Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour to rise in this House to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.
The bill we are debating today, Bill C-12, the so-called drug-free prisons act, is a perfect bill for a Conservative government in the last tired dying months of its senile reign. It meets the three main criteria of a Conservative crime bill.
It has a bogus title that they would somehow create drug-free prisons, when their own studies say they are never going to deal with that and they need to come up with other solutions.
As a classic Conservative bill, it would not change anything. It is a windmill that the Conservatives are going to run at with their fake spears because the provisions already exist. They are saying they are going to ensure that the drug tests are brought before the Parole Board to stop these bad people from getting out. The Parole Board already has those powers. They are tying up more time in the House of Commons.
However, there is a third element that makes it a definitive Conservative crime bill, because these guys are not tough on crime, they are dumb on crime. It is more wasted money. Do members know, and the folks back home, the terrible financial record of the current government that will blow money on anything that suits its ideology, like the F-35s that it was going to spend incredible amounts on?
The Conservatives have spent $122 million on this program already, claiming that they are going to stop the drugs in prison. “We're going to get tough on those prisoners”. After $122 million, they have come up with nada, zero, doughnuts. They have not delivered on anything. Rather than going back and figuring out what they are doing wrong, they will just come up with another fake bill, with another fake title, offering very little.
Why this is of concern is that this is a government that has run on its so-called tough on crime agenda with one bill after another without ever coming forward with focused, coherent legislation that, number one, can meet the test of the charter and is not a waste of money. Our present justice minister has had more recalls than the Ford Pinto, in terms of his legislation. It costs Canadian taxpayers about $100,000 a year to incarcerate a prisoner. That is an enormous amount of money that is being wasted in prisons.
I am not saying that we do not need prisons to hold people. However, if we are going to spend up to $100,000 a year holding each of them, we could certainly divert a lot of that money toward smart crime prevention, which is to keep people out of the prison system. The fact that we do not factor in is the enormous financial, emotional and psychological damage that happens to our society when someone gets into the system in the first place.
We need to look at where solutions exist, where good grassroots solutions exist, so that we can actually find ways to cut the recidivism rates and ensure that we are pulling people out of the prison system and out of the nightmare of drug addiction and drug trading.
I have seen a few really good models at the grassroots level of how we could actually be smart on crime. For example, just recently in Timmins we launched a fentanyl task force. Fentanyl has become a major problem. It has replaced what was the OxyContin epidemic. I have noticed, in many of the communities that had never dealt with opiate addictions before Oxy became very street available, that a lot of people got caught up in Oxy who would not normally have got caught up in Oxy. It created a market for heroin synthetic opiates. Now, with the Oxy market being squeezed off, fentanyl has become the new drug of choice. Fentanyl is extremely dangerous. It is a patch that is meant to deliver a synthetic heroin over a three-day period. If people cut it up and smoke it, they might end up getting the full shot in one go, which will stop the heart. I have seen young people who have died from fentanyl, and these were good young people. These were people with their whole lives ahead of them who thought this was a party drug, and it is not.
In the city of Timmins, as they have done in so many other communities, we have started a grassroots response of bringing people together, asking, “How do we learn from each other? How do we start dealing with the trade in fentanyl?” However, we obviously need the federal government involved because we need a way of tracking the fentanyl patches. It is not simply a matter of someone taking their uncle's or their grandmother's patch off them when they are getting cancer treatment; there is a trade that is going on in fentanyl that is much bigger.
The impact here is that we have the demand of people who are being brought into addiction, thinking that it is a party drug and this drug could actually kill them. We have to do the public awareness on that, but there is the supply issue. If it is a lucrative enough market, we are going to get into the gangs and a very illegal trade by people who do need to be put away. However, we need a way of tracking them and working with police.
At the grassroots level, what we have done in the Timmins area with the fentanyl task force is try to find ways to come up with smart solutions from the grassroots up so that we are, first of all, preventing the casualties, deaths and overdoses that are costing our families terrible emotional strain, as well as costing the medical and prison systems. We are also trying to find a way to track these patches back to the source so that we can cut off that trade. We need the federal government to show some leadership on this. That is one important element.
I was at a very fascinating conference just this past week in Timmins, led by Brent Kalinowski, who spent 27 years on the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, police force. Brent was bringing to Timmins a program that is working very well in North Bay, and it is working in Saskatchewan and some other communities, where they create a community hub. Brent explained this really well when he talked about the years that he had spent in policing, going after the bad guys after the fact, after the damage had been done, and after the families' lives had been ruined. At that point, what can we do with these characters except put them in jail?
We are dealing with enormous costs to the medical system, to the prison system, and to families who might never recover if it is an act of violence. Brent said that after 25 years of doing this, he felt that there needed to be a smarter way of getting people before they get too far into the system. That is a really important issue. There is nothing soft or namby-pamby about diverting people out of the prison system. When we put someone into the prison system, we are putting them into a university of humiliation and a university of crime. That is not where we want our graduates coming from, so whoever we can divert from that, we are making smart, grassroots responses.
The hub response that is working very well in North Bay and that we have talked about bringing into Timmins is one where we bring the key organizations together, including the school boards, the addiction experts and the police, and identify individuals. We do not give the person's name, but we could say that we have a 13-year-old female who overdosed twice and was in the emergency ward, and we think that this may be the scene of a need for greater intervention. The school would say that it has her and that she has been missing school five, six, or seven days in a row. One of the counsellors would say that they have been dealing with her and what is actually happening is that a boyfriend has moved in and it has become an abusive situation.
All of the little pieces of the puzzle around this hub become identified. We have a problem here. This could end up flaming into a much more serious condition. They put a team together to go and meet the family, the mother and daughter, and say “How can we help?” It might seem like an extremely simple solution, and it might seem that it would not work, but it is amazing, they say, how quickly people are willing to open their door and say “Thank God. Come in. Can we make you a coffee? How can we divert our child from this crisis?”
It goes all the way up through various issues. We start to see the symptoms in someone who is starting to miss school when they are young, starting to get in trouble, or starting to appear again and again in the emergency ward. These are people who either become victims of violence or victims of crime, or become criminals themselves. Once they have identified someone who has had months of skipping school, certain schools would say that they will just suspend them permanently. They are suspended, they are out there and they are not being helped. The emergency ward just puts them back out on the streets.
We need a smarter way. If we are going to get them to the prison system and waste $100,000 a year, plus all of the other costs that the system incurs, and then spend $122 million to stop them doing drugs in prison, there has to be a smarter way of doing this. We are seeing some really good grassroots models coming from police and community organizations. That is where the House of Commons needs to start working to say that we can be a lot smarter on crime, rather than always spending the enormous amounts of money after the fact and after it is too late.
