Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the minister for being here, and also for bringing his senior team of very impressive public servants to the committee.
I think one of the things we've managed to establish in this committee is that there's an equal concern for public safety, although we might not always agree on how to get there among all parties in the House of Commons. And we appreciate the work that all of you do in ensuring that Canadians remain safe.
Today, of course, the topic is the main estimates, so there are many issues we could explore on public safety, but we're going to try, on this side, to stay focused on the impacts of the estimates as they're presented today.
One of the concerns we have is that the services that are provided in Public Safety are of course essential to the safety of the public. So the level of reductions—the 4% cut in this budget and the projected 10% cut eventually—give us some concern about whether existing functions can be maintained and whether some new initiatives, which might be necessary, such as some of the initiatives that have been talked about for dealing with the sexual harassment issues in the RCMP, can be dealt with in this declining budget.
One of the ones we want to focus on, and I'll try to be quick, is the question of the prison closures, and quite apart from all the numbers about prisons.
My colleague, Madame Doré Lefebvre, has visited Leclerc, and last Monday the NDP members of this committee visited Kingston Penitentiary and the Regional Treatment Centre. We came away with a lot of unanswered questions, which maybe you can address today, about the impacts of the closure of those institutions.
In the case of Kingston, we know we have highly qualified and highly experienced staff working in that institution who have dealt with some of the most dangerous and notorious criminals in the country, and we've heard nothing so far about the fate of those staff.
In terms of the Regional Treatment Centre, we have a very highly talented and highly experienced group dealing with mentally ill prisoners, and we know nothing about the fate of that unit as a whole.
I'm going to ask you three very specific things.
One, Mr. Minister, will you make a commitment today to retain the experienced staff of Kingston Penitentiary within the Correctional Service of Canada?