Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
This committee generally does have agendas. This committee has been quite good at having agendas at particular meetings. We did have an agenda for this meeting; however, that agenda was taken away by other committee members, so here we are. The work of this committee has been pushed ahead, not because of anything that the Conservatives have done today. It's been by other members of this committee, and that has now delayed the work of this committee.
Going back again to talking about how people are affected both by cost of living and crime, we know that small business is the backbone of this country. Many of us have small businesses in our communities. I have some larger businesses and medium-sized ones, but the vast majority are small businesses, and they include farmers. Farmers are businesses. Many of the orchardists and viticulturists in my area are small businesses. They have seen the increase in their costs absolutely go up, in particular transportation costs.
I'll go back to what I was just talking about, which is the aspect of crime. As I said, this is something that I hear the most about from my residents. I do a lot of different surveys that go out, and I have thousands of people fill out surveys. The two biggest issues that people respond back on have to do with various aspects of cost of living and crime, because it is affecting many people.
I will mention as well, on the point of crime but also with helping people who are suffering from addiction, that I did have a private member's bill that was called the “end the revolving door act”. When you look at addiction and recovery, there's a lot of health care that is provincial, but there are federal elements that we came across. There are some, and one of them has to do with federal penitentiaries.
My private member's bill would have had, for people who were incarcerated federally, that a judge could offer the person, if they were suffering from addiction—and 70% of people who are incarcerated federally suffer from addiction—to have a mental health assessment and then addiction treatment and recovery while they're in the federal penitentiary. This has happened in other jurisdictions. One of the biggest supporters was someone from the United States. This has happened in other areas, and there has really been a lot of success.
What happens is that people go to the federal penitentiary, and they don't deal with their addiction issues. They come out, and then they reoffend, so they're caught in a really bad cycle. While they're there, for however many years, we could offer them treatment and recovery.
Unfortunately, my private member's bill wasn't supported by all members in this House, and it did not pass at second reading. I think it's a real miss. Any time that I talk about this in relation to crime, I do hear huge support from people saying, “Geez, I wish that had passed.” It's not going to solve everything, but it definitely would have helped some people who were going through addiction issues.