Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's actually a shame that we have three such interesting topics and such very little time to deal with them. I appreciate you trying to truncate them within our timeframe here, but I'm really tempted to get lured into the points that Chris was making, because if I can say one thing, if anybody could demonstrate that more time in prison equalled less crime, we might want to go for that. But if you look at the United States, with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, you would think all of their streets would be crime-free.
From a public policy point of view, I think we very much need to know the real cost of some of these tough-on-crime bills, and this is the first time we're getting to it. I think if the public knew the whole cost, the real cost of stacking up even more people in prison, they might be more inclined to dedicate some of those billions of dollars to the other end of crime prevention policies, etc. They may decide that it would be money better spent. Virtually all of these crime bills have a mandatory minimum sentence built into them, and we'll be stacking up prisoners like cord wood, unless they want to start building a lot more prisons.
One of the things that's crossed our minds, and I say this to share this with you, is that they seem to be laying the foundation for dealing with some of their fiscal problems through ideological lines, privatization. They could call in Onex or Haliburton to start building private prisons, like they do in the United States. If it costs $147,000 to keep a prisoner in prison here, what if Onex or Haliburton came up and said they could house a prisoner for $120,000 a year? I think they'd be tempted to go that route.
It's one of our concerns that's in a number of the areas you've mentioned, the looming fiscal crunch that's on the horizon that you cited for us. We've squandered the fiscal capacity to be able to cope with some of those very real demographic problems of aging baby boomers, etc., through some of the corporate tax cuts and things that still remain on the books.
I know I'm wandering a little bit here.