My remarks are directly relevant to this, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate the member's interest in what I am saying. I appreciate that he is listening. If he had been listening at the beginning of my remarks, he would know that I spent a good deal of time talking about the sex offender registry.
When we are dealing with legislation, it is incredibly important to ensure there is a balance in what we are approaching and how we are going to deal with it. We are dealing with legislation that needs to be passed but we have to consider the ramifications on the other legislation that is on the table.
There is no doubt this bill will have ramifications on people being incarcerated, and it should. It is going to put a strain on our prison system. We have to make sure there is space in those facilities to put the people who belong there. Sex offenders certainly do belong in our prison system.
Chiefs of police across the country have told us that our prisons are replete with the mentally ill. Oftentimes our prisons have no room for dangerous offenders because of the fact that prisons are being used as repositories for the mentally ill. When police encounter somebody who is mentally ill, they have nowhere to send that individual. They have to wait for the person to commit a crime so the person can be put into a prison. Instead of receiving health care and getting better, individuals are put into solitary confinement because there are no resources to deal with them. Being in solitary confinement makes them worse. They are released back onto the streets where, in a worsened condition, they commit a more serious crime.
When considering a bill like this one, we have to ask who populates our prisons and how much space we can make for them.
The government recently announced that it is going to move forward with double-bunking. What impact will that have on conditions in our prison system? In California, prisons are overcrowded and inmates are stacked one on top of the other. We can say we do not care what happens to inmates because they committed a crime, but the problem is that over 90% of them will come out. They are being stuck in overcrowded, unhealthy conditions where not only their mental health and their exposure to poor behaviour is at issue, but their rate of contracting an infectious disease increases. When over 90% of them come out, this becomes a major public safety problem and a major public health problem.
The government's approach on this issue is very germane to any discussion with respect to who we are incarcerating and who populates our jails.
What is the actual evidence? The government's prison agenda has been repudiated. California's system has been a disaster. The rest of the world is condemning that prison system yet the Conservative government is chasing after it at 100 miles an hour. What is the solution?
If we want to ensure there is room in our prisons for the people who belong there, and if we want to ensure that we have safe communities, then surely we should not be cutting back on crime prevention. Over 70% has been cut from the crime prevention budget. Over 41% has been cut from the victims of crime initiative. This initiative helps break the cycle of victimization.
As we know, unfortunately victims often become offenders, and this relates directly to sex offences. Young people who were traumatized or faced sexual violence in their past deal with that through aggression, through confrontation with our legal system. We hear from police that this is often the cause of some very violent and disturbing behaviour. Programs and services to help deal with victims were not in place.
If we want to deal with sex offences, it is not enough just to have a sex offender registry. We also need to invest in community infrastructure to make sure that victims who go through those experiences are given the support they need to ensure they do not walk down that dark path.
When I talk with the boys and girls clubs, church groups, or others who are involved in providing these kinds of services, I hear that their funding is being cut all over the place. They have to twist themselves into pretzels in order to get access to federal funding. This is egregiously wrong. What is so bad about it is that it is enlarging the pool of crimes that are being committed.
The government is building all of these new prisons while it is cutting from the very things that stop crimes from happening in the first place. This means it is feeding the beast. It is compounding the problem on top of itself.
Then the more the prison population grows, the less money there is for rehabilitation, the less money there is to make sure people get better. We then have to do things like cut the prison farm program, one of the most successful programs, which we had for over 100 years and which was studied by the world for how effective it was at bringing about rehabilitation. Yet it was cut because the Conservatives said they do not have the money. This is the track we are on, where it compounds and takes us to an ever-increasing population that makes us more and more unhealthy.
Aside from investing in those things, we have to listen to local communities. Instead of sending diktats from Ottawa about how these community groups have to twist themselves to fit into some bizarre federal scheme, we should be asking them through their community safety councils or other such agencies to tell us what their needs are, what can they do to build infrastructure on the ground to break cycles of victimization, to help people who have been victims, to make sure that when a crime happens it does not perpetuate itself, that it breaks cycles of addiction, and we know that in our prison system more than 80% of inmates are facing addiction issues. We should be asking them to deal with mental health concerns, to have them from the bottom up tell us what their communities need, and then Ottawa should be a partner and say here is how we are going to work with them.
As we are looking at ways in which we can go after people who are committing crimes, sexual offences, as I mentioned before particularly against children, the most egregious, is one of the reasons why I am disturbed that we still have not dealt with lawful access provisions that have been in the House for over five years now. In the lobby a few minutes ago I spoke about how this pertains to terrorism. But police have been telling us it also affects child exploitation. Police need the technology, the ability and the legislative authority to be able to chase after these predators and these people who would commit crimes online, to be able to get access to Internet service provider records, to be able to open up BlackBerrys that have encoded information, yet that legislation has been sitting on the table for five years with no movement, no action.
When the government's promise in 2005-06 to put 2,500 more police officers on the streets was not realized, members of the Canadian Police Association called it a betrayal. They said it would impede their ability to enhance public safety and go after some of these individuals. Yet the government is quick to pound its chest and talk about what a great job it has been doing on crime.
If I have an overall narrative here it is that while I support the bill and I believe the bill needs to be done, the government's approach to crime is heading in a very dangerous direction in the way in which it attacks people who raise legitimate concerns and raise alternative suggestions about how we should pursue these ideas. It does so in such a personal, visceral way. It tries to portray that somehow people who disagree with it do not share the same interest in overall public safety. It is dishonest and unbecoming to the House.