Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to a piece of legislation that we actually support. We support the notion and the direction of this legislation, but we are concerned about whether or not this will be resourced. That is going to be the $30 million, $50 million or $100 million question. When it comes time for the Minister of Finance to bring forward a budget, will he bring forward a budget that will put money where the Conservatives' collective mouths are? It is all well and good to talk about witness protection, to talk about protecting victims and to talk about reducing crime in Canada, but unless money is provided to actually do those things, they are not going to happen. To this point, the Conservative government has not shown a willingness to put real money into real crime prevention and getting at the roots of crimes before they actually happen. I class witness protection as partly crime prevention.
Generally, we in the NDP support the direction this legislation is taking. We are pleased that the government listened to our request to expand the witness protection program. It would be expanded to include other items such as organized crime. National security agencies would have access to this program, including national defence, CSIS and so on, so there could be the possibility of witness protection for more than what is currently covered.
We are counting on the government to provide funding. We are going to be paying close attention to the budget, whatever day it happens, whether it is the beginning of March or the end of March, to see if it will put forward the funding required to do what the bill intends to do.
The member for Winnipeg North suggested earlier that I have to come up with figures. We do not have to go much further than last year, when there were 108 requests but only 30 were approved. Not a lot of money was spent last year. It was something like $9 million. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money we spend on crime in this country. That is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money we spend on jails and jets. A tenfold increase in that spending would be good for Canada, for Canadians, for solving crimes, for finding and punishing criminals. We hope and pray that the Conservatives come up with that money.
In Toronto, where I am from, several serious problems of gang violence have gone on for a number of years. While generally violent crime is down across the country, there are still gangs. The Toronto police force has a guns and gangs unit, and it has an organized crime unit that does reconnaissance, that actually hunts down criminals. I have spoken to Toronto police officers and to the superintendent of 12 Division, which is where my riding is. They told me they are looking for the ability to find witnesses. The problem they face is that witnesses will not come forward. Why will they not come forward? It is because they are afraid or in some cases it is because they have taken some oath. In most cases it is because they are terrified that there will be repercussions, that they cannot be protected, that they cannot be sheltered from harm. In the case of organized crime, this legislation would provide the police with the opportunity to offer protection to potential witnesses of violent crime in my city.
I go back to the Danzig shootings of last year where 24 people were shot, two of whom were killed, at a simple neighbourhood barbecue as a result of gang violence. The police have had extreme difficulty in finding people who will come forward and testify. The police know that many people know what happened, but there is a climate of fear and of intimidation and of it not being possible to be protected. The bill might go some way in allowing police forces to offer a sense of security to people, which they cannot offer now, particularly in the case of gang violence and gang-related crime. We suspect there is some measure of gang involvement when 24 people are shot at once and two of them are killed.
In addition, there is a significant-sized Somali population in my riding and in the riding of Etobicoke Centre immediately to the west. That Somali population came here over the course of the last 15 years from a country that was riddled with unrest, that had no effective government. Those people came here as undocumented refugees. They still cannot get documentation and so, in some cases, it is still not possible to completely finalize their status as immigrants to Canada.
That community is terrified of some of what the current Conservative government has done to it since the beginning of the majority government. I am referring of course to the immigration changes that have come from the immigration minister. The mothers of those children are terrified that those children, who have only ever known Canada, as a result of falling into a bad crowd, would not just go to jail but would be deported to a country they have no connection with whatsoever, to Somalia, where it is dangerous just to be, let alone to grow up. These mothers of these boys, and most of them are boys, have pled with me and with the member for Etobicoke Centre to change that law, to fix that law, to fix that big hole that is causing their children to be in such terrible jeopardy.
Yes, it is true they have fallen into some bad habits. “Bad habits” is probably too small a word for it. They have done some seriously bad things. The mothers believe that part of the reason is that they have been abandoned by the system over the course of the last few years.
There was, put in place by the current government when it was a minority, a series of measures aimed at tackling youth violence before they got to gangs, with intervention programs, mediation programs and mentorship programs funded in part by the Minister of Public Safety, to allow community agencies to get at these kids before they joined these gangs and went afoul of the law. There have been tremendous successes in some of those agencies and some of those programs, but they are being cut back. They are being ended.
The answer we get from the Conservative government is that was a three-year program, the three years is up and, therefore, we do not need to do this anymore.
The people running the program know that the program is successful, but they also know that if the government ends the program, the next generation of kids is going to fall off the wagon.Those kids are going to end up in crime, have a propensity to join a gang and are not going to succeed.
In addition, we have had, in my riding anyway, huge cutbacks to the immigrant settlement services that were being provided over the past 10 years, to the point where whole agencies have had to shut their doors. One agency was urged by the ministry, by CIC, to sign a five-year lease. Six months later, after it signed the five-year lease, it had all of its funding cut. Now it is sitting, holding a five-year lease for something it cannot afford to do.
That is the kind of event that is going on in the community now. That is the kind of reality that this community faces. What ends up happening is the kids end up in gangs. The kids do not see hope. They do not see jobs. There are not a heck of a lot of jobs in my riding. There is not a heck of a lot of choice.
One youth said to me, “I can either go work part time at something like McDonald's or some other small retailer for $10.25 an hour and maybe work 20 hours a week and maybe make 200 bucks. Or, in five minutes, I can go on a street corner and make $400 by selling drugs. What choice would you make?”
It was not because he was trying to give me a lesson in morality; he was trying to give me a lesson in economics. These kids cannot afford to live or eat, and they know they do not have access to the good jobs that remain in Canada. Those jobs are disappearing. The industrial heartland of Ontario has been under attack over the past few years. Hundreds of thousands of good-paying industrial jobs have disappeared and been replaced by service sector jobs, at $10 and $12 an hour. No one can feed a family on $10 and $12 an hour.
I am not condoning the selling of drugs. My point is that it becomes very easy and economical for these kids when they are faced with these dire choices to choose a life of crime. We are trying to prevent that. One of the ways we hope to prevent that is by making it more difficult for them to succeed in a life of crime by making it easier for witnesses to come forward. When it is easier for witnesses to come forward—