Joe Comartin

[Criminal Code, March 10th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we have a Senate bill in front of us today, a private member's bill, which, quite frankly, is a joke. In spite of the speeches from the other three parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals in particular, in support of Bill S-203, it remains a joke.

One of the first things I learned when I went to law school was that if we were going to have effective deterrents to anti-social or criminal behaviour, there had to be laws that could be enforced so that people who were inclined to anti-social or criminal behaviour knew that they would be caught. Everything that I have ever learned since then with regard to how we prevent or deter deviant behaviour to society has confirmed that basic rule.

At the present time the legislation in the Criminal Code with regard to animal cruelty is around 112 years old. There were very minor amendments in the 1950s, but it has not changed since that time.

Today, the reality is that of all the animal cruelty cases in this country, less than 1% of the perpetrators of those offences are ever charged. The reason is that our prosecutors right across the country and in the territories know that the law is so inadequate as it stands that they cannot get convictions. If I have time I will go through some of the examples, but that is the reality today.

In addition, in this bill there is a gross dereliction of responsibility by the political parties in this country and in this House. They are prepared to allow an unelected irresponsible Senate to dictate how we deal with the issue of animal cruelty.

We have heard the history from some of the other members. The bill with regard to animal cruelty in its most recent reincarnation was Bill C-50 which passed back in the 38th Parliament. The legislation has been passed twice by the House of Commons, the elected body in this country, and has been refused to be passed by the Senate twice.

When Bill C-50 was introduced the last time, it was clear that it had all party support because its prior incarnation had in fact received votes in this House from all parties. It was not even the Conservative Party at that time; it was the Alliance. All parties supported it. There were few exceptions; it was not unanimous, but all political parties supported it. It went through this House with overwhelming support and then got stymied by that unelected irresponsible other house. That is where things were until this bill came forward from the Senate.

We hear the argument why not just support the bill. I will say why we should not support it. It does not do anything. It is as simple as that. It does not do one thing to increase the rate of conviction. All it does is increase the penalties. It does not allow our prosecutors to get any more convictions. It does not allow our judges to convict any more people. That less than 1% conviction rate is going to continue.

We will get the odd case where somebody is convicted and perhaps gets a stiffer penalty, and I repeat perhaps. The reality is that it is not going to change the conviction rate.

We have an alternative. Again I think in particular of the Liberals on the justice committee. I introduced the amendments that would have brought the old bill, Bill C-50, into this bill. It would have dealt with the issues that are important with regard to actually protecting animals. It would have brought it into the 21st century. I do not have time to go through all of the points. I introduced those amendments and they were accepted by the chair of the justice committee as proper and admissible. The member of the Conservative Party who is chairing that committee accepted them as proper amendments.

The amendments mimic exactly the private member's bill from the Liberal member for Ajax—Pickering; it is exactly the same. The Liberals on the committee voted those amendments down. The meaningful reform that has passed this House twice was voted down by a combination of the Liberals and the Conservatives on that committee. The Bloc stood with me. The Bloc then moved some other amendments, which did not go as far as C-50 but would have made some significant progress. What happened? The same coalition of Liberals and Conservatives on that committee voted them down.

I want to be very clear about why I believe we absolutely should be voting this bill down. It was made very clear by Senator Bryden, the author of this bill, that the Senate would not accept a bill from this House. Again, a totally irresponsible unelected body is telling members of the elected House that it does not care what we think or do, but it is not letting this bill through. That reinforced my strong belief that we have to get rid of the Senate. That was the attitude.

Neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives have the political will to challenge the other place on this bill. They basically have thrown up their hands and said, “Okay, senators, whatever you want, we are not going to buck you”. That is what we are faced with and our animals will continue to be treated as we saw this past weekend with those horses in Alberta. In that case, 29 horses died. Local officials knew for two years about the abuse that was going on. The amendments that I proposed, C-50, the private member's bill from the member for Ajax—Pickering, would have allowed them to move much earlier to protect those animals and perhaps none of them would have been lost.

That is the reality of what we are faced with today. There are two political parties that are unwilling to challenge the unelected Senate, and then trying to convince the Canadian public that Bill S-203 is anything meaningful and is going to somehow deal with the issue. That is where the farce is. That is why I say this bill is a joke, because it does nothing like that.

I want to make one additional point. We did not hear from the member from the Conservative Party who spoke to this bill this morning, that the current governing party was prepared to do anything about bringing C-50 forward as a government bill, to put in place a law that in fact would protect our animals. It is not saying it is going to do that. The reality is that because of the attitude in the Senate and the lack of political will by both the Conservatives and the Liberals to challenge them, they are not in fact going to bring forward anything further. We are just never going to see these amendments as long as that attitude remains in place.

At this time, 110 to 115 years later, we need to update the legislation to have in place meaningful protection for our animals. In my riding an individual clipped the ears of a dog so that the dog would look fiercer. The dog was used for fighting. We saved that dog and got him adopted, but the reality is that person could already own another dog. We cannot prevent that from happening.

There are all sorts of other provisions. We can think of any number of other abuse cases. There is the one out in Alberta where a dog was dragged behind a vehicle, repeatedly injured, grossly and brutally attacked. There were minimal consequences as a result. That is what we need to bring to an end and that is what Bill S-203 does not do.

It is time for this Parliament to do what it is supposed to do in terms of protecting our animals.

[Ethics, March 3rd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, if the House leader understood the system, the acting director could take on this role, but he probably does not understand that.

To put an end to the attacks from the Liberals on Mr. Cadman's family reputation, to stop the stonewalling by the government, will the Minister of Justice direct the director of public prosecutions to hire independent counsel to conduct an investigation and recommend as to whether prosecutions should be taken against Mr. Finlay and Mr. Flanagan?

[Business of Supply, February 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I think I will get most of my 10 minutes in and I may be able to avoid questions. I would expect one or two intelligent ones from this House but that may be a fond hope.

My opening comments will be somewhat critical of this motion coming forward at this time. As one looks at it and at the other issues confronting us in this Parliament right now, the budget and the debate around that in particular, one cannot help but wonder about the motivation of the Liberals. They obviously do not want to be confronted with their flexibility on the budget and their unwillingness to stand up, as they should as the formal official opposition, and challenge the government on a great deal of this budget. They would rather sit on their hands, as they have so often done in these last six months, and not play the role they properly should and protect the Canadian people in the kind of budget that we have. Instead, they move on this.

I do not want to downplay in any way or demean the significance of the Mulroney-Schreiber and Airbus inquiry and the need for it, but that message has been clearly sent out by the ethics committee, by a great deal of the positions of all political parties, except for the Conservatives, and by the Canadian public generally.

This debate today, I would suggest, is not really necessary because all the points that I have heard so far today have been made repeatedly in the past. The political pressure is on the House and, more specifically, on the government to get the public inquiry going as quickly as possible.

It is quite obvious that the government is very interested in prolonging the establishment of the public inquiry until the next election occurs and have the election done and over with before the public inquiry gets started and certainly before it completes its work.

In that regard, I think the crucial issue here is not only to get the inquiry going, but that a mandate for that inquiry be given. If it follows the very clear message from the government at the present time and, to some degree, the recommendations that came from Dr. Johnston, this will be a very limited mandate that basically will do nothing.

I would argue strongly that, if we see that limited mandate, it is intentional that it will not do anything. We will spend a chunk of money on it, we will put a lot of resources into it for a very limited mandate and we will come to no conclusions.

I want to acknowledge the work that my colleague from Winnipeg has done on the committee and the work of the committee generally in moving this forward. We also need to recognize the limitations it was functioning under. It lacked the financial and professional resources and, in particular, the forensic accounting resources that would have allowed the committee to move it even further along.

It has been a rather significant problem for me as I analyze how Parliament and our committees function as opposed to the way committees function in other Parliaments around the globe. As we see with the present government and as we saw with the prior Liberal government with the sponsorship scandal, we do not provide sufficient resources in the structure within this House and within the committees. Our structure is not flexible enough and not resourced enough to do the job that we are required to do or expected to do when we are faced with this kind of an issue and these kinds of facts. I address it specifically as a situation where we as a committee are expected to conduct a quasi inquiry without having anywhere near the resources.

We saw that very clearly during the sponsorship scandal. I remember speaking at that time with the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, who was an accountant himself, and saying that this was everything we had and that there was no way we would be able to get to the bottom of it. The committee did excellent work but, because of the limited resources, it took the Gomery inquiry to get much further along that line.

We saw the same thing here. Excellent work, as I saw it, by the ethics committee, as far as it could go. But we saw with Mr. Mulroney his refusal to give documentation to back up what was a fairly incredible story. However, the one that really got me was when he claimed that his income tax returns were sacred.

My relationship with my wife is sacred. My relationship with my children is sacred. I want to be very clear to this House that my relationship with my accountant and the Revenue Canada office is not sacred, and neither should Mr. Mulroney's be.

That is what we are up against and not having adequate resources to really challenge that. That is why we need the inquiry established as quickly as possible and follow the report that was tabled today. We say to the Prime Minister that he must do it now and must make it with a mandate that is broad enough to get at all of the issues and to finally put this to bed for all Canadians.

[Criminal Code, February 27th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I echo the comments of my colleague from Hochelaga. This was a good initiative on the part of the member from the Conservative Party who brought this forward. I would like to think that it would have been one of those that the government would have actually moved on at an earlier stage. In any event, we are at that point and it has all party support.

We heard in the course of the testimony at committee that a number of the provinces and their prosecutors at the provincial level felt strongly about the need to create a separate offence. Auto theft had always been covered historically under the general theft provisions of the code, but what they needed to do, because of the high incident rate of auto theft in the country, was to create a separate offence and then be able to deal with it in terms of penalties, with that new evidence going in that it was a specific theft, in the form of an auto theft, particularly if we had repeat offenders, that they could be dealt with more harshly by way of using indictment rather than a summary conviction.

All too often we were hearing of cases where the summary conviction approach was taken, with theft generally, where penalties were being meted out that were not adequate or responsive, particularly, and this is one of the other points that came up repeatedly, with the amount of organized crime that is involved in auto theft now where organized crime figures will actually assign individuals to steal specific cars and then sell them, oftentimes, offshore. We needed stiffer penalties to deal with this specific crime.

We have all agreed that we will shorten our speeches but I want to make one other point, and that is that additional work needs to be done in the preventive area of auto theft.

We took a fair amount of evidence from, and I will signal up your home province, Mr. Speaker, the province of Manitoba and the work it has done on requiring immobilizers to be placed on all vehicles in that province. Immobilizers are a new technology which makes it impossible to steal a vehicle and, so far, the immobilizer has not been broken by either organized crime or thieves generally. If there is an attempt to steal the vehicle, the immobilizer just shuts the vehicle down. It cannot be operated and, therefore, the vehicle is no longer available to be stolen.

The Province of Manitoba has mandated that to have car insurance in that province, people must have an immobilizer on their car. This is a major step forward in simply making it impossible to steal cars. The auto manufacturers, both in Canada and internationally, need to take some lessons from that experience and provide this technology on all new vehicles as they come on to the market. The federal government could be playing some role in that, at least from a policy standpoint, to ensure that happens. If that does occur, this section of the code may, at some point in the future, become one of those sections we go back and repeal because we will no longer have auto theft in this country.

I am maybe being a bit optimistic on that ever happening but hope springs eternal in the human breasts.

[Mickey Renaud, February 27th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League will play their first home game since the tragic death last week of their 19 year old captain, Mickey Renaud.

To all who knew him, Mickey was a young man of great character. He belied the notion that toughness and skill on the ice could not be matched by caring and generosity away from it.

As the captain of the Spitfires, he demonstrated leadership, dedication to his team and a talent that led the Calgary Flames to draft him in 2007.

Away from the rink, he touched many in the community by reaching out to youth in elementary schools and to special needs students at his high school, St. Anne's Catholic Secondary School, in his hometown of Tecumseh.

Those who are not from the Windsor area may find it hard to appreciate his impact on the community, yet since his untimely death thousands from across Windsor and Essex County have poured out their affection and respect for him in numerous expressions of condolences as well as donations to the Windsor Spitfires Foundation.

As the Spitfires resume their regular season, they do so without the physical presence of their captain. However, his spirit will continue, with visible reminders of his number 18 painted on the boards and sewn into team jerseys, as well as the invisible memory of his character etched into the hearts and minds of those who knew him.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Mickey's parents, Mark and Jane, his brother and sister, Remy and Penny, and their extended family.

[Tackling Violent Crime Legislation, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague from northern Alberta misses the point. I have a delegation from MADD coming to my office tomorrow. What am I going to say to it? I am going to say that the government had no answer when I asked why it had delayed the bills by two or three months. There was absolutely no reason for it other than the government's political agenda.

What do I say to a mother whose daughter has been sexually abused by someone who is 45 or 50 years of age? I will tell her that we do not have legislation to deal with it because—

[Tackling Violent Crime Legislation, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, my friend brings up a very good point. I can assure my colleague from Ottawa Centre that we are currently looking up all the promises the Prime Minister in particular made about Bill C-16, that he would not use the traditional methodology of bringing his government down at the whim of the government, but that he would abide by the spirit of Bill C-16 and fixed election dates. It is a concept that we have supported.

However, we are ready. If the Conservatives go ahead with this motion and the Senate does not meet their deadline by March 1, we will be ready to tell Canadians that the Prime Minister has misled them once again.

[Tackling Violent Crime Legislation, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with the assertions the member for Malpeque made at the beginning of his question. In my address to the House, I said that the delay was on the part of the government. There was no reason at all for the Conservatives to back this up, prorogue and then not allow the bills to go back to the same stage, as the three opposition parties proposed.

Despite the fact that I do not have a crystal ball, I have done an analysis of how crime bills have gone through the House under the current government and under the previous Liberal administration. Three of the five in Bill C-2 would be through and I think the fourth one would be as well. Only the dangerous offender bill would probably still be before the Senate at this point in time. Since that bill went to the Senate, for most of the time the Senate has not sat and neither has the House.

I will make one final point with regard to the Senate and the government. If the government were really serious, it would not be this motion before the House. The government would have a motion something similar to, “we call on all the senators to resign and we call on the Conservative government to initiate a process of constitutional reform to abolish the Senate for the future”.

[Tackling Violent Crime Legislation, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Wild Rose is accurate to a degree.

I was at one of the Chinese New Year's dinners on the weekend at which I heard something about a partial omission of truth was like a full lie.

Not that I am accusing him of misleading the House, but historically, if we study what happened around the age of consent issue, repeated bills came from the Reform-Alliance and then the Conservatives to raise the age of consent. However, they never put in the near age defence, which allowed people in the same age group to engage in sexual contact without criminalizing that sexual contact.

I remember sitting on a panel with a Conservative member who had sponsored one of the private member's bills. I asked him if he understood that he was about to criminalize 100,000 youth who were 15 and 16 years of age by the bill he had introduced. That was always the problem with it.

I have to take some personal credit. I convinced the former justice minister, when he was in opposition, to support the NDP in saying that we needed to raise the age of consent, but that we needed to put in the near age defence. Then when the Conservatives formed the government, for the first time that showed up in legislation, and it was passed.

[Tackling Violent Crime Legislation, February 11th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, this motion by the government is unprecedented in the history of Canada. We can go back through almost 141 years of Confederation and we have never had a motion like this one in front of the House.

In substance, the motion says to the Senate, “We are telling you from the House of Commons if you do not pass Bill C-2 by the end of March 2008, we are going to bring down the government”. The Minister of Justice was on his feet in the House repeating in his speech this afternoon exactly the same threat.

I want to start with the height of hypocrisy that this motion represents on behalf of the government. Before I do that, I want to deal with the basic lack of logic of this motion.

What are we hearing? We heard from the Prime Minister in the fall when Bill C-2 was put before the House, and I will come back to some of the history leading up to Bill C-2, that he was going to bring the government down if this bill was not passed. It was passed in the House and now the government is doing the same thing in the Senate.

The logic escapes me because behind the threats, the bombast and the macho image the government is trying to portray on crime is a totally illogical position, which is that we need this legislation right now, that we needed it years ago. That is what we hear from the government. There is some validity to that in the case of a number of parts of Bill C-2, particularly those that the NDP supported as a political party and which the Liberal government in previous administrations would not pursue.

The Conservatives are saying, “We need it right now, we are way overdue on a number of these amendments and provisions, but we are going to go to an election”. They threatened it last fall and now they are threatening it again.

This resolution from the House has absolutely no impact on the Senate. We do not have the ability constitutionally to deal with this. It is totally illogical. If it comes to fruition, that is, if the government falls, or brings itself down is a better analysis of what is going on here, over this issue, Bill C-2 will die on the order paper. It will not get through the House of Commons or the Senate until the end of 2008.

Where is the logic behind this? Although it is a rhetorical question, the obvious answer is there is no logic. This is not about dealing reasonably, realistically and effectively with crime in this country. This is all about political posturing and nothing else on the part of the government.

Why are the Conservatives pushing it right now? The answer to that is very obvious. They lost the agenda on making crime the primary issue they want to run on in an election. The Conservatives think that is where they have their best chance of gaining support in the country. I think it is an analysis that is faulty, but that is where the Conservative Party and the Conservative government is coming from.

What has happened in the last several months is that the Conservatives' agenda around the crime issues has been completely pushed aside because we passed that bill before the House recessed at the end of last year. Any number of other issues that have been before the House and the country have taken prominence, issues that the government is very afraid of. Let me mention a few of them.

Obviously, at the top of the list right now would be the economic straits we are in, in particular in the manufacturing and forestry sectors, compelling the government, in spite of the blackmail it tried to pull on the House, to move $1 billion into those sectors and communities in order to deal with the dire economic crises that a number of those communities are facing. That pushed it off its agenda.

Obviously, the Afghanistan war, and in particular, the way Canada is handling detainees in Afghanistan, has pushed the Conservatives off their agenda in that regard. The firing of the head of the nuclear safety commission has pushed them off. Of course, there is always the Schreiber-Mulroney scandal. In the last couple of weeks, there has been the issue of the finance minister not following the rules of the Treasury Board with regard to letting contracts. There is the in and out scandal on the part of the Conservative government, the only party in the House that has been charged by Elections Canada with having in effect breached the election financing law.

There are all of those issues, none of which are favourable to the government. We are seeing, as a result of all of these issues, that the government is falling in the polls. The Conservatives believe that they can hijack the agenda in this country by trying to get back on to the crime agenda.

Let us look at what the Conservatives have done historically in the last 12 months or so. Last spring, just before we broke for the summer, three of the five bills that comprised Bill C-2 had passed this House and were in the Senate. I say without any hesitation that by the end of 2007, had the government not done what it proceeded to subsequently do, those bills would have passed the Senate. I say that on the basis of the way the Senate has handled other crime bills since the Conservative government has been in power. The bills would have passed. I assume, if the government were really serious about doing anything about crime, the bills would have received royal assent and they would have been law.

All three of the bills would have been law by January 1, 2008, if not earlier. Those three parts of Bill C-2, the mandatory minimums on serious violent gun crimes, the age of consent, and the impaired driving bill, all three of those have been through this House. Let me correct that. The impaired driving bill was the one that had not gotten through. It was at report stage. It would have had third reading. It would have passed the House in the third or fourth week of September, when we were supposed to come back. The third one was the bill on the reverse onus on bail hearings which was to keep people in custody if they were facing serious charges involving guns.

Those three bills, the age of consent, the mandatory minimums, the reverse onus, would have been law by now. I believe, quite frankly, the impaired driving bill would have been law by now, because it would have passed the Senate quite quickly in late September or early October, but for the action of the government.

I guess we all know that what the Conservatives did is they did not have enough to do, that is, they did not have their political agenda. They thought they would have fallen as a government, as they probably should have, before the fall of 2007, so they prorogued Parliament. All of the bills on the order paper died. We had to start all over again. All of these bills were off, including the ones in the Senate.

I want to be very clear on this. All of the opposition parties were prepared in the fall when we came back in October after a month's delay to reinstate all of those bills at the same stage they had been, that is, three in the Senate and one here for a quick passage because there was the consent of all of the parties.

Again, with just a little bit of luck, we would have had all of those bills through the Senate by the end of the year, that is, before the year-end break, and if not, we would have had them in the first few weeks of January or February of this year, all of them. Instead, we have had this lengthy delay caused by the Conservative government, not by the Senate.

As members well know, my party and I are not supporters of the Senate. Regularly and consistently since the existence of our political party back in the 1940s, we have been calling for the abolition of the Senate. I am not here to defend members of the other place. We saw last week the kind of delay on Bill C-13, the meddling they do all the time. It is an unelected, unrepresentative, and I think oftentimes an irresponsible body. I am not here to defend them, but by the same token, at this period of time the delay for this legislation lies squarely, entirely in the lap of the government.

If the government were really serious about fighting crime as opposed to, as Lawrence Martin said in the Globe and Mail this morning, using it for, to quote him, “cheap politics”, if the Conservatives were not doing it for that purpose, if they were really serious about the need to deal with serious violent crime in particular and some of these other issues around impaired driving and the age of consent, if they were not seeing it just as a methodology to try to get re-elected, we would have moved quite a bit further along. It is to their eternal shame that we are at the stage we are. Let us look at that stage.

It was interesting in the early and middle part of last week. The government, in the speeches its members were giving in the House, and in some of the addresses they were making to the media, began to sound almost desperate for an election. In that regard, if we have an election, we are going to be in the same situation. The bill is going to die, as all the others will that are on the order paper, and we will not see any of this legislation in place for the use of our police officers and judiciary across the country to apply and fight the various aspects of criminal activity that the bill would allow them to do.

The Conservatives are pushing that button, not because they are really serious about fighting crime. That is not their primary motivation. Their primary motivation is to use this as a political tool to try to save their seats, to try to get re-elected as a government. It is probably a faulty assumption on their part that it is going to work, but that is what their motivation is, not the best interests of the country and not the victims of crime. It is the Conservative political party that this is all about in trying to save their skins in the next election.

If we look at history, it is the height of hypocrisy for them to stand in the House and argue that they are tough on crime. It is simply not the reality when one looks at it.

The other point that I want to make is that if they were really serious about being effectively tough on crime, they would not have broken their promise with regard to the 2,500 police officers that they promised in the last election, and on which they have not delivered. In fact they misled Canadians in the last election. The Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice, the former minister of justice, all of them across the country were trumpeting the 2,500 additional police officers they would see put in place.

What has happened? Number one, they did not tell the Canadian people that they were expecting the provinces to pick up most of the tab for those 2,500 police officers, money which the provinces do not have. To some degree, at least a number of the provinces have already moved on with regard to promises they made in elections to increase the number of police officers. They have already put some money into it and now the federal government is coming to them, johnny-come-lately, and saying, “Oh, by the way, although we promised this in the last election and we didn't tell the Canadian people we were going to do this, we want you, the provinces, to pay a big chunk, in most cases at least 50%”. That is not within the financial capabilities of most of the provinces, nor should it be their responsibilities when the promise was made without that condition by the government.

It is a full two years after the election and this broken promise is still hanging over their heads. If the Conservatives were serious about it, they would not be bringing this kind of useless motion in front of the House. They would be moving a motion in the House to see to it that money was put in place, that a budgetary item was put in place. We should have seen this last fall, we should have seen it in the budget in February and we should have seen it in the budget in the previous February.

Today we hear that the next budget is coming. Let me assure the House that there will be nothing in the budget for those 2,500 police officers. The Conservatives are going to break that promise on an ongoing basis and they are not going to fulfill their commitment to the Canadian people.

With regard to that, whenever we look at dealing with crime effectively, we have to look at it from three perspectives.

First, we have legislation, as we see with Bill C-2, that deals with specific problems under our Criminal Code and other legislation. We are working on that against the delays caused by the government because it wants to keep it as a hot button item. It does not want the legislation passed because then it will be behind us. Therefore, we have done that to a great extent. There is still more that needs to be done.

The other two legs of that three-legged stool, if I can use that analogy, is prevention. The big item there is to move programs into our local communities, funded by the federal government. Again, the provinces do not have the taxing power or the revenue capability to fulfill all this. However, we literally have to move $100 million a year to the provinces and the municipal local levels of government, to provide programming that will keep young people, in particular, out of the youth gangs and generally fight the drug culture and keep them out of those parts of our communities that advocate the use of drugs. That money needs to be spent. There is absolutely nothing beyond a very inconsequential amount that the government has done in this regard. It is minuscule. In fact, most of the time the government does not know what to do with it.

I come back to those 2,500 police officers. We know that in those areas of our cities where we have seriously violent crimes, we need to put more police officers on the street. We simply cannot deal with that in any effective ways, even if it is in an interim measure, for the next number of years. We need more police officers on the streets fighting that kind of crime, street level crime, particularly in the youth gangs where so much of the gun crime resides at the present time. The government has done nothing on that and it has done a minuscule about on the prevention side.

Therefore, if the government were really serious, we would see that. We would not see the sham that this motion represents in the House at the present time. We would see concrete action. Most of this is looking at programming that would be successful. There are all kinds of examples of it in Canada and in other communities across the globe that we can look to and adopt, but we have to fund them. The government has been refusing to do that, just as it is refusing to fund those 2,500 police officers, as it promised in the last election.

Where are we at? On a silly waste of time today debating this motion. It is going to have absolutely no effect. The government, whether it is over this, or over the budget or over Afghanistan, is looking desperately to bring itself down, to force the opposition parties to bring it down.

However, in this case it is not even asking the opposition parties in effect. It is saying that we should pass the motion and then if the Senate does not move, it will go to the Governor General and say that it does not have the confidence of the House, even if the motion passes. That is the stupid part of the motion. Even if the House passes it, and it looks like perhaps the Liberals and the Bloc appear as if they will support it, the government would still come down at the end of March, if the Senate, the other house over which we have no control, decides will not pass Bill C-2 by March 31.

It is absolutely silly. It is the height of hypocrisy. It is really the height of demagoguery as well when we look at what has gone on in the House over the last few months around Bill C-2. It is a shame. The government members should really bow their heads and apologize to the Canadian people for it.