Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivers remarks at the 6th Annual Gala and Fundraiser for the Canadian Crime Victims Foundation

Thank you. Thank you very much, and thank you, Peter, for that kind introduction, and more importantly of course, for your service to the Government and to our country. As has been said, besides being a strong advocate of the issues that bring us here tonight, Peter also is responsible in our Government for another set of issues that I know is important to all of us and important to many of you, and that is he is the Minister of National Defence, asserting and defending Canada's interests at home and abroad. This is a very important task, one that he is accomplishing with great professionalism, and let me just say, he is not just a colleague and friend, but to repeat what the Wambacks said, Peter is one of the finest citizens of our country, so thank you very much.

My colleague Senator Di Nino, mayors Jackson, Grossi, Emerson and Scarpitti, representatives from regional police forces, Member of Provincial Parliament Frank Klees I believe is here, ladies and gentlemen; first of all, I am very grateful for the opportunity to address this evening's gala. For nearly six years the Canadian Crime Victim Foundation has been providing comfort and support for Canadians in what is for many their greatest hour of need. I'd like to thank its founders, Joe and Lozanne Wamback, for creating a powerful national voice for Canadian men, women and children who fall victim to crime. I couldn't say it any better than Peter said it. The Wamback family -- Joe, Lozanne and Jonathan -- have taken a personal tragedy and turned it into an extremely valuable social movement for the good of this country. They are a remarkable family. Thank you very much for what you've done. I also want to draw your attention tonight to a tenacious survivor who's also seated at the head table and who's helping make a real difference in the lives of others, Misty Cockerill. We'll hear from her a little bit later this evening.

Ladies and gentlemen, I try to get off of Parliament Hill as often as possible to attend functions like this. It helps me to keep in touch with the issues that really matter to Canadians, and one issue I hear about time and time again, whether it's among Canadians old or young, whether it's in the East or West, in English or in French, is unacceptably high levels of crime. Everywhere I go I hear the same refrain: "Prime Minister, please crack down on criminals, get guns, gangs and drugs off our streets, stop behaviour that threatens our property and our persons, make our communities safer." It's a reasonable thing to ask of government. It's one of the most fundamental reasons, maybe the most fundamental reason, the government exists, especially in Canada, a country that was founded on the principle of peace, order and good government. Let us never be misled. The vast majority of Canadians, the vast majority of every demographic in every community in this country live by these principles, but there is a minority who don't get it. Whether they missed the lesson on Canadian civics or picked up the wrong values through bad associations, or just on the most fundamental basic level really don't care about the rights and feelings of other people, they do tremendous damage to our streets, to our communities and to the lives of their fellow citizens. It's one thing that they, the criminals do not get it, but if you don't mind me saying, another part of the problem for the past generation has been those, also a small part of our society, who are not criminals themselves, but who are always making excuses for them, and when they aren't making excuses, they are denying that crime is even a problem: the ivory tower experts, the tut-tutting commentators, the out-of-touch politicians. "Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong," they say. "Crime is not really a problem." I don't know how you say that. I don't know how you tell that to the families of the victims we saw on the screen today. These men, women and children are not statistics. They had families, friends, hopes and dreams, until their lives were taken from them.

Obviously we cannot undo these travesties, nor can we erase the pain and suffering that they cause. But there is something we can do and that we must do, and that is to get serious about tackling crime in this country. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the strongest reasons why our Government was elected in the last federal election, and that has been one of the highest priorities in which we've been acting since taking office, and let me just review those things for you. In the first session of Parliament, we ended house arrest and instituted mandatory jail time for people who commit serious violent crimes. We implemented reforms to broaden the national DNA bank to include a greater range of convicted offenders. We chased down street racers with a new Criminal Code sanction that mandates tough maximum penalties. We allocated new resources to give victims a more effective voice, enhanced travel costs for support for parole hearing appearances, and made the appointment of the country's first Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, Steve Sullivan.

Unfortunately, none of these things proved to be easy. I do have to tell you that this is one of my great disappointments in this minority Parliament, in spite of the fact that in the last election everybody, everyone, every party professed to want to crack down on crime. We have had to fight for weeks or months or longer to get anything passed in this Parliament in terms of tackling crime. So last fall after some of our key justice reforms had been obstructed by the opposition parties for over a year, we packaged them up together in one comprehensive bill and made them a confidence measure. That did the trick, and this bill, the Tackling Violent Crime Act, is now the law of the land. It contains five additional major measures: mandatory prison sentences for criminals who commit crimes with guns, tougher bail rules to make it easier to keep people accused of serious gun crimes off our streets, a higher age of protection --16 years old -- to protect children from sexual predators, new, stronger measures against drunk and drug-impaired driving, and provisions that make it easier to keep the country's most dangerous violent repeat offenders behind bars, where they belong, forever. All I can say to you members in the CCVF and all other groups: keep pushing for these changes. I can tell you from experience that every time the spotlight is off of what we are doing in Parliament, attempts to tackle violent crime cease. Every time public attention returns, legislation begins to move through this Parliament. So keep up the pressure.

Our government's approach, let me assure you, to criminal justice is fundamentally different than our predecessors', and I say it everywhere I go. We believe that the central purpose of a criminal justice system is not the welfare of the criminal. It is the protection of law-abiding citizens and their family.

Of course criminals have rights. We believe those rights must be balanced with responsibilities, and we believe victims have rights too. What we're doing, ladies and gentlemen, is starting to overhaul a system that's been in place. In fact, we're starting to overhaul a system that has been moving in the wrong direction for 30 years. It's a system that has coddled criminals and made our communities less safe, and we are determined to replace it with a system that serves the interests of its law-abiding citizens. Passing the Tackling Violent Crime Act was a significant step toward this goal. Bringing better balance to the appointment of judges was another step.

Examining the function of the corrections system was another, but we have only just begun. There is still a lot of work to be done. Our government has four new anti-crime bills that are currently before the House of Commons. The first proposes expanding mandatory sentencing for serious drug offences, the second addresses the rising tide of identity theft with three new Criminal Code offences, the third takes aim at organized auto theft by making it a crime to alter, destroy or remove a vehicle identification number, and the fourth bill tackles a problem I know is of particular concern to the Foundation and to all Canadians, and that is youth crime. Our predecessors' approach to young offenders, the approach we've been using for some time in this country, has been an unmitigated failure. There is no other way to describe it.

The principles of deterrence and punishment have been all but erased from the youth criminal justice system, and the consequences have been disastrous. A recent Statistics Canada study shows that the rates of violent youth crime have increased 12 percent over the past decade, and a staggering 30 percent since 1991. It also found that drug-related crime among youth has nearly doubled since 1996, and that the number of youth accused of homicide in 2006 reached its highest point since the data was first collected 45 years before. Last fall our government moved to address this escalating problem by introducing some long-needed amendments to the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The aim of bill C-25 is to make it easier to detain accused young offenders who pose a risk to public safety. If passed, it would empower judges to include deterrents and denunciation as principles of sentencing. The intent of these amendments is simple: to hold young lawbreakers responsible for their behaviour and to make them accountable to their victims and to the community. Our Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson is currently reviewing the Youth Criminal Justice Act with an eye to ensuring that sentences reflect the gravity of the offence.

Let me be clear: we are concerned about young people who may be at risk of falling into a life of crime, and we are developing and implementing programs to effectively deal with that. But our Government has no intention of allowing young criminals to avoid punishment and evade responsibility. Anyone who represents a serious threat to public safety should be held fully accountable for their actions, and that will be the next big criminal justice priority on our agenda.

Ladies and gentlemen, we believe that no Canadian should ever be afraid to walk down any street in our country, ever be afraid to walk down the hall of their school, no innocent Canadian bystander should ever be collateral damage in a gang shootout, no Canadian woman should ever fall victim to a paroled serial rapist, and no Canadian family member should ever die in a car accident caused by repeat drunk-drivers or street racers. The idea of peace, order and good government was once our birthright in this country. It can be again. That is our goal, and with the support of Canadians like yourselves and organizations like the Canadian Crime Victim Foundation, we will get there. Thank you and have a wonderful evening.

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