Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let me start by thanking the witnesses.
When you look at the variety of backgrounds from which you come and the variety of perspectives you're offering, it's hard to think of a better case for keeping the prison farms open than the one you've given us here today. I hope all committee members are listening and keeping open minds on the matter before us.
I'll start where we left off in the last meeting, when we had department officials with us. What we found was that they have no statistics whatsoever. They have nothing on rehabilitation, or on recidivism, as an example. They have nothing comparing the prison farm program to other programs to tell us about its relative efficacy.
What we hear today comes from individuals who are coming forward and giving us anecdotal stories about how positive the program is and how well it works. I asked department officials for any examples at all that they could give us to show that this program isn't working. Given that the principal objective of corrections is rehabilitation, you'd think that if they cancel the program, when it's one of the most effective I've ever seen....
I have to say, Mr. Leeman, that it's looking into the eyes of people like you and other inmates that gives me the passion I have for this project, because never before have I seen a program that has had such a dramatic impact upon inmates and upon their rehabilitation.
I'll leave rehabilitation. They have nothing there, and I think the anecdotal case has been made overwhelmingly.
The next point they make concerns employment skills.
To Mr. Perry and Mr. Amey, first I should say that I appreciate the courage of all witnesses here today. I know there was a tremendous amount of pressure not to testify. I know that we asked you to appear today. I am deeply appreciative of that.
Could you talk to the fact that they talk about the number of people who haven't gone directly into agriculture? I've been to the Pittsburgh facility and the Dorchester facility; in fact, I've been to pretty much every prison farm facility in the country. I saw other programs that had people building birdhouses or sewing pockets onto vests for military vehicles. No one asked how many of them went off to jobs building birdhouses or sewing pockets onto canvas material, yet in agriculture it seems to be a question only of jobs directly in agriculture. We have no statistics for how many jobs they get, period; in other words, we have no statistics for the relative success of that program over other programs.
What we do know--and this is off the CORCAN website--are the top ten occupations with vacancies in Canada. I will list those for you and you can tell me, from operating these programs and being on the front line of them, how you feel these programs relate to the top ten vacancies. The list includes truck drivers, sales, wholesale sales, retail sales, delivery and courier drivers, cooks, food and beverage servers, customer service clerks, estheticians, and janitors.
Can you talk about the skills that are learned through this program that are directly applicable? Second, can you talk about your experience in terms of the success of inmates getting employment with this program versus some of the other programs that are in the Correctional Service of Canada today?