Mr. Speaker, I understood quite well the speech by my learned colleague on the other side of the House. But he talks at the same time of serious crimes and sentences of less than two years. He should know that sentences of less than two years are handed out for minor crimes and that they are served in prisons in Quebec and in other provinces. Who will build these prisons when more room is needed? You stated that 15,000 additional people would be incarcerated. Where will we put these people if we have no prisons? Will you build them? Will you maintain them and pay the staff? If it costs $50,000 per inmate and we multiply that by 15,000, I think you will be running up quite a bill. However, I believe that you will pass that bill on to each province. That is the first thing.
We must consider something else that is important in all of this. People will think that they have a lot of money to do this. They have so much money. But fighting crime does not go together with poverty. Eliminating poverty and helping the poor would reduce slightly the number of people who go to jail, because they want to incarcerate people serving sentences of less than two years. That is another issue.
Then, if too much money is left over, they must think about older people who receive pensions and are living below the poverty line. If we can afford $50,000 per inmate, we should be able to give a little money to these older people who do not even receive minimum wage. We must help these people who live below the poverty line.
If you still have too much money, you should also help people losing their jobs. There will be more such people in two industries since the minister did not uphold the Canadian International Trade Tribunal decision to apply a surtax on bicycles for Raleigh and for Pro Cycle. They did not think of that. This is not serious. The lobbying that is going to take place elsewhere, at the retail level, is more important. However, in terms of workers and businesses, that is not important. By the way, both of those businesses are located in Quebec.
If that is not considered important and you still have too much money, there is also the program to help older workers, which we have been working on for years. We have been demanding such a program to help older workers, but there has been no progress in this area.
I think that the gentleman at the other end does not know where he is headed. The problem is that you have too much money, too large a surplus. You want to build prisons and put everyone in them. As I was saying earlier, before instituting such repression, we could start by tackling poverty, which is where the true problem lies.
Thus, here is my question. What do you intend to do to tackle poverty to ensure that these people do not end up in prison?