Madam Speaker, earlier in my colleague's speech he quoted the vice-president of the union. I will also provide him with a quote from May 2014, when the Conservatives were in government. Global News quoted the national president for the same union, Kevin Grabowsky, who said, “The violence is on the rise and it's a big concern for, certainly, correctional officers.”
The auditor general at the time was quoted as saying, “Correctional Services Canada has identified themselves that with overcrowding there can be risks to security in their facilities.”
This is a stark underpinning of the difference between the approaches to corrections we see from this side of the House versus the other. All of a sudden, the Conservatives seem to be very concerned with the safety of the correctional officers, yet in 2014, they were encouraging over-bunking and double-bunking, which is exactly what the guards were against.
How can that member actually stand in the House now and try to make it seem as though the Conservatives are the champions of correctional officers, when in 2014 they did the exact opposite, creating extremely unsafe conditions for them?