Thank you, sir.
Thank you for allowing me to speak here today.
I am John Edmunds. I am the national president of the Union of Solicitor General Employees. I represent the people who work on the farms to train the offenders.
I can sit here today and talk about what the farm program does, but through my normal course of action in a day I'm not getting the answers that I require. The government has come out with a very public statement saying they're losing $4.1 million a year on the farms, yet I stood at 269 Laurier in September as part of a 2,000-person protest asking the then Minister of Public Safety to produce said document, to produce an audit to explain where the money is going.
Right now there are just too many questions that remain unanswered for me as a representative of over 15,000 people inside the federal system, those people being in law enforcement essentially. Everybody is focusing on the loss, but I'm trying to find out what the actual cost of the farm is and what the loss of the farm will cost the Correctional Service of Canada.
If we look at something as simple as a 250-millilitre container of milk that is produced for anywhere between 23¢ and 28¢ and sold to the government, what is that going to cost us when we go to the free market to try to buy these products? What's going to happen when the farms are no longer there and we have a riot at one of our institutions? At this point in time we can change our orders and we can pick up what we need and get it shipped.
I want this committee somehow to please stand up and ask the questions that I can't get answers to.
It's being said that the training people receive on the farms is not relevant in this day and age, and it's been quoted here that the farms are from the 1950s. Up to about a couple of years ago, I believe $500,000 was reinvested in the Bowden Institution. Where's that good government spending? We're putting money into these institutions, into the farms, but now, with a stroke of the pen, we're losing them.
The sunset on this is winding down fairly quickly. There are two herds that I believe are going to be auctioned off in June and July, one in Winnipeg and one in Kingston. These herds have been around for years. The bloodlines are of value. They're going to be split up and sold, one cow at a time.
Where do we go from here? I'm not going to say that I believe we're going to have super prisons on the grounds in Kingston or on any other farm site, but I do believe that shutting down the farms is a grave mistake. The rest of the civilized world is looking at Canada. We even have places in the United States--and I'm not a big supporter of corrections in the United States, but even they have expanded a farm program to go green, and they're actually doing what the sign at Frontenac Institution says, which is “paying our way through agriculture”.
I think these are the things we're missing, and I'm hoping this committee can get answers, because it's very frustrating to ask the questions and not get the answers. Every time you ask the question, the answer is that it's a sensitive cabinet document.
This is a committee of cabinet. This is a committee of the House of Commons. I'm hoping that you people here have the authority and the ability to, one, stop the closure of the farms, and two, ask the questions and get the documents out to the public.