Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the minister and officials for being here. Whenever the minister and I deal with each other, I feel the obligation to talk about some things he'd like to talk about first before he does so.
I do want to say that nothing we have to say today implies any criticism of our front-line staff in the public safety areas, who we believe do their best to keep Canada safe, in all those agencies. The second thing is: know that we do not believe dollars are always the fix, but we are talking about the budget today, so we will be talking about dollars. The third is the kind of reductionism that Ms. Bergen just engaged in by saying that because we voted against the budget, there should be no federal government. We obviously will differ on priorities and may end up voting against the budget. It doesn't mean we oppose absolutely everything that's in the budget or absolutely every dollar devoted to public safety. I just wanted to get those off the table.
Yesterday, we had the tabling of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's expenditure analysis of criminal justice in Canada. What that analysis, I think, shows is that the government is pursuing policies that are driving up costs in public safety, both for the federal government and also for the provinces. Yet we have estimates before us today that show significant costs coming in Public Safety. I'm looking at that contradiction and asking the minister which policies that are driving up those costs—like additional mandatory minimum sentences and those kinds of things—is the government prepared to give up? Or which of the major challenges in public safety are we not going to tackle?
At some point, this just doesn't add up. The costs are increasing. The number of people in prison, whether it's the projections or not, is still at an all-time high. Yet we're going to have reduction in the funding for those things. It's hard for me to see how you square the circle there by pursuing those same policies that drive costs up. When we look at overall Public Safety in the estimates and the supplementaries, we're going to be down about 30% from last year.