Madam Speaker, my intervention is about corrections but I have to correct something that the hon. member just said a second ago, that our emissions were down 8%. Our emissions were up several thousand per cent last year, 2023, because our forests were on fire. We became the world's third largest emitter. The lousy forestry practices of the government are a substantial contributor to that ecological catastrophe.
I am here to follow up on a question I raised on September 27 regarding a conflict of interest in which cows have been purchased from members of an advisory group styled “prison farm advisory panel” in Joyceville, Ontario. This panel was set up by the Liberals as a first step in fulfilling their 2015 election promise to reopen the prison farm at Joyceville, which at that time had recently been shut down. The minister's approval of the panel's request to include cows in their plan for a reopened prison farm was contingent on the panel's assurance that this would be an achievable goal at “no extra cost” within the farm's original $4.3-million budget.
However, following a litany of errors, the costs of constructing the cow barn have ballooned to $16 million. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that in order to create a situation in which these cows would be purchased and thereby financially benefit the members of the advisory panel, it has been necessary to spend many millions of dollars that would not have been spent had the project actually been about what it was supposed to be about, which was providing job training to inmates.
The entire reason for reopening the farm, the entire ostensible reason, was that the newly elected Liberal government rejected Corrections Canada's rationale for shutting down the farm. The rationale was that, in the form in which it then existed, the prison farm was not teaching marketable job skills to inmates and thus was not helping them to reintegrate into the community. The Liberals brushed this reasoning aside.
Immediately following the 2015 election, the then-minister of public safety, Ralph Goodale asked Corrections Canada to outline options and recommendations for reopening the prison farm.
In a November 2015 briefing note, the CSC responded that prison farms did not enhance offender employment. CSC pointed out that prison farms are actually counterproductive. They actually lead to less employment and more recidivism because they direct financial resources away from more effective offender training programs. CSC was particularly opposed to reintroducing dairy operations. Instead, CSC recommended that if a prison farm program did have to be opened, it should have minimal start-up costs, no expensive equipment or infrastructure, and must at a minimum break even.
To achieve these goals, CSC recommended small plot farming in lucrative specialty crops, such as lavender and garlic, which former inmates would be able to grow in small amounts with limited capital investment and to sell at venues such as farmers' markets that are open to someone with a history as an offender.
All of this was ignored and, at present, the plan is to hand this $16-million barn over to McGill University. The barn will be staffed by four people, none of whom will be inmates. CSC has identified only two offender positions related to the dairy research and this is in basic data entry. Otherwise, prisoners will gain only generic soft skills from doing groundskeeping tasks such as whipper-snipping. These are activities that prisoners were already engaged in before this project came along.
Why has so much money been spent on something that will achieve so little to prevent recidivism—