Absolutely.
The parliamentary budget officer in 2010 said it cost $348,000 to keep a woman in minimum or medium security prisons in this country. If that money were being invested in different ways in the community, absolutely, we could see very different things.
I think the brother of Kinew James, the woman who died in federal custody in 2015, put it way more succinctly than I could. She was an indigenous woman who died of a heart attack, in part because she had mental health issues, and the presumption was that she was just trying to get attention when she was actually calling for help. She died of a heart attack. Her brother said there was no end of resources available to use more security on his sister, to put her in segregation, to put her in restraints, or to transfer her across the country, but when she wanted to take a university course or even a high school course, or when she wanted to do something to try to assist herself to get out and better herself, there was a whole, long, drawn-out policy and description of why that couldn't be done, or why it took so long. I think that's what we have to fundamentally change. These are policy decisions about how we decide to quickly spend money and not quickly spend money.
Part of the reason I think it hasn't been addressed, quite frankly, is it will require changes and involve investments that will cross the period of the electoral span. It can't happen between one election to the next, so all parties, and all of us, have to invest in ensuring that we're doing some of the things recommended, whether by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the royal commission, the Auditor General, or the parliamentary budget officer. Otherwise, we'll continue to try to spend on the short responses that are inevitably going to be more security types of responses, not necessarily investing in people.