Maybe you're going to give me a chance to talk about a slogan I hear a lot, “tough on crime”. I hear that from the field. People are saying the new government wants to be tough on crime, right?
We accept the challenge to be tough on crime. I'm a correctional officer. Justice, it's in my mind. But tough on crime means being tough on criminals, too. Changing the law to bring us wider margins of manoeuvre to manage the population is going to be good. At the same time, we're going to have to give what goes with that. Managing the population, managing new rules, means we're going to have to review the number of correctional officers we have at the site. You're going to build more units. That's good news. Now we're facing a lot of double-bunking, and double-bunking is no good for anybody. It's not good for correctional officers, but it's not good for inmates, either. Two in a cell means a lot of stress for them and a lot of stress for us.
This is the first chance I've had to talk to the MPs in the committee about those things. You're going to see the media saying different things. People are going to say, “Ah, you're never satisfied. You're receiving more units, more jobs.” Let's talk about the stuff. We're passing the law, and now we're going to have to deal with new stuff, new laws. How are we going to apply that? Engage? Not engage? Maybe we're going to arrive at something. In any case, we want to be there.
I want to tell you something. We were in Ottawa this week, all week, for the Blood Samples Act. We want the Blood Samples Act. If an inmate is trying to throw feces at me, and he's using his blood as a weapon, please, can we know if he's sick or he's got something? Can we just know? We know that in your bill it's going to be criminal to do stuff like this. Please, we want that. We need it.