Mr. Speaker, we need look no further than the prison farm program. We had six prison farms in this country for many years in Kingston and in Winnipeg where prisoners would get up at six in the morning and work with animals producing milk and other farm commodities. The government just shut down the farms when it should have been doubling them, taking the number of farms from six to twelve, or maybe even more, and expanding them. However, it shut them down at cost to the economy for the farmers around Kingston who used the abattoir in Kingston. There are dairy herds in Winnipeg and in Kingston that have been sold off. The land is being sold off. When I tell Conservative voters what the current government has done to the prison farms, they shake their heads.
This is an issue that even the government's own supporters cannot understand. The Conservatives are basically looking to the next election. Their whole vision is to lurch from crisis to crisis and to wonder how the issue will look in a focus group and how it will help them in the next election to get a majority government. They want to forget about the long-term consequences and the long-term costs that have been clearly demonstrated in the United States and recently commented on by Newt Gingrich.
They want to spend $9 billion to develop prisons to house prisoners when they say that the crime rate is actually dropping and then there will be the ongoing costs of keeping these prisoners, which, as the member for Thunder Bay—Rainy River pointed out, is about $300,000 a year per prisoner, when they should continue to fund the anti-gang programs that they started three years ago. They should also have addiction programs and rehabilitative programs. They should actually start following Newt Gingrich, to be honest, to achieve results.