Madam Speaker, it is with a great deal of sadness that I rise today to speak against this omnibus legislation. I agree with the previous speaker that it is more like an ominous bill rather than an omnibus one.
The first area that makes me sad is that my colleagues across the floor did not agree to separate the bill and let go through a fast-track process the provisions that deal with the abuse of young children. Being a teacher, a mother and now a grandmother to three of the most beautiful grandchildren in the world, there is nothing that is more important than the protection of our children from sexual predators. It is an absolute shame that my colleagues have not agreed to fast-track that.
To put nine pieces of legislation into one bill, and then to keep hearing the rhetoric about how, because I happen to sit on this side of the House, I do not care about victims is offensive.
I have been a teacher and a counsellor most of my life. I have dealt with victims of child abuse and rape. I have dealt with families that have lost loved ones who were shot through gang violence. I have dealt with families who have dealt with violent crime. I know what it is like to be a victim. I know the kind of pain victims suffer.
I want to remind my colleagues across the floor that absolutely 39% of Canadians voted for them, but that leaves a high majority who did not give them a mandate to bring in sweeping legislation.
I am also hearing what they are hearing from victims everywhere they go.
I was back in my community of Newton-North Delta last weekend. For those who know Surrey, they know how it is often in the news as having the greatest number of gang-style killings and violence. Recently, a young woman was butchered at her workplace. She was not even safe at work. We dealt with the aftermath of that not only with her family, but with the whole community. We lost a young man who was shot. We dealt not only with the family but with the whole community.
As a community, we have dealt with the impact of these kinds of killings and these kinds of crimes. Our community deals with young people who are engaged in drug abuse and drug addiction. I do not have members in my community telling us to punish those who do the crimes. It actually made me cry just a few weeks ago to hear a mother who lost her child due to violent crime saying that all she wanted was justice. She did not want draconian punishment because she herself was a mother.
Last weekend I attended a forum held by the Surrey Board of Trade, and I learned something really amazing that I had not expected to learn at that meeting. The president of the Surrey Board of Trade said education is the single indicator toward building our economy, to making our communities safe, to making savings on health care, to protecting the environment, whichever aspect of our society that we value. That president did not say it is incarceration and punishment, and there is a huge difference between education and punishment.
As a counsellor and teacher, let me say that punishment by itself and the kind of punitive sentences, mandatory sentences, and actions we are seeing explicit in this bill will make very little difference to crime. The U.S. just to the south of us has tried incarceration and has tried the death penalty. It still has high drug abuse, high death rates due to the use of weapons, and a very high population in prison.
I know we think we can do things differently. If our business community, the president of the Surrey Board of Trade, can see education as a main driving force to building healthy, safe communities, then surely we as parliamentarians should be taking the time to debate those issues.
I have to express my dismay at this time that as an elected official I am being denied, and therefore, the people who voted for me and sent me here to represent them, a fair and in-depth debate of issues that are going to impact our families, our communities, our young people, and those who are the most vulnerable.
It is time that we stopped using the rhetoric of the victim to say we do not care or that the NDP members do not care. It is time we started to talk about what really works. I will tell the House what works, from my perspective of 30 years of experience in the school system and in my community.
What works is prevention programs. What works is better policing. What works is rehabilitation. There is not a doctor out there who is going to call drug abuse and drug addiction just something fancy that somebody gets up and does one morning. It has now been classified as a medical condition. So what do we do with people who have a medical condition? Do we put them in prisons or do we treat them? Canadians who are compassionate citizens want to see treatment.
In Surrey, the fastest-growing district in B.C., we have more students sitting in mouldy classrooms because our province keeps telling us it cannot afford to build schools. Yet, this legislation would force provinces to build prisons. Does that mean that young people in my area would have to sit even longer in mouldy classrooms day in and day out because the province would be forced to build prisons?
I also want to say to my colleagues that there are two ways to debate. I really like respectful debate. Yes, teachers deserve a decent wage. They absolutely do and they deserve it for the job they do everyday. However, let me get back to this. Are we as Canadians saying that we would rather put people in prisons rather than take steps to address the very issues and problems that lead people into crime, whether it be addiction, poverty or just family dysfunction, so therefore the need for some social programs?
I urge my colleagues across the floor to reconsider separating the child sexual exploitation bill. Let us work that one through and then send it to committee, and let us take a serious look, based on research and on good practice.
Those members can accuse the NDP of being out there, but the Canadian Bar Association has spoken and said that this is the wrong direction.
