First of all, we are here to talk about costs and budgets. We have sent this letter to leaders of the opposition as well, so this is not a politically partisan issue for us. It's about the general direction of all the legislation that's going in the direction of putting more people in prison, and the cost of that, which has really reached a tipping point.
We've known for a long time that this is a bad investment of public funds. I draw your attention to what we have distributed, “Towards a smarter sentencing policy”, which you should have in both languages. We've known for a long time what works better, and how it costs less, and how it helps victims better as well.
As we know from the U.S. experience, and I know that you know this, they've had a disaster down there in pursuing the same policy of more people in prison. They have found that they really have to change direction at this point.
What I think many people don't know is the very latest data that has come out through studies in the States from the Pew foundation. I would like to talk about two things related to that. They have done a very careful study of the data related to the impact of a sentence of incarceration--down the road, for generations to come--on the people who have suffered that and their communities. They have very specific data that show a number of things: that there are lifelong impacts on the economic stability of those people and their families and their children; that with their massive incarceration policy, there's a huge increase in children who have a parent behind bars; and that this affects their own economic survival during that time but also lifelong. When the father comes out of prison and cannot take care of the family--a great percentage of them were supporting the family before--who has to pay? It is the community and society who have to pay.
We also know from their data--and this is specific data, not rhetoric or ideology--that these children are significantly more likely than other children to be expelled or suspended from school. Education and parental income are well known to be strong indicators of children's future economic stability. The data show how entire communities, because often this is concentrated in some communities, are suffering the effects of this kind of policy with a lower standard of living, lower economic development, and poor education and health care services. It's creating the very conditions that breed more crime.
We know this will be true for Canada as well. We already know this from the data, but I don't think we're paying enough attention to this.
We know also that this is not just a question of federal costs. The provisions you're approving are going to lead to a great deal more cost to be carried by provinces. There will be a lot more court time, and longer trials. More personnel will have to be hired, with more people in pretrial detention. I won't go into it in detail, because you're pressed for time, but you should find out about that.
Canadians don't just care about what the federal government is going to pay; we care about what the downside effect is going to be on our provinces, on our communities, on the citizens of our cities. We care about the costs we have to bear because of all the services we need to provide around that, and about what it does to the relationships in our communities and the causes of more crime.
We know that it's affecting the most vulnerable people in our society. We know that it's affecting against certain racial groups and people with certain handicaps and difficulties. As the Ottawa Citizen recently noted in an editorial, “If any politician were to say that poor and aboriginal Canadians should spend extra time in jail when charged with crimes, that politician would be vilified.” Yet that in effect is how our system of justice works now. And if you don't know that, you should find that out, because statistically that is true in terms of pretrial detention and at many other levels as well.
We know that a majority of Canadians do not want this, contrary to what we're being told more impressionistically. The latest poll shows that 58% against 36% of Canadians prefer prevention programs and education rather than tougher punishment as a way to combat crime.
We don't understand how you can spend all this public money without regard for the costs that we're all going to pay down the line. We are informing our constituency about this, and many others are encouraging the people they're in contact with to find out more about this. We're still at a point where we could stop it, and it's a tragedy that we're not paying attention to that.
I'm finished.