Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Ajax—Pickering for a very clear and lucid presentation.
I am just wondering if my colleague would consider that perhaps he is being a little too hard on the Conservative government. Perhaps some of what he outlined could be, as seen through the Conservative government's own kind of warped world view, a form of national housing strategy. Just as the Americans have tried to lock up an entire generation of young black men, the Conservative government seems hell-bent and determined to follow that folly and lock up a whole generation of young aboriginal men and women.
I would like to put on the record a statistic I recently read in a book by Pierre Berton. The book was about 1967, the last time Canada was happy. At that time, 100% of the inmates in the women's penitentiary in Kingston were aboriginal women. Every single inmate was an aboriginal woman.
I wonder if perhaps my colleague wants to reconsider his remarks and entertain the notion that perhaps this is the Conservative government's concept of a national housing strategy, to lock up a generation of young aboriginal people, given their overrepresentation in the penal system.