Madam Speaker, I take issue with my friend on that last point. We do not know only from prisoner advocates or the defence bar, we know from Correctional Services. I know my friend wants to leave, but I have to pin him down. We know from Mr. Head and Mr. Sapers, who is very directly involved, that we have overcrowding. Mr. Head told us at committee that we had a huge number of cells designed for one inmate, in which two and, more and more often, three inmates were in them.
We also know that the justice minister came before our committee. When I asked him a question about the capacity in our prison systems to handle the additional inmates, he said that he had talked to the public safety minister and gave the assurances that we had the capacity to take additional prisoners. That was before Mr. Head, the real person who knows what is going on, because the Minister of Public Safety does not, came before us and said that we did not have the capacity. As much as he tried to be diplomatic about not contradicting his minister, he said that we were overcrowded already, that we had large numbers of cells holding two inmates, which are only designed for one, and that we had a large number of cells in which there were three inmates, and that was getting worse.
I come back to my friend from Moncton. If we have that kind of ignorance level on the part of the government, on the part of the minister responsible for corrections, what hope do we have if we pass the bill and we have that increase in population? I am not talking programming. I am talking about physical space to handle these prisoners. What assurances do we have, what sense of hope do we have that the government is going to do anything about increasing the number of prisons in the country?