Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up a little further on the statistics that the speaker for the Bloc mentioned. He pointed out that we were talking about a cost of $52,205 per inmate. If we are projecting another 15,000 inmates in the system as a result of the bill, we are looking at roughly $783 million.
Who will pay for that? A lot of this cost will be provincially based and the provinces do not have enough cells to house the prisoners they have right now. The $52,000 is the cost per inmate per year under the current system, but if we have to spend hundreds of millions building new facilities to house the inmates, and it might take a number of years to do that, what will they do in the interim? Will the government delay bringing the bill into force for five or six years before it is actually implemented?
What does the member think of the cost implications and does he think the government has these figures? No government introduces legislation without knowing what it will cost. The Conservatives know, but they are not telling us.