I thank the witness for his presentation. I also have to mention Mr. Young's presentation.
I will say, however, before I ask a couple of questions, that we on this side are still a bit mystified about why the government is insisting on spending this much time on such a narrow topic. Even when we have approached people to be witnesses, they are surprised that the broader issues really aren't being addressed. We look forward to getting some witnesses before the committee who will look at the broader issues of crime prevention.
Of course, we have placed motions on notice for dealing with things that are really the responsibility of this committee and an important part of our mandate in terms of oversight of the government, such as the failure to deal with the mental illness crisis in prisons, or the youth gang problems in Montreal, or the front-line border services project.
I don't mean any disrespect to our witnesses, who I think are doing fine work and have interesting ideas. It just seems so far from the mandate of this committee, and so far removed from actually talking about the national crime prevention strategy, that it's sometimes difficult.
Having said that, I do have a couple of questions to ask.
We had as a previous witness Elizabeth Lower-Basch from the Center for Law and Social Policy in Washington, D.C. She talked about SIBs and some of the other ideas that you are bringing forward. She said, as I understood her conclusion, that these projects are inherently more expensive than the government doing this work directly because they involve creating another infrastructure. Most of them involve some kind of profit to be paid back to the investors. She finished by saying that if it's the only way you can get more money for crime prevention, they may be good ideas, but they are inherently more expensive and less accountable than the government doing the crime prevention work directly.
I wondered what your response to that would be.