorious revolution. I follow in the footsteps of those who confronted King John and compelled him to sign the Magna Carta. I follow in the footsteps of those who for 1,000 years or more have worked and when necessary have fought and died to ensure that governments serve the rights of their citizens rather than oppress them.

I intend to continue the fight for property rights, the core of our ancient liberties. Since this is not how most people understand the concept of property rights, I have three primary purposes in my remarks today. First, I would like to begin by explaining what property rights really are. Second, I would like to outline why they are central to the problem of good government. Then I would like to explain how my motion would address that problem.

Property rights begin with the concept of self-ownership. It is vital to stress this point because when people hear the term property they generally think of real property: houses, boats, mansions and yachts. They generally think not just of real property, but of real property of a luxurious nature. They think of property rights as protecting the rich, or as protecting the existing order of things. This is fundamentally and entirely wrong.

The essence of property rights is the concept of self-ownership, of the individual's conscience and the individual's judgment as inviolable, even sacred. People have the right to make their own decisions. That is my most fundamental belief.

Our property is ourselves, our labour, our imagination and our courage. The right to control one's own actions is what property rights is all about. Only by extension is property material.

In a universe of material things and in a universe in which time passes, a respect for self-ownership of others must mean a respect for the things they make or modify. Property does mean things too, but fundamentally, the right to own property is a right to own oneself, to make one's own decisions, to trade voluntarily with others, to labour freely and for oneself and not for others as a slave.

It is therefore profoundly mistaken to believe that property rights favour the rich. Take half of a rich man's things and he will still be well off, but take half of a poor man's or a middle class man's things away and what hope do they have of one day being comfortable?

It is also unsound to say that one can be free without ownership of the things one makes with one's labour. It is unsound to contrast mere material things with higher matters such as love. However bright the eye of a beloved child, food, clothing and shelter are essential to that child, but they are not the end of that child's material needs. It is not a case of satisfying material needs and then moving to a higher plateau. Toys, games, books and the very arms with which a parent hugs a child are all material. No parent who cannot make a thing and keep it or trade it for another, whether simple food or a book of poetry can express their love effectively and freely.

The right of self-ownership is fundamental. It must imply the right to control the material things that one owns, makes or alters. However, its origin is in self-ownership: the ownership of ourselves, our labour and our imagination.

Those who deny the right to own property, deny not the right of the exploiter to hoard, but the right of the ordinary citizen to live according to his or her own lights. That right is fundamental to human dignity.

That brings me to my second point, the problem of good government. However sound the right of self-ownership may be in abstract theory, it is threatened in practice from two directions.

People may be subject to force and fraud from within their own community. Their rights may be insecure either in theory or in practice, if theft is legal or if it is unpunished. If that is the case, nothing we may do to make the world a better place as we understand it can persist. Whatever is achieved is snatched away. Then whatever a person may dream will be only a dream. It will never be realized.

People may be subjected to force and fraud from outside. Whatever system of rights they possess, an attack from outside may overwhelm that system and leave them raped and murdered in their burning houses. Whatever they have achieved may be taken away this way also.

Therefore people combine into societies and create governments. Through them they seek to define a system of rights and enforce it internally and also protect the system as a whole from attack from the outside. Sometimes they fail and if they do the results are clearly catastrophic. A government too weak to protect the lives, liberty and property of its citizens is unbearable, but the usual problem is quite the reverse.

Through most of human history the problem has been that governments wield too much power. The usual result of having a government too weak to protect people's rights is to have it displaced by one strong enough to do it, but unwilling to.

The historical problem is that governments have had the ability to protect citizens but not the will. Instead, they themselves have taken these rights away. What they have done is to treat citizens as means and not ends. They declare some higher purpose and then force citizens to seek to fulfil it, whatever it may be.

In most parts of the world the problem of government quite simply has never been solved. The Romans considered it. "Quis custodiet custodientes?" they asked. Who shall guard the guardians? But they did not solve it.

In the Anglo-American tradition it was solved, if imperfectly. The solution was partly theoretical and partly practical, but the larger and more impersonal societies and governments became the more important, the theory was. In Britain the Anglo-Saxon councils seemed somehow to have solved the problem of government, to give chiefs and leaders some power but not too much. They could defend rights but not take them away.

After the Norman conquest it seemed that government had triumphed over society, but it had not. At swordpoint at Runnymede, civil society told King John he would sign the Magna Carta or he would die and it told him he would abide by it or he would die.

When the Stuarts sought to shake free of it the people revolted. Charles I lost his head over it, literally. When Oliver Cromwell sought to use power to engage in social engineering, the people withdrew their consent to be governed. Shortly after his death the Commonwealth was abolished.

The monarchy was brought back under strictly limited terms after James II showed he would not keep the bargain. The glorious revolution brought William and Mary to the throne but also the 1689 Bill of Rights. Again the right of the citizen to be free from his or her own government triumphed.

Governments, however, have a real tendency to encroach. The guardians must be guarded. It was that which led to the revolt in the 13 colonies in the 1770s. It was the danger of another revolt that led to the Durham report urging self-government in this country. For most of our history the common law and its protection of the right to own property withstood any attempt to undermine it.

Unfortunately what wise men create clever men can undo. And so it was here. The Right Hon. Pierre Elliot Trudeau neither fully understood nor cared much about the notion of citizens as ends rather than means, nor did he understand or sympathize with the British parliamentary tradition and the supremacy of common law.

In 1982, quite casually, he traded away our most fundamental right in a slick and clever political calculation, but he should not have done it. Since 1982 things have gone downhill very fast in this country. Since 1982 we have somehow had the idea that government is the master and the citizen is the servant.

Mr. Trudeau felt very clever because he had reached agreement with the premiers to have the Constitution repatriated. However, when one level of government agrees with another to abolish citizens' protection against government, a protection 1,000 years old or more, it is not good and it is not wise. Therefore, I want this House to take steps to restore it to the Constitution.

The Canadian people were denied a chance to vote on property rights in 1982 when the Constitution was repatriated. Nobody asked them. They were denied it again in 1992 when the right to own property was deliberately omitted from the Charlottetown accord, against the wishes of the Canadian people I might add. They have been denied it here because hon. members opposite have denied the House a chance to vote on this motion, to stand up and be counted with the Commons or with bad King John. However, it is time we restored it.

What I am proposing is very precise, that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be amended to include the following:

The federal government shall take no property from any citizen, in whole or in part, through eminent domain, regulation, or any other way, except for public use, through due process and with just and timely compensation.

This does not encroach on provincial jurisdiction. It only binds the federal government. It does not paralyse public policy. It only holds it to a reasonable standard of serving the public and not abusing it. It does not forbid takings. It only insists that they must be done in a legitimate way and for a legitimate purpose.

What it does do is admit the existence of the paradox of government and to seek to apply the solution of wise men to the problems created by those who were merely clever. It seeks to restore government to its proper function: protecting the rights of citizens, not usurping them, not taking them away.

The most important of these rights is the right to own property. That right is the right to own oneself, to be a free person and not a slave. I therefore urge this House to express itself in favour of the entrenchment of the right to own private property in the Constitution.

Many of my colleagues will have an opportunity to speak to this motion today but many others will not. It is an additional unfortunate consequence of being denied votable status that the time for debate is drastically restricted.

Those of my colleagues who would like to speak but cannot have therefore asked me to read into the record a statement of their support. On behalf of the members for Calgary Northeast, Lethbridge, Mission-Coquitlam, Prince George-Peace River, Port Moody-Coquitlam, Prince George-Bulkley Valley, Vegreville and Wetaskiwin, I would like to conclude with this statement:

"Mr. Speaker, hon. colleagues and fellow Canadians, we believe the right to own property and not to be deprived thereof, except for public use, through due process and with just compensation is at the core of Canadians' ancient liberties as free people. Each of us would like to be able to rise in the Chamber today to voice our support for the entrenchment of that right in the Constitution. In case we do not have that opportunity today, we have asked our colleague, the member for Skeena, to place this statement of our support for this measure into the record".

I hope that all members of whatever party in this House will share and endorse that sentiment. This is most emphatically not a partisan issue but a matter of fundamental justice and human rights.

[Young Offenders Act, February 22nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments and I would reiterate what I said in my intervention. We have to measure the success of our programs against clear criteria. We have to evaluate whether or not the legislation that is in effect right now or legislation that is brought into the House is actually working.

The Auditor General said in his report that so many of the things the government does, fails. It fails the test of accountability. It does not achieve the lofty goals that it sets out to achieve. The Young Offenders Act is another example of that very deep malaise that sits in our federal government and has for a long time.

The programs that are brought into the House or that are on the books right now have to be evaluated in clear terms. It has to be demonstrated they actually work and that Canadians are satisfied with them.

Clearly Canadians from coast to coast are not satisfied with the Young Offenders Act and they will not be satisfied with the amendments as proposed.

[Young Offenders Act, February 22nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, in his latest report the Auditor General took what I consider to be a major step forward in discharging the duties of his office.

In addition to the traditional accounts of waste and questionable accounting practices, this time around he pointed out that a major cause of wasted money-and in my view this is the major cause-is not overpaid civil servants, the redecorating of offices, or the wasting of staples and paper clips. The problem the Auditor General focused on this time around is that we spend billions of dollars a year on programs without ever saying what the programs are intended to achieve, or how we measure their success in achieving their goals.

It is not hard to think of a government program to which this criticism applies. Actually it is hard to think of one that it does not apply to. We have social programs that hurt society. We have family programs that destroy families. We have aboriginal programs that keep Canada's Indians from ever achieving self-sufficiency. We have trade programs that discourage free trade. We have expenditure control legislation that allows spending to spiral out of control, and so on. It is not a pretty sight.

Every time one of these programs fails, the solution is to spend more money. We never ask what we are trying to do, how we will know whether or not we have achieved it, and when we will shut the program down if we do not see some success.

Getting to the Young Offenders Act, what is it supposed to be doing? Is it doing it? How can we tell? If it is not, at what point do we change our approach?

The purpose of the Young Offenders Act is quite clear. It is intended to draw a distinction between hardened adult offenders on the one hand and juveniles on the other. Then it is intended to separate the hardened juvenile offender from the kid who got in with the wrong crowd and made a foolish mistake. Most of us would agree that the kid who made a foolish mistake and that kid alone deserves a second chance.

I am sure many members are thinking: "Come off it, Mike. In this country we do not hold hardened adult criminals responsible either", and this is sadly true. It is difficult to pick up a newspaper today without seeing some dreadful tale of an innocent person abused or slaughtered by someone who ought still to be in prison serving out their sentence. Perhaps our governments do not take crime seriously even by adults, but the public wants them to and the Liberals ignore that desire at their grave peril.

Last time the Liberals formed the government the public got so sick of their arrogance that it reduced them to some 40 seats in Parliament in the 1984 election. Let me serve notice here and now that if the Prime Minister and the cabinet ignore public feelings about crime, that will be the good old days for the Liberal Party.

If the Liberals hope to avoid such a debacle, there are so many things they are doing that they had better not. They had better not raise taxes for one thing. They had better not keep spending more money than they take in for another. They had better apply the Auditor General's critique to their entire crime policy. Is crime being deterred? How do we measure it? If it is not, how do we change the law so that it is?

To help the Liberals in this unfamiliar exercise of considering whether what they are doing is actually working, I would like to start by applying the Auditor General's criteria to the Young Offenders Act and to these amendments to it.

The Young Offenders Act is supposed to give a second chance to those who deserve it. Is that what it is doing? Or is it just giving a licence to those under 18 to commit crimes? How can we tell? It seems quite simple to me.

If the Young Offenders Act is working, those youths who are given light sentences, who have their records sealed when they reach the age of majority, who receive no punishment at all for their misdeeds, should subsequently turn out to be better citizens than those who are selected for more severe punishment. Young people who get into trouble with the law should be less inclined to continue their criminal careers into adulthood than before there was the Young Offenders Act.

In short, if the Young Offenders Act is working, we would either have no more youth crime than we had in the past or perhaps a little bit more but a much lower rate of juvenile delinquents going on to become adult criminals. If not, if youth crime is skyrocketing and young offenders who receive a light slap on the wrist for serious acts like robbery, assault, even rape and murder go on to commit serious crimes as adults, then the Young Offenders Act is failing.

To me, the scariest possibility would be that the young thugs are manifesting an increasingly obvious awareness that they are beyond the reach of the law because of the Young Offenders Act, that they are responding rationally to the incentives government has built into its policies. That would be easy to measure too. Just look to see when the Young Offenders Act came into force and then after a few years delay when teenagers came to understand these provisions youth crime skyrocketed.

I wonder whether the government bothers to keep statistics on these questions and if it does, whether it will release them. I wonder whether we had less youth crime before the Young Offenders Act or more. I wonder what proportion of those who receive lenient sentences or have their records sealed when they turn 18 go on to commit more serious crimes as opposed to those who used to receive a stiff punishment for an evil act.

I am submitting these as Order Paper questions because as Canadians we have a right to know what is going on. That includes knowing whether the Minister of Justice knows or cares whether the Young Offenders Act is working. If it turns out that when measured adequately against clear criteria the Young Offenders Act is the failure it seems to be, then I wonder something else. I wonder what the government's priorities are.

Does the Minister of Justice think that his primary and overwhelming responsibility is protecting the lives, liberties and property of Canadian citizens and does he measure each of his initiatives against that criterion? Or is he busy trying to turn us all into socially aware, personally tolerant, cappuccino drinking, fluently trilingual citizens of the global village of the 21st century? Is he too caught up in his social engineering to protect society as it now exists?

Some will doubtless believe I am being unfair to the minister. Some will doubtless maintain that the justice minister knows exactly what the Young Offenders Act and these amendments to it are supposed to achieve. And he knows exactly how to measure success.

The Young Offenders Act, some will tell me, is part of a grand social engineering project of this and previous Liberal governments. It is the abolition of personal responsibility. These people will further tell me that the Minister of Justice knows exactly what the amendments are intended to achieve. They are intended to deceive the bumpkins out in the hinterland into thinking that crime is being punished and innocence rewarded so that the project of relieving us all of responsibility can proceed unmolested.

These people will tell me that the justice minister has very clear ideas how to measure his success on this project. They will say that if the justice minister can get the polls to say Canadians think he is cracking down on youth crime, he will not actually have to hold murderous young thugs accountable for their acts of evil. I do not think so.

I prefer to be charitable and assume that the justice minister and the Liberals are so convinced of their divine right to rule over Canadians and reshape them for their own good that they do not bother asking themselves whether what they are doing is working.

That is why I have risen in the Chamber today, to tell the justice minister as clearly and forcefully as I can that when his party was elected on the promise of a better yesterday, voters had in mind a time when jobs were more secure, the national debt was far lower and the streets were a lot safer. That is what they want to come back, not to the crazy experiments and wild excesses of the Trudeau years.

I hope the Minister of Justice, the Prime Minister and the entire government understand that Canadians really do believe and cherish individual responsibility. They overwhelmingly favour the right to own property. They overwhelmingly favour politicians who listen to their constituents. They overwhelmingly favour the right of law-abiding citizens to live in freedom and in security. And they overwhelmingly favour tougher action against crime and criminals of whatever age.

I call on the Minister of Justice, the Prime Minister and the government to take back this legislation and to repudiate the entire approach behind it. I call on them to recognize that the most primary duty of a government is to protect the lives, liberty and property of its citizens from force and fraud.

I call on them to develop and make public a set of standards for measuring the success or failure of the Young Offenders Act against this goal. And I call on them to amend it so that it works or abolish it if it cannot be made to work.

Enough of softness on crime. Enough coddling. Enough punishing the innocent and pardoning the guilty. Either they do it now or the Reform government does it after 1997 while they collect their undeserved pensions and write their wistful memoirs.

That would be simple justice. Simple justice is what the Canadian public wants and simple justice is what the Reform Party is going to give them.