Mr. Speaker, I think Newt Gingrich and other conservatives in the United States have recognized that the program is unsustainable primarily because it does not get results at the end of the day.
The government will have some short-term advantage with the public because the public will agree to the building of prisons, but it is not looking at the $9 billion associated with building them and, as the member pointed out, the fact that it costs $343,000 a year to keep one person in prison without showing results.
We need to start getting smart on crime but the Conservative government is not showing a lot of signs of that at this point.
I pointed out earlier that on the day the Conservatives found out that Clifford Olson was getting a retirement pension, they introduced legislation to eliminate it. However, when we checked into it, we found out that it was the Conservative government of Joe Clark that started mailing pension cheques out to prisoners in the first place.
A lot of things need correcting in this system, and that was one of them and it was corrected, but the Conservatives did not admit that it was their problem in the first place. They did not admit that they were the ones who started sending pension cheques to prisoners in the first place. I just get total silence from that side when this issue comes up.