Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise and speak for a few moments on Bill C-12.
Bill C-12 would amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to, in effect, do what is done in practice now. It would give clear legal authority to an existing practice of the Parole Board, which we support, and that is urine testing for drugs when making decisions on parole eligibility.
What makes me crazy is the way the Conservative government holds up a piece of legislation like this, which would do an important yet fairly mundane thing by ensuring that current practice is maintained, and dubs it the drug-free prisons act. We know that the government is doing, frankly, nothing about dealing with the question of addictions in our prison system. It is an utter shame.
Estimates are that nearly half of the male population in prison and over two-thirds of the female population in prison have some form of mental illness and an addiction associated with it, yet the government continues to cut back on rehabilitation programs and other tools and strategies that could properly be used to treat and help focus the individuals who are facing these particular challenges.
Here we are. The government is going to make sure that it is able to find out whether someone has been using drugs. It has been able to do nothing about the fact that prisoners can access illegal drugs in prison, but it is going to ignore its absolute, dismal failure on that end of things. It is going to throw them back into prison. There are no programs to help them deal with the addictions. What is the government going to do? Is it going to keep firing people back into jail, keep the doors locked, and keep throwing other people in for the same kinds of problems and never deal with them?
How is that keeping our communities safe? How is that dealing at all with the problem that exists, to a lesser degree, but is nonetheless a problem?
It reminds me that there is a service in my community of Dartmouth run by the Freedom Foundation, which is a recovery house for men. They have 14 beds. The foundation provides services to men who acknowledge that they have addictions and are committed to dealing with them, and it does so at a fraction of the cost that would be faced if there were any programs in prisons. Certainly the cost of warehousing people in prison is a fraction of the cost that would be spent if the government invested in programs like the Freedom Foundation to help men make this transition to a drug and alcohol-free life.
The foundation has served over 1,000 men over the past 25 years and has helped them become drug and alcohol free. It is a remarkable program. It supports the kinds of issues the government would if it were truly concerned about drugs in prisons and in society, if it were truly concerned about helping Canadians deal with addictions, which, in far too many cases, are associated with incarceration. Then once and for all we would begin to deal in a substantive, productive, and constructive way with the issue of making our communities safer and more productive.