Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Prince Albert for bringing this forward. I know that he is very sincere, having worked in Parliament with him for a number of years on this issue.

I will get into some reasons a little later on as to why I do not think this bill is the response that is needed, but I want to start off by talking about British Columbia and the British Columbia difference. We have been talking a lot about car thefts. Why is it that in British Columbia there has been an opposite result from what we are seeing in other parts of the country?

I would like to thank the integrated crime prevention services for their work, the New Westminster Police, the Burnaby RCMP and a wide variety of law enforcement from across the Lower Mainland and British Columbia who worked very carefully with the B.C. NDP government to ensure the rapid increase we have seen in so many parts of the country is not reflected in B.C. Gangs have attempted to come to British Columbia and have been pushed back and arrested. That is fundamentally important.

The bait car program, the fact that we have integrated law enforcement on this issue and the anti-gang strategy that the British Columbia government has been a very strong proponent of have all made a difference. We need to make sure that we continue to act to ensure that we are not subjected to the same rise in auto thefts in British Columbia that we have seen elsewhere in the country.

I want to come back to the rest of the country. Particularly in provinces with a Conservative government, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of auto thefts. This is very unfortunate. Having bait car programs and integrated law enforcement can help make a difference, but the federal government has a responsibility. Where I think the federal government can play a role is in providing supports so that the provinces do the right thing, as British Columbia has done. I think we will see the new Manitoba NDP government take similar types of action to help bring down the crime rate.

The reality is that we need to ensure we have an anti-gang strategy, and that includes ensuring that money laundering is not present. As members know, the NDP has long been an advocate of a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry that ensures criminals cannot hide behind numbered companies. This is something I brought forward under the Harper government and was rejected by the Conservatives at the time. The Liberals have moved very slowly on this, but it is absolutely essential.

Law enforcement knows about this and so do so many Canadians. Having a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry would ensure that people cannot hide behind numbered companies. An anti-gang strategy and ensuring criminals cannot launder money are absolutely fundamentally important. Canada is known as the snow-washing capital of the world because there have been successive Conservative and Liberal governments that have not taken action on this. An NDP government would make sure that we no longer have criminals hiding behind numbered companies.

I also want to talk about the importance of having the auto industry and auto manufacturers take action to ensure there are new measures to improve security features in automobiles. This made a big difference about 10 years ago. There was an evolution in technology 12 years ago, and we started to see the high rates of auto theft come down. There needs to be a similar requirement that auto manufacturers improve security features. That would make a fundamental difference.

We also need to ensure that we are funding programs that prevent youth from reoffending. This is where the funding cuts to Canadian crime prevention centres, including the B.C. crime prevention centre, are so regrettable. This happened under the Harper government. The Liberal government did not restore that funding. It is critical to have crime prevention programs in place to ensure that we can crack down on crime before it occurs. Part of that is funding programs for youth at risk to ensure that they are not subject to the kind of recruitment that, sadly, we are seeing in eastern Canada right now and on the Prairies.

There was a very regrettable decision by the Harper government to slash CBSA officials. We lost over 1,200 positions. This was over a dozen years ago and we are still bearing the consequences of this. When we talk to people in port authorities across the country, this is something that continues to be a problem. We do not have border enforcement in place, because of the cuts that occurred under the Conservatives and have been continued by the Liberals, to ensure that, if an automobile is stolen, it cannot be exported. This is a fundamental issue that has to be dealt with by the current government; it cannot be ignored.

We need all these measures that I am talking about: comprehensive crime prevention, an anti-gang strategy, and ensuring that criminals can no longer hide behind numbered companies and money launder through a publicly accessible beneficial ownership registry. We need to ensure that CBSA is staffed up so that the border agents who work so hard on our behalf have the resources to do the job they are supposed to do and that successive federal governments have not let them do because of chronic underfunding. We need to force auto manufacturers to actually put security measures into place. Often, we are talking about an automobile that costs $50,000 or $60,000 that is protected by a relatively cheap security system of a couple hundred bucks. This is not an appropriate way of ensuring that we can bring down the level of auto theft. All of these measures are really important.

I wanted to come back to the member for Prince Albert and his bill. Again, I do not, in any way, question his sincerity; it is quite the contrary. I know he is somebody who upholds the principle of effective representation. However, he has presented a bill that really does one thing: It re-establishes mandatory minimums. The reality is that, as we have seen and when speaking with Crown prosecutors we get this sense, if what we are trying to do is to have a comprehensive strategy to crack down on criminal gangs, then we need to make sure we get the gang leaders.

The way to ensure that is to be able to talk to the lower levels in the criminal organizations. The way to ensure that co-operation is not through mandatory minimums. There is nothing to deal with. The mandatory minimums mean that the hands of prosecutors and law enforcement are tied in terms of getting the co-operation that is so vital to getting to the leadership of these gangs. That is what we need to see right across the country, and mandatory minimums stop that. It is actually counterproductive in terms of how we can crack down on the auto theft that, outside of British Columbia, is becoming epidemic.

We will not be supporting the bill at second reading, though I thank the member for bringing this forward. I believe this is an important debate. The NDP believes in the kind of comprehensive strategy that we have seen work in British Columbia. Though auto theft is still high, it is lower than in the rest of the country. That is because of the comprehensive approach of integrated law enforcement, ensuring an anti-gang strategy, ensuring that we are moving to crack down on money laundering and ensuring that we are staffing up CBSA officials, so we can stop the exports of stolen automobiles at the border points that we are simply under-resourcing right now.

We need to ensure that automobile manufactures have a responsibility to improve the security features of the vehicles we spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy. These are all actions that can make a huge difference in bringing down the auto theft rates, which are far too high in the rest of Canada. We need to bring them down to what we are seeing in B.C. All these measures taken together have had a noticeable impact and have stopped it. We will continue to work hard to make sure that they are maintained to stop the chronic rise in auto theft we are seeing in the rest of the country.

Peter Julian

$568,566.00