I think fundamentally we have to talk about reinserting national standards. Those of us who are long enough in the tooth to have been around at the time the Canada assistance plan was eliminated didn't think that plan was the best. We wanted to see stronger and more enduring national standards at the time than we had.
I think the recommendation that has been made about going back to community is important. I have yet to go to a community, whether it's a very small, remote community or a very large city, where people don't have all kinds of ideas about what they could do with the resources that are currently being spent to prosecute, detain, and ultimately to try to reintegrate individuals into their community. There is probably a much smaller number--not just of women, but of men and young people too--who need to be incarcerated, and there are far more creative things that we could be doing.
There are ways that you could make recommendations to put real pressure on to change what's happening. I think also making some recommendations about the effects of the increased number of bills that are impacting how long people will be in prison would address a huge issue. It's going to disproportionately impact indigenous peoples, especially indigenous women. It's going to disproportionately impact the poorest and those with mental health issues. We need national standards that really challenge the mechanism whereby we're making imprisonment the norm. The fact that we talk about crime prevention as a way to meet social issues and the fact that we're making imprisonment the norm has become one of our biggest social problems.
We feed children in breakfast programs and call it crime prevention. Do we really want to send messages to all those children across the country that we're feeding them so that they don't become young criminals? That's essentially what we do when we argue in those kinds of ways.
We need to be pulling back and making recommendations that are fundamentally about what Louise Arbour talked about not long ago when she was still at the United Nations. She said that we need to have basic human rights. Every person in this country should be entitled to be fed, clothed, housed, and educated, and to have their health needs met. When countries had that fundamental standard--whether in the Scandinavian countries, or Australia when they had better social programs, or our own country when we had better social programs--crime rates and rates of incarceration were much lower for that reason.
If the other mechanism worked, then we'd all be flocking to move to the United States, because it would be the safest place and everybody would be taken care of. We know that quite the opposite is true.