Thank you.
You raise an important question, one that is difficult to answer in a short period of time. I will do my best.
When you look at prisons and you see, in our case, disproportionate numbers of aboriginal people, that can mean that aboriginal people are perhaps committing more crimes than non-aboriginal people. It also might mean that police are focusing their attention more on aboriginal communities than on non-aboriginal communities. That's certainly the case in a number of jurisdictions, in a number of locations in Canada. It's not that, perhaps, aboriginal people aren't committing crimes. Non-aboriginal people are committing crimes as well, yet those crimes are not being investigated to the same extent.
The other issue, with regard to overrepresentation, relates to the type of sentences people get. For example, I looked recently at the Youth Criminal Justice Act in Ontario. When I looked at people who were charged, dividing aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, non-aboriginal people charged with the same offence as aboriginal people tended to get the non-jail option and aboriginal people tended to get the jail option. So those are some of the issues that arise when we look at overrepresentation.
It's interesting that in Gladue, the Supreme Court of Canada called aboriginal overrepresentation a crisis in the Canadian criminal justice system. The crisis wasn't that aboriginal people were necessarily doing everything wrong. Obviously, people were committing crimes, but the overrepresentation suggests that there's a crisis because the system is unable to find a response other than jail for aboriginal people who are committing crimes. Because jail has such deleterious effects on people--and as you noted, in some cases people are sent thousands of kilometres away--we have to look at that. What's happening is that our reliance on jail as a first option--increasingly a first option--for aboriginal people is making what is a bad situation even worse.
As for your question about a federal prison in Nunavut, I would simply defer to the people of Nunavut to see whether that's something they want in terms of whether they would like the option of having federal funds in justice spent on building a penitentiary or on community programs. My suspicion, having been to Nunavut a number of years ago, is that they would rather their focus not be on the creation of a penitentiary.