Mr. Speaker, what the member does not understand and I will put very clearly is that the Conservative government is in the business of building prisons in Afghanistan. It is not in the business of building prisons in Canada, yet it is in the business of putting more people in prison in Canada. Its program is very clear.
What it is not in the business of is recognizing that the institute at McGill that the member referred to has long been a proponent of a harm reduction strategy, which is nothing more than a public health slant on drug abuse issues, which is totally absent from the government.
What these bills on mandatory minimums seem to forget is that we are dealing with people mostly addicted to drugs or at least in the drug trade.
An Irish study, for instance, suggested that 20% of people who use illegal drugs actually began to use illegal drugs while in prison. If there is a problem with drug use, drug abuse or drug production, then sending people to prison is not going to help the problem.
In fact, if some of the more ambitious, intelligent and entrepreneurial drug producers were sent to jail, they might populate a whole new generation of drug users within the prison system. We could call it the Conservative college of cannabis, for instance. This could be the new higher learning agenda.
As my friend, the hon. member for Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, would suggest, finally we have found the Conservative agenda on higher learning and it is in our prisons, which may or may not be in Canada, which may or may not be in Kandahar.