Thank you.
That's why I emphasized at the beginning that I'm not a lawyer qualified to speak on the technical issues. But there are some important policy issues here, and I think that in the discussions or the debates I've read over the past several years dealing with criminal justice, the focus is very narrowly on the Department of Justice and the costs of the correctional service, rather than looking at the larger picture—which Statistics Canada does, and which is where this data came from, so it is very reputable—showing that the costs are much larger.
I put the data in for the Government of Canada expenditures because last fall I testified before the justice committee, and a law professor was testifying, talking about the enormous amount spent by the Government of Canada on jails. Well, we'll spend $1.87 billion this year, 2007, by the Correctional Service. That's nine-tenths of 1% of government expenditure, of the total federal budget. It's two-tenths of 1% of GDP, which is the number you use when you want to do cross-national comparisons. So the amount we spend on security expenditures at the federal government level is trivial. But when you look at the cost of crime to the larger society, it's very large.
This is 2003 data. Unfortunately, I made a mistake and put 2005 in the heading, but it's 2003 data from the Department of Justice and StatsCan. It was estimated at $80 billion. Now, $80 billion is an enormous amount of money, and as I pointed out, it falls disproportionately—and this again is Statistics Canada data—on young people under the age of 30.