In our brief, we emphasize a certain contradiction between an alleged pro-victim stance and certain budget choices. We refer to the statement by Mr. Sullivan, the previous Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime, when he left his position. He emphasized that victim support budgets had been cut. Those cuts amounted to 41% in the case of subsidies and 34% for contributions to programs for victims.
On the one hand, the government says it's pro-victim. There's currently a lot of publicity on TV, on posters and so on stating that the government is in favour of victims. In actual fact, however, the government is cutting funding to victim support programs, whereas that's where the problem lies in our criminal justice system. The government is making cuts to programs for victims and preparing to spend billions of dollars to build correctional facilities in a situation where crime is falling in Canada, which the government refuses to recognize. They're preparing to invest billions of dollars; that's a dead loss.