Keith Martin

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 17th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak on Bill C-53, Motions Nos. 2 and 3.

We have gone through this before. The government is nibbling around the edges. The bill unfortunately will not address the problems affecting the private sector by any meaningful way. I will continue with the speech I was making earlier on constructive solutions that can be applied to the bill if the government would listen. It would find there would be widespread agreement among the electorate.

There are various things the government can do with respect to labour policy. It can work with the provinces. I challenge the ministers across the way to call their provincial counterparts together to deal with the issue of labour policies which are having a restricting effect on the ability of the private sector to function as well as it can.

Unionization techniques are being done to quite significantly restrict productivity. Certain things can be implemented. For example, there is the aspect of members taking a strike vote. The strike vote or a vote on whether to unionize should be a silent or anonymous vote rather than public. Often strong arm tactics are used on members to vote for unionization or a strike. That should be done by a secret ballot system.

The aspect of sexual bargaining should be banned, as this also restricts the private sector.

It is really horrible that we have not been able to address these significant problems that have been beleaguering the private sector for so long.

The government has an enormous role to play regarding industrial policy in reduction of interprovincial trade barriers. We had an opportunity to do that in this House and rather than taking meaningful measures to reduce interprovincial trade barriers the government once again nibbled around the edges.

The private sector says we have more boundaries east-west in Canada than we have north-south. In part that can explain the reason why, although we have implemented free trade agreements, they have not been as good as they can become because the Government of Canada has actually impeded and impaired the ability of the Canadian private sector to be competitive with its counterpart south of the border because it has not done much with removing the interprovincial trade barriers that hamstring them so badly. I would encourage it to do that.

By eliminating direct subsidies to businesses we can save taxpayers a lot of money. They really are not necessary because the private sector does not want the money. It wants the environment that will enable it to be productive.

We have a fetish for introducing regulations but have little desire to remove them. British Columbia has enacted 3,000 new regulations since the government was elected.

[Headstart Programs, November 17th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, one year ago 14 year old Reena Virk was brutally beaten to death in my riding by a group of teenage girls.

The Virk family, displaying enormous courage, turned its pain into positive action supporting effective crime prevention tools such as my private member's Motion No. 261 which passed in the House of Commons in May and calls for a national headstart program.

It focuses on strengthening the bond between parents and children, particularly those between the ages of zero and eight, so that children will have their basic needs met.

Headstart programs have decreased child abuse by 99%, youth crime by 60%, teen pregnancies by 50% and saved $30,000 a child. Headstart programs have also decreased the single leading cause of preventable and irreversible brain damage, fetal alcohol syndrome which plagues one-third of the people in jail.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care and I call on the government to act on the contents of Motion No. 261 and work with the provinces to implement a national headstart program so we will not see more deaths like Reena Virk's.

[Canada Small Business Financing Act, November 17th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure today to speak on Bill C-53 at report stage. Once again, unfortunately, the government is using a band-aid solution on something that is exceptionally important to Canadians. It is not getting to the essence of the issue and it is not dealing with the specific and effective solutions that could be implemented today to dramatically improve the health, welfare and economic future possibilities of Canadians.

My colleagues have and will mention the flaws in the bill, that it is a band-aid solution and that it puts on the shoulders of Canadians a $1.5 billion liability. Instead of providing these small funds to businesses what the government should be doing is creating the climate to improve the business community in Canada.

I will now talk about specific, pragmatic and effective solutions the government can do in conjunction with its provincial counterparts to improve the economic situation in Canada.

I will start at the top, with fiscal policy. The government can introduce a process for a 10% reduction in expenditures, not by putting it on the backs of the provinces but by truly reducing the expenditures within the public sector. It can do this in an effective way by making sure that the good people it has working in the bureaucracy are able to do the jobs they are trained and tasked to do. At the end of the day all the hard work they do will result in action as opposed to the situation we have now where most of us in parliament are running around in a circle because of all the work we have to do which does not result in action, as opposed to having a system where meetings, tasking and work actually result in action and outcome.

We could also enact balanced budget legislation. A balanced budget law could be enacted and I am sure the government would find a lot of acceptance on this side of the House.

We have asked for a debt reduction plan for a long time. The government has not set debt reduction targets yet. It can and should do that. By having and setting targets we have goals. If we have goals, we have objectives. If we have objectives we have something to shoot for. Right now there is absolutely nothing.

The next thing it can do is stop providing loan guarantees to businesses. We have created in North America a corporate welfare state where money is being given to the private sector, particularly big businesses, not little ones. This is not necessary.

Why should multimillion or multibillion dollar companies receive money from taxpayers? That is what we saw in the case of Bombardier and other companies. This is completely unnecessary.

The government has continued to fail in improving the taxation policy. I have gone around, as most of us have, and asked and consulted with the private sector, with small businesses. What did they say? They begged and pleaded for a reduction in taxes. They said the government does not need to give them money but it needs to give them the ability to create jobs. They cannot create jobs given the heavy tax burdens they have today.

Since we came here we have said that those tax burdens are killing jobs. If the government does not believe this, let us look at where economies have worked and where they have not. Let us look at economies where they kept high taxation and what they did after the taxation levels were lowered.

England and Ireland had high taxation rates and complicated rules and regulations but have reduced them dramatically. As a result their economies are booming.

Some on the left like to cite the example of northern Europe. We need to look at Sweden. Sweden had a very high tax policy and when it reduced those taxation levels the economy boomed dramatically. That is what is happening.

Governments and countries that pursue a high taxation policy kill their economies. Governments that pursue a low taxation policy and lower regulations improve the economy.

Look at our case. My province of British Columbia is the worst place in North America to do business, bar none. Premier Clark likes to point his fingers to the far east and say it is the Asian flu. Our economy was in trouble long before the Asian flu hit. The statistics are there to prove that all across the resource sector and many others.

Let us look at Alberta and Ontario where they have lowered taxation rates, where they have lowered the rules and regulations. As a result those provinces are improving dramatically in their provincial economies.

Why does British Columbia not do that? More important, why does the federal government not do that? Why do the feds not take it upon themselves to intelligently look at this taxation system, to look at what has worked before and lower the taxation levels that are weighing like a huge rock on the shoulders of Canadians, be it in the public or in the private sector?

We need a 20% reduction in personal income taxes, which can be done. A marrying and harmonizing of the PST and the GST could lower this. Also, why not look at a flat tax or a simplified tax system?

I was having meetings last week in my riding, as most of us were. People asked repeatedly why we cannot simplify the tax system. As individual citizens, many people require a tax specialist to do their taxes. That is absolutely insane.

Why does the Minister of Finance not work with the minister of revenue to put some of their people together to see how to intelligently simplify our tax system to make it fair and applicable?

Our party has repeatedly suggested that we increase the minimum taxes somebody pays, lower the tax rates for everybody. We have proven that those in the lowest socioeconomic groups would improve dramatically. We have to make sure they, most of all, are taken care of.

More important, because taxation rates would be lowered all the way through, including the business sector and the upper levels, they would then have the ability and the tools to create jobs.

The left likes to talk about hitting the rich, hitting the businesses. What happens when taxes are increased for the business sector? They leave.

Comparing our taxation system to that of the United States, our primary competitor, a family of two income earners will earn 44% more in the United States than in Canada. That in part is contributing to the brain drain. We are losing our best and brightest. It is also contributing to the loss of businesses.

Clearly the government can see that and it can act. If the government were to act and consult with other parties, it would find agreement in pursuing this common agenda. Why the government does not do this is beyond me. I think it is beyond many Canadians who see what is going on try to understand why this is happening.

Other things can be done. There are the regulatory policies. We have a great ability to institute regulations. We have to analyze whether those regulations are actually working and if they are not, to remove them. Every government department should look to see whether regulations which have been implemented previously are necessary.

Right now we are piling regulations on top of other regulations rather than trying to determine whether or not a regulation is necessary. There would be widespread approval if this year the government took it upon itself to rapidly develop a task force to look at these regulations, eliminate the ones that truly are not necessary, and then set up an ongoing process to evaluate the necessity of the rules and regulations that we have.

The federal government needs to work with the provinces on labour policy. Many rules and regulations in labour are not very effective. I would like the government to look at the U.S. experience with right to work legislation because where it has been employed there has been a dramatic increase in employment. There has been a dramatic increase in the order of $2,000 to $3,000 per person who is working in a state with right to work legislation.

I strongly encourage the government to work with the provinces on the issue of education. Our education system needs to be revamped radically in order to provide our young people with the opportunities they will require in the future. I could go on at length about the education system. I hope I will have an opportunity later in the day to talk about that.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I remind my hon. friend and colleague from across the way that it was the Reform Party that put forth a private member's motion in May of this year which received unanimous support. It concerned a national headstart program that we now see the government, to its credit, starting to adopt in aboriginal communities. It is expanding that to aboriginal communities outside reserves.

We support those initiatives. We support investing in these people in order for them to stand on their own two feet. But we do not support the government merely tossing money at aboriginal groups without any accountability. That does a huge disservice to the aboriginal people who ask why it is that the chief and council live in beautiful houses, have cars and skidoos while they do not have enough money to feed their children. That is partly why they are living on Coca-Cola and macaroni. That is what is happening.

I beseech the minister and the parliamentary secretary, do not go on a fancy trip to meet with the aboriginal leadership. Go to the people on the ground. Get rid of the entourage. Meet with those people. Go by yourself. Do not go on an official visit. Find out what is going on. Listen to what those people are saying because they will tell you that all is not well.

The solutions are not difficult. Some of these solutions require that paradigm shift. Give aboriginal people the tools to provide for themselves and they will do well. Do it under the guise of equality for all so that aboriginals and non-aboriginals can work together as brothers and sisters to build a stronger country for everybody.

Aboriginal people, ensuring that their traditional rights and responsibilities are enshrined in the constitution, which they are, can teach us a lot about their culture. We will certainly benefit from that.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member brings up an important question. I am glad he asked it.

There are aboriginal reserves that are run wonderfully and there are those which are not. The reserves we are talking about today are the reserves that are not run well, reserves I might add where aboriginal people have asked for over 10 years as to where the money is going.

There are millions of dollars put into some reserves that have very few people on them. While the band leaders are living in opulence down in Vancouver, those people are living in squalor. Representatives of those people have asked the minister repeatedly, in fact they have begged the minister, for a hearing. They have begged her for answers. What have they got? All they have got is the cold shoulder.

While that is happening, those people are living in third world conditions. People are committing suicide. They are getting diseases at rates far higher than anybody else. They are suffering from unemployment at levels that are unparalleled in this country. Those are the reserves the member and the minister should be looking at, not for our benefit nor the leadership and the aboriginal group's benefit but for the aboriginal people who are suffering from diabetes, tuberculosis, high rates of suicide and unemployment. They have been suffering for so long.

The resources are there. The member knows full well that those resources are not getting to where they should be going. Find out where those resources are going and do these people a service.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, if the hon. parliamentary secretary were interested in giving back land rights, he would enable aboriginal people to have the same land rights as non-aboriginal people have, which he knows full well they do not. Rights are given to a collective in aboriginal groups. They are not given to individuals. That is part of the problem. The individual aboriginal person does not have the same rights as a non-aboriginal person.

I know the hon. member is interested in this issue very deeply as we all are. I know he has experienced this himself. If he really wants to do a favour to aboriginal people, he will take a message to the minister. He will say to her that we must not segregate and separate aboriginal people. We must give aboriginal people the same rights and responsibilities as non-aboriginal people, which includes land rights and land ownership.

Aboriginal people off reserve are sustaining horrendous circumstances. They do not have the tools and abilities to fend for themselves. Part of that lies in the lack of accountability which occurs as to where moneys are going in the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.

If the parliamentary secretary wants to do another important job, he can take another message to the minister. Do forensic audits in those reserves where aboriginal people are looking for answers. Billions of dollars are put into those reserves. The money is not getting to where it is supposed to go. It is being siphoned off somewhere, be it in the department or in the aboriginal leadership. I suggest that he find out where that money is going. If he does that, he will be providing an enormous service so those people can get the resources to be fully functional and to stand on their own two feet.

[First Nations Land Management Act, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for York North for letting me speak for five minutes on this important bill.

The bill goes to the heart of a very important issue that I know members from across party lines are very interested in, the fate of aboriginal people in the country today.

What is happening today is a travesty. It is a tragedy beyond proportions that most Canadians understand. This past summer I was at a medical clinic in northern British Columbia. I saw once again in the flesh, in the trenches, what is taking place. There are children with infectious diseases that I have not seen since I worked in Africa. People are suffering from enormously. There are high rates of substance abuse and suicide attempts. There are communities with rates of tuberculosis and diabetes three times higher than the non-aboriginal population. The soles of communities are being torn out. Why is this so? Why has this not changed despite billions of dollars being put in by successive governments?

The answer is that we non-aboriginal people have to engage in a paradigm shift in the way we treat aboriginal people. The Indian Act has created an institutionalized welfare state. We have segregated aboriginal people, have made them separate from the mainstream.

The result has been a marred system. In some areas the money is not getting to the people. Grassroots aboriginal people are dislocated from their political masters. Is is between the political and intellectual elites and between aboriginals and non-aboriginals on how we deal with aboriginal people. We leave out the grassroots aboriginal people. They are suffering in horrendous ways that can only be compared to third world conditions.

I implore the government, and my colleagues will agree, to stop the segregation. Stop the separate development. The rights of aboriginal people to engage in their traditional activities is enshrined in the constitution, thankfully. Let us invest in aboriginal people to help them help themselves. Only if they have the tools to help themselves, to gain employment, provide for themselves, their families and their communities will they get back that sense of self, that sense of pride they so desperately need.

It does not entail separate development. It does not entail a lands claim process. The essence of bill says “You are aboriginal people. You are different from non-aboriginal people. Therefore you are going to be treated differently”. Grassroots aboriginal people do not want political emancipation that is different from anybody else. They merely want equality. They merely want to be treated as equals and have the opportunities, benefits and responsibilities of non-aboriginals.

This bill is flawed. The history of dealing with aboriginal people is flawed. It is flawed in saying that aboriginal people are somehow different. They are removed and segregated away from mainstream Canada. They have sustained and suffered under the yoke of non-aboriginal people putting their feet on them and segregating them.

I thank the hon. member for allowing me to speak now because I have to catch a plane.

Again, I implore the government not to treat aboriginal people differently. Give them the tools so they can help themselves. Aboriginal and non-aboriginal people can work together to develop a united forward looking country. We can mutually respect each other and develop together for a more positive and beneficial future for all.

[Central America, November 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, since hurricane Mitch ripped through Central American tens of thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands left homeless, infrastructure has been destroyed and crops decimated. One hundred thousand are homeless in Guatemala alone and diseases such as malaria, typhoid and dysentery will ravage thousands of people weakened by starvation.

We must act now to ameliorate this disaster and I challenge Canada, Mexico, the United States, the OAS and the United Nations to provide urgent essentials such as iodine tablets, non-perishable foodstuffs, emergency medical equipment and in particular antibiotics and rehydration supplies.

Helicopters and heavy equipment must be barged down. All must be acted on now. I also implore hospitals and other private sector companies and pharmaceutical companies to donate what they can now.

Act now and we can save lives. Procrastinate and people will die.

[Criminal Code, November 4th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I thank our justice critic, the member for West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast, for sharing his time and other members for allowing me to speak to this bill.

Ray Canuel, the chief of the Vancouver city police, once said that the justice system is not working, that the Canadian public does not think it is working and that we need to fix it and we need to fix it now.

Bill C-51 was an ideal opportunity to do just that. Instead what see is another effort to nibble around the edges of serious problems, problems that range from child prostitution, as my colleague has mentioned, to issues relating to sentencing. The opportunity existed and, once again, the government let it slip through its fingers.

I will go through a number of points to provide some constructive solutions that have been around for a long time, solutions that the government would be wise to adopt as they are solutions that have been adopted and pushed forth by members from Surrey North to Moncton and members from all political parties. The government would find widespread agreement if it was to take these constructive solutions and adopt them tomorrow.

We have to look at crime in the context of resources. We have a certain amount of money. The money is limited and the demands on that money are rather extreme.

These are some examples of resources not being available to fit the demand. Many criminals, as my colleague mentioned, are being let out of jail early. Criminals have been sentenced but are not doing any time. The RCMP had to close down its training facility. The public is not served well by this.

If justice is going to serve the public well we have to implement cost effective programs. Perhaps the first thing that we can do is address the issue of crime prevention. Nowhere in this bill is that mentioned, yet the statistics and the data conclusively demonstrate that crime prevention is not only effective if done well, it is also cost effective. For every dollar that is invested there is a $7 saving.

In our country today the cost of crime is roughly $46 billion, yet we spend a little over $15 million on crime prevention each year. Contrast that with countries like Belgium, which spends $130 million on crime prevention, and Great Britain, which spends a few million dollars and the result has been a 35% drop in crime.

The cost to incarcerate a young offender is between $80,000 and $90,000. The cost for an adult can be anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000 per year. Experiments from Ypsilanti, Michigan to the Hawaii head start program to the Moncton head start program have shown that one dollar invested saves $7 per person.

We can no longer afford to give mere lip service to this issue. We must act.

We could take the best of the three programs. If we took the best of the program in Moncton, the best of the program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which is the prairie preschool program, and the best of the Hawaii head start program, in front of us would lie a plan.

Then we could bring together the medical community. All women have to go through the medical system before they give birth. We could use the nurses and the physicians to identify families at risk. If we did that we could address important things such as fetal alcohol syndrome which is the single leading cause of preventable birth defects in this country.

If we look at those who are prison, there is an extraordinarily high number of individuals in jails who have been dehabilitated by fetal alcohol syndrome. This irreversibly damages a person's brain. They do not have the ability to integrate, learn and communicate with other people. It impairs their ability to act in an integrated way with society. It causes extreme frustration for children and can manifest later on in criminal behaviour, conduct disorders or worse. It is preventable, but we have to start at time zero. Head start provides that.

The Hawaiian head start program used trained volunteers. This is important because we could use women who have had their children, who are responsible parents and who can provide their expertise. It is an extremely important way in which a community could build ties. They could use this pool of experienced individuals to support people who need help.

What was the outcome of the Hawaii program? There was a 99% reduction in child abuse rates because of the trained volunteers who worked with families at risk. There is no other program that I am aware of which provided this extraordinary benefit to children and families.

The emphasis is on working with parents. The emphasis is on teaching parents the basics of appropriate discipline, setting boundaries, proper nutrition, love, care and compassion, the effects of abuse on children and how to prevent that within the context of the family. These may seem very basic and simple, but they are essential if children are to be psychologically stable children, adolescents and eventually productive adults in our society.

The Moncton program started with children early on. The key was that it used parents in conjunction with the school. The bottom line was that it turned parents who were having difficulties into good parents.

The outcome was extraordinary. It has been shown that there was roughly a $30,000 saving for every child. These programs showed a 50% reduction in teen pregancies. There was a 60% reduction in criminal behaviour and incarceration.

Not only do these programs make sense economically, they make sense from a humanitarian perspective and they have been proven to work.

The cost of justice in our country today is roughly $46 billion per year. The amount we spend on crime prevention is approximately $15 million. We need a national program. We need to use it within the context of the resources that we have today.

The Minister of Justice can take a leadership role. She can work with her counterparts in human resources development and in health to convene a meeting as soon as possible in Ottawa with her provincial counterparts. They could determine and assess what works in the provinces. They could keep what works and remove what does not. They could take poorly used resources and put them into something that works. If we use the existing resources of the medical community, trained volunteers, and a similar program to the Moncton head start program we would save this country millions of dollars.

More important, it would save a lot of people's lives both in victims and in potential perpetrators. The stats are there. The facts are there. The government needs to show the leadership to do this.

In May I had a private member's bill calling for a national head start program that was adopted by the House. This program, based on work done by members across party lines and the National Crime Prevention Council which was brought to bear as a result of an edict from the House in 1994, shows very clearly that the House will support a national head start program using existing resources.

We just need the political will from the ministers to do this. I know the ministers will find support from across party lines to do this. Alone we managed to get four provinces on side to support the national head start program. All the minister has to do is call together the rest of them and half the work is already done for her. She can do it.

If there is one legacy that the government can leave that is positive right now it is to enact this program for the future of our country, in particular for the future of the children of today and tomorrow.

I will deal with some issues that have not perhaps been dealt with. We are talking about drugs. Again, this bill could have dealt with the issue of drugs. There are some important projects that have been done that can effectively reduce the serious drug problems we have. In Vancouver we have hundreds of people overdosing and dying every year as a result of the drug problem. Children are taking drugs.

We can look at existing programs that have worked. Let us look at the Geneva experiment. After the needle experiment that failed in Geneva in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it rethought what it could do. The Geneva experiment basically legalized drugs. It was an abysmal failure but now it has taken hard drugs, particularly narcotics such as heroine, and given hard core addicts a dosage of heroine a certain number of times every day at set times. The quid pro quo on this is that individual has to come in and participate in drug rehabilitation programs, skills training. The outcome has been remarkable.

There has been a 50% reduction in hard core drug abusers who have been off drugs for at least a year. This is a recent program and so therefore we do not have much beyond that to look at. The preliminary results are encouraging. No other program in the world has worked so effectively to reduce drug abuse among hard core drug addicts.

The savings were also remarkable because there was at least a 65% reduction in crime rates among this population of individuals. Imagine if the minister were to speak to her counterparts in British Columbia and other provinces to at least adopt this in a trial program in Canada. We know what we are doing now does not work.

On the other side of the coin with respect to those people who are pushing drugs, we need to have heavier penalties. Right now, as my colleague from West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast mentioned, individuals are serving a third or a sixth of their sentence and being paroled. That demonstrates to criminals that there is little or no penalty at all.

My colleague from Surrey North has worked long and hard on this and many other issues of justice. He needs to be listened to by members opposite because he has spoken so eloquently and from a great deal of personal experience.

We need to look at projects that have worked. We do not need to reinvent the wheel but we need to look at projects that have worked, to adopt them at least on pilot projects here at home and look at the international experience on these. With respect to pushing and trafficking, these issues have to be dealt with with the full force of the law.

We also want to address the issue of child prostitution. The government has an opportunity to hit those people for abusing children in one of the most egregious fashions possible. This is not child prostitution. This is rape and pedophelia, pure and simple.

These individuals need to be hit with the full force of the law and this does not mean getting off with a third of their sentence. This means being sentenced hard and being sentenced with the full force of the law. Programs need to be put in place to help child prostitutes get out of that situation and move into a life where they are not subjected to abuse that we cannot possibly imagine.

On the issue of restorative justice and shaming procedures, members across the way and in this party have articulated experiments that have been done in some pilot projects across the country. This can be applied to take the financial and economic load off our justice system in a very important way. It can provide for effective penalties that have proven in certain non-violent populations, in particular for juveniles to ensure that they will not engage in recidivistic behaviour. They would benefit as, most important, the victims would benefit by getting some retribution for the crimes that have been meted out to them.

As the Vancouver city police chief mentioned in his speech, the victims do not find they are being supported by the system because the justice system, largely because of financial reasons, is unable to mete out the penalties that are required for individuals who are committing atrocious crime.

In effect what we are often doing is lumping the violent with the non-violent, the inveterate criminal with the first time offender all into the same bunch. Many are being tossed out together with little retribution as part of the justice system.

We need to divide up these two populations as and make sure those people who are the inveterate criminals, the violent offenders, the rapists, the murderers and the child abusers, are put behind bars and will receive the full force of the law and of course engage in the appropriate rehabilitation.

Those people who are non-violent or first time offenders, juveniles in particular, can engage in issues such as restorative justice which in British Columbia, for example, has proven to be highly effective not only by keeping people out of jail but, most important, by decreasing the recidivism rate and ensuring that victims receive some retribution for the crimes that have been meted out to them.

On the issue of victims rights the government had another opportunity to pursue and adopt solutions that the Reform Party has been pushing for for a long time, to make sure victims have an important role to play in the justice system. Right now, although victims represent half the situation in crimes, they play a very small role in what happens.

It is a slap in the face to those who have been violated, sometimes in horrendous ways, that they are second class citizens within our justice system. They are not treated as the important persons they should be within the justice system which should first be seeking to protect them, provide retribution to them, provide restoration to them and provide help to them.

There are many cases where the perpetrator has been convicted and receives all kinds of help. Yet the victims are left dangling in the breeze to fend for themselves. What a sad situation if one knows those individuals or those families and the pain and suffering they have to endure.

There is much that can be done within our justice system. There is little that has been done with respect to Bill C-51. Instead of dealing with issues such as whether we should remove the prohibition on dice and gambling on cruise ships, whether we can use wiretaps in the case of certain crimes and whether we remove sentencing from one sixth to one third of a sentence, the justice system and the members responsible on the other side should have used existing solutions and adopted them.

We in the House have a responsibility to the people who elected us. We have a responsibility not to nibble around the edges of problems but to take those problems in both hands and find the best solutions we can, the most pragmatic solutions, solutions that have worked not only in Canada but around the world, solutions that are cost effective and do the job and adopt those solutions here if only in pilot projects. Why wait to dot the i s and cross the t s? Why not implement those programs in Canada? Then we can see whether they will work.

We must have the courage to act. The continued failure of the House to act in a courageous manner, to deal with these problems in a substantive way rather than in a superficial way is one of the failings we as members from across party lines have seen over the last five years.

This is not rocket science. We can do it. We can improve the justice system. We can effect important constructive solutions to make the streets safer for all Canadians now and in the future. Above all, we can adopt programs to prevent crime.

[Criminal Code, October 22nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-251. I give my encouragement, thanks and admiration to the member for Mississauga East who has worked so hard to bring this bill to the forefront. If we could clap today I am sure we would because she has truly done a tremendous job on something that is going to bring enormous justice to the Canadian people. It will improve our justice system and make our streets safer.

The member is addressing an issue that goes to the worst, most predatorial of all individuals, the violent offender, the murderer, the rapist. The member is introducing a bill that allows for consecutive sentencing, not concurrent sentencing, for individuals who have proven to be a danger to society, who have proven to have violated the fundamental rights of another individual by committing the most atrocious violations through murder or rape.

The Canadian public does not find it acceptable that somebody who commits multiple rapes or murders can only receive one sentence or sentences which run concurrently. It is absolutely unbelievable that only 13% of child molesters, who are often multiple repeat offenders, and 30% of individuals who commit sexual assaults receive a sentence of two years or more. Bear in mind that individuals who receive any sentence can receive parole after serving only one-sixth of their sentence. They can be out on the street after serving only a few months for committing a violation against an individual. The innocent individual will have to live with the violation for the rest of their life. Bill C-251 addresses the root of this problem and provides a constructive outlet for keeping the streets of our country safe.

I would caution the government to make sure that this bill does not languish in committee. All too often private members' bills go to committee and the government blocks them. It prevents those bills from ever reaching third reading and becoming law.

It would be an absolute travesty if this were to happen to Bill C-251. It would be an enormous problem and would do a huge injustice to the hard work by one member of parliament, the member for Mississauga East. She has done so much work for 166 members in the House to arrive at this level of support for the bill. For 166 members to support the bill and for the bill to go to the committee to sit there and languish would be a huge problem. We will be watching the government and government leaders on the other side very carefully to make sure this never happens.

This issue also illustrates a larger problem with respect to Private Members' Business. I know that the House leader, the government whip and all other members opposite who have the power to change it are very interested in constructive solutions to making sure that Private Members' Business is a more lively part of the House.

Private Members' Business is one of the few opportunities for members of parliament to exercise ideas in the House. If the government continues to prevent it from being a useful tool it would violate the very basics of democracy. It would violate the ability of MPs to represent their constituents. It would violate the ability of the Canadian public to be represented in the House.

The government House leader was very vocal and provided many constructive suggestions when he was in opposition. He published a wonderful document along with Mr. Dingwall and a number of other people in 1992 which provided incredibly constructive suggestions on how to improve Private Members' Business.

I know the government House Leader is listening intently to me. I would encourage him to take the words he penned with his own hand in the wonderful document to reform Private Members' Business and make the House more democratic and more responsive to the needs of the backbenchers and the public. I encourage him to pull out that wonderful document, come to the House within the next two months and institute it.