Mr. Speaker, I know the previous member who asked the question was looking for an answer and the answer he received was maybe. He did not receive a definite yes or no.
I want to make some comments on the member's speech and draw his attention to comments by Newt Gingrich and Patrick Nolan on January 7, 2011 in the United States. They have come around to the way of thinking of people here in the NDP and the Bloc whereby we look at dealing with issues of crime and best practices and look to jurisdictions that have successful programs.
For example, being from Manitoba, the member knows that the Manitoba government has been successful in reducing auto theft by 80%. The Manitoba government brought in legislation dealing with the proceeds of crime and has seized 21 houses, starting with the Hells Angels gang house. Those houses are worth about $9 million to the treasury.
Those are things that work. We need to strip away the ideology. The Conservative government is basically following the Ronald Reagan solution of “three strikes and you're out”, filling up American prisons and yet the crime rate has not gone down. Right wing thinkers like Newt Gingrich have come around to our way of thinking saying that the U.S. needs to be smart on crime and that it needs to develop programs that actually work.
It does not matter what jurisdiction is implementing the programs or whether a right wing or left wing government that is implementing the programs, we need to know where it works. If a program works in Quebec, and many programs do, then we should be looking to Quebec as an example of implementation. If a program is working well in Manitoba, we should be looking at Manitoba. We should not be taking the Conservative government's ideological approach of saying that it does not fit within its ideology, that it wants to go back to Ronald Reagan's days and say that “three strikes and you're out” is the way to do it. We have had 25 years of that and we have not had good results to show for it.
The American system is bankrupting itself. Some of the states are in difficult economic times now and have to admit that they were wrong in the first place and are now letting people out of prisons. The Americans should have developed a rehabilitative approach to dealing with drug issues and so on as opposed to putting people in jail for 20 or 30 years.