Recently in my community, two innocent lives were targeted by senseless violence. A 16-year-old youth waiting for the bus to take him to a volleyball game was indiscriminately shot in the face. He suffered critical, life-altering injuries.

Nearby, on the very next day, Mr. Adu Boakye, a 39-year-old man, was shot multiple times and killed. Speaker, he came from Ghana just three months ago to build a better life here and support his family back home. Now he’s gone, leaving behind a grieving wife and four children. Two completely innocent lives targeted, and for what? For nothing—absolutely nothing.

These senseless acts destroy lives and families but also rob communities of their feelings of safety. The Ghanaian community held a vigil for them this past weekend, and our faith community and Toronto police led a prayer walk yesterday. They did it to bring community together, to comfort one another, to mourn. They did it to begin restoring feelings of safety and to build hope for the future, and I thank them deeply.

Collectively, we must all do more to stop this senseless violence. We must get these guns off the street and stop them at our borders. We must continue to strengthen and build the relationship between communities and our police who are here to serve and protect us. We must support victims of crime. And we must invest more to find out and intervene when a person begins to gather that darkness within themselves to cause such terrible harm. We must find them and change the course of their lives before they lose their humanity and take the lives of others.

Speaker, there is hope and there are solutions, and it is our obligation, our moral imperative, to deliver them.

Thank you to the member for an important question. Just before I get to it, I just want to say hi to Bill and recognize again his presence here. And I do want to say one thing because this ties into what I had said before. When he was minister and I was critic at the time, on a particular bill that came forward—and I don’t agree where it ended up—there was some conversation, there was some consultation at the time. It was rare under the last session, and I’m hoping that changes under this session. So I do acknowledge him on that as minister.

I want to state for the record that jury selection is important. It has to be more diverse. We’re opening up acts. We have the possibility to make changes. I know the government has many lawyers and people that come from that background here. I think you know it’s the right thing to do. Let’s do it. Let’s make sure that access to juries is more accessible and more diverse and reflective of our population. Thank you for that question.

When it comes to carbon sequestration, I will rely on the experts’ opinions. But I had mentioned this one thing—and again, it was mentioned by another colleague of mine: The simplest way to develop a carbon sink is to plant trees, is to protect environmentally protected lands. We have so many green spaces that this government is so eager—environmentally protected green spaces, again, under the conservation authorities that were established by previous Conservative governments. If you really want to provide a sink for carbon, plant trees, protect environmentally sensitive green spaces. That is a non-controversial, important way forward.

Again, it’s very important to highlight this issue. Why do we bring it up? Since the government is opening up certain acts, this is something that is very key and very important. We call on members of the public to come and serve on a jury, and sometimes a trial is going to take longer for two weeks. If you’re not compensating them for that, how can they simply do their job to help as a juror? It’s not easy. I think this is something that you should take back to your ministries; it’s something that you should work on—and I think you will find the support of the official opposition. I think it’s the right way forward. Let’s compensate those jurors, and let’s make it more accessible.