The hon. member makes an excellent point, Madam Speaker. His distinction between kids caught joyriding versus organized crime, chop shops and so on is a perfectly legitimate point and I agree with him completely.
With respect to organized crime initiatives, in some respects we cannot be too harsh.
He makes an additional very good point, which is that these bills are piling up. He does not know the cost, I certainly do not know the cost and, I dare say, there is no one in the chamber who actually knows the cost. Perhaps if they did know the cost they might reshape some legislation initiatives to reflect other forms of societal punishment.
However, at this point, we are operating in the dark because the government wants Parliament to be operating in the dark. It does not want to say.
I agree with the member in the sense that the cost parameters of this bill and any other bill are difficult to calculate but there is sociological and criminalogical material that does give us some working presumptions.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, basically without co-operation from Correctional Service Canada, took the material from Statistics Canada and Correctional Service Canada and used the methodology the Department of Finance uses, i.e. there will be no behavioural changes, therefore, we calculate on the basis of, I think he said, 3,800 increased prisoners.
It seems to me that unless Parliament insists on a costing no one else will insist on a costing. All we have are cheesy headlines from the government where apparently we are going to get tough on crime and the crime operates independently of all of the cheesy headlines and boring speeches put forward by the government and, in particular, the Minister of Justice.