Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Vancouver for his insights into the faint hope clause. I know it is a difficult subject for many people and I think he gave it a very sensitive treatment and tried to embrace both sides of the debate.
I was in the government operations committee earlier today, where we tried to put a price tag and enumerate some of the many crime bills that have come through this Parliament in recent years, as they will impact the correction services.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer was there to try to explain to us some of the predictable consequences of having many of these bills with mandatory minimum sentences and doing away with the credit for time served in a remand bill and the predictable explosion in incarceration. We are going to be stacking up prisoners like cord wood in these prisons pretty soon or having to build new ones with price tags of billions of dollars.
Some more cynical people have even implied that this is the Conservatives' alternative to the absence of a national housing strategy. They are going to lock up a whole generation of young native kids in prison instead.
The question I have for my colleague is this. People are coming to the conclusion that perhaps what the government is really doing is laying the foundation for a wholesale privatization of the prison system so that companies like Onex or Halliburton can perhaps offer to house a prisoner for $100,000 a year. The government is charging $147,000 a year. It would be pretty tempting, now that they have the member of the board of directors of Onex Corporation advising the Prime Minister in the Prime Minister's office. Who is to say he is not dropping a bug in the Prime Minister's ear, saying this could be a business opportunity. Let us make lemonade out of lemons and turn the prison system into a revenue-generating private business. Onex could build prisons for the government.
Is it paranoid to assume that these people could be laying the foundation for a wholesale privatization of our corrections system?