Mr. Speaker, on the heels of what I consider to be a fine speech indeed, I want to thank my colleague from Davenport for his attention to this matter. I know he will listen attentively to what I have to say.
I want to start by talking about what I feel is one of the essential ingredients for crime prevention: programs that encourage our youth to get more involved in communities and in programs that allow them to help build communities. I have witnessed this first-hand. Whether they are below the age of 18 or between the ages of 10 and 15, there are some excellent programs for them. They encourage youth to get involved in community cleanup, activism, and certain issues that are important to them and to the entire community.
I represent a riding in Newfoundland and Labrador that encompasses 191 towns. One can well imagine that the culture and activism in the region creates quite a tapestry of individualism and community spirit. The programs help prevent crime and sickness. There are many different community groups that want that one common goal at the end, which is to raise awareness of crime and make our communities safer.
This bill is not so much about crime prevention. The title of the bill is An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. As most of us know, a lot of the bills regarding incarceration and imprisonment involve conditions upon their release.
There have been several renditions of this. There were two bills prior to this one that, following the prorogation of last winter, have been combined in one bill. Before I get into the gist of this, I would like to say there are many components of the bill that should be supported by all of us in the House, because they go much further toward protecting our society.
A lot of the common themes and recommendations that came from the 2007 road map were premised on a hypothetical profile of Canadian offenders. This came from the Conservative ranks starting in 2007. Much of it deals with the imprisonment of dangerous offenders and creating new rules upon their release. There has been significant debate on putting dangerous offenders in prison for first-time offences. I have enjoyed the debate in the House. I wish the government had engaged in the debate a little more. But in the talking points we received there have been some valid arguments.
One of the issues comes down to the dangerous offender. It almost seems as if we have elevated the debate to a point where the offenders have taken on a new character. It is as if the offender has become a certain type, an individual different from how he was perceived before 2005-06, when the Conservative government was elected.
It leads me to think that we should be somewhat nervous about this attitude. It is almost as though a mind-shift has taken over the headlines of newspapers, the media in general, whether electronic or print. Sometimes we neglect to go beneath the headlines and dig deeper into individual circumstances.
Many people in my riding read the news of the day. It simply states, at the very beginning, the name of the offence, what happened and a headline saying that somebody did this. I do not want to go into details because I do not want to mention any particular case. However, what happens is that we have this visceral reaction against the people who have perpetrated these particular crimes. I am not separate from that. I, too, read some of these headlines and wonder how some people can bring themselves to commit a crime that is so drastic.
One of the questions we seldom ask and should be asking when we get caught up in these headlines is what brings a person to a level of desperation that compels the person to do this. We need to ask what the circumstance is of the particular individual prior to the crime to push the person into behaving in such a manner. I do not think these words would say to someone that they are getting away with crime.
However, the problem with some of these talking points and headlines, and locking people up and throwing away the key type of attitude leads us to believe that there is nothing more than just that. It is this shallow attempt to look at crime legislation, Unfortunately, what we forget, which is what I returned to a the beginning of my speech, is the crime prevention program that dismissed that crime in the first place. The person who committed that most violent of offences, if circumstances had dictated, if the community had engaged that person at the very beginning of a turn for the worse, then could we not have avoided that situation? It is the type of situation we cannot quantify. That is the problem with the debates that we have here within this particular chamber. We need to dig deeper into the crime prevention side.
I am voting for the bill at second reading because I know there are people who are dangerous offenders and because there was no level of community engagement at the beginning that could have avoided the particular crime. I get that and I think almost everybody in this House gets the same message. We have no problem with taking this to the next round and sending it to committee. I understand about tightening some of the rules and putting people back into society after serving time. However, the problem is that we have only skimmed the surface of what is a complete package to bring crime rates down.
Crime rates have dropped over the past 15 to 20 years, although I would not say dramatically. Each day when I see the news, I can guarantee that at any given moment, on any particular radio station's website, 40% of the news deals with events that happened in the last 24 hours and names are released. What is in a name? What is in the circumstance is what we must look at. Unfortunately, however, when we try to bring some semblance of mature debate in this House about crime prevention, what bothers me the most is that we do not give it the attention that we should and, unfortunately, that does not lead to a wholesome debate.
Yes, I will support sending the bill to committee for a very important reason. This would further the debate for crime prevention. The prison system across the country is about to get a tremendous amount of financial pressure. How will we address this in light of the fact that we have a tremendous deficit? We need to make an agenda of items like health care and pension reform in light of the fact that we also have new expenditures in the prison system.
One of the things I want to address, which I hope the committee addresses once it receives the bill, is the road plan for people to receive the resources by which they can put themselves back into society in a different state of mind than when they first entered. Where are the resources by which prisoners can help themselves to get back into society the way that we think they should be engaged back into society?
