Why is questionable.
What the government is really doing within the prison system itself, it is closing down prison farms.
I am a farmer. There are several members here who are farmers. We all know how wonderful farmers are, working with livestock, growing crops, and how rehabilitative that is.
The government has announced it is going to close all the prison farms in Canada. It makes absolutely no sense at all. So my colleague, the critic for public safety, and I toured those farms. We were out west at the one outside of Winnipeg. We were at the Frontenac Institution, in Kingston, which has a marvellous dairy herd and a good egg operation. We were at the Pittsburgh Institution in Joyceville, which has an abattoir and a greenhouse. The greenhouse is already closed down. And we were at the Westmoreland Institution in Dalhousie, New Brunswick, which has a wonderful dairy herd and egg-laying operation.
The Conservatives have made a lot of crazy decisions as a government over there, but closing down prison farms just makes absolutely no sense at all.
We had a couple of committee hearings. The sad part about those committee hearings is that we did not get hardly any answers from CORCAN or government representatives. I will make a couple of comments about what others have said, just to fill members in on the issue. The reason I am mentioning prison farms in the context of the young offenders act is because it goes to the attitude of the current government that it is all about penalities, not about rehabilitation.
On prison farms in both New Brunswick and Ontario I have seen young offenders, well, they are below 35 years of age, so, they are fairly young people. One individual was an older gentleman, who went into the system when he was very young. He has been in that prison system for 31 years. He said that he was a bad fellow, that he did lots of crime, and that he was a bad fellow even within the prison system. The only time he really became a human being is about four years ago, when he happened to get moved to the prison farm at the Frontenac operation.
The dairy herd is called the Pen Farm, a herd that was established at the turn of the previous century, a herd that is in the top 20% of production in Canada. When people walk into that dairy barn, they look at the herd and they see the quality of cattle. They see the care and attention that inmates are giving those cattle. They are actually making equipment to assist downer cows.
My point about this individual and what he said to me is, “I never became a real human being until I got here to this farm to work with cattle”. It has a tremendous rehabilitative impact.
Again, the Government of Canada is throwing that opportunity away. Just like what it is doing in this bill, it is throwing the opportunity away to make young people better people, to find the good qualities in them, and make them productive citizens in Canadian society again, not throw them in jail and throw away the key, where eventually when they do get out, all it has done is make better criminals of them. We need a system outside of the prison system to work with people, young people. We also need a system within the prison system to work with folks who have done crime and are paying a penalty. We need to rehabilitate them.
However, the thing that angered me most on the prison farm side of the equation was the attitude of the former minister of public safety. He is President of the Treasury Board today, but he did make it clear why facilities were to be closed. It was the opinion of the minister, and no doubt the Conservative government as well, that the funding for these facilities and the farming skills acquired “could be more adequately redirected to programs where people would actually gain employable skills”.
This is what we heard at the public safety committee with CORCAN and Correctional Service Canada about prison farms. They were saying that those farm skills are not as important anymore. One of the members of the Conservative Party tried to make the point that only 14 people came out of that system and got jobs on farms. What about all the others who went through the prison farm system? They got jobs. Not every lawyer goes into law. What they learned in that prison system on the farms was discipline, getting up on time, doing work, and managing their time. They learned farming skills, welding skills and other skills. They learned all kinds of skills that could be used in many occupations.
I am the agriculture critic and I can understand why a members over there would say they do not value farm skills because we know they do not even value farmers in this country by the lack of programs they are putting in place, but that is a subject for another day.
Just a note on the Frontenac Institution before I move back to the act itself. The Frontenac facility has been described in the agriculture media in the following way:
It ranks in the top 20 per cent of Ontario’s dairy herds for management, is quick to embrace new technologies and make them work. It won Frontenac County’s most improved herd award in 2005 with a jump of 147 points and supplies milk and eggs to Corrections Canada institutions in Ontario and Quebec. And if a recent report is to believed, it is among six prison farms in Canada which not only aren’t making money, but aren’t supplying inmates with the skills they need upon release. Its abattoir services 300 local farmers, processes 60 animals per week and supplies 150 local butcher shops.
That is a productive operation. It teaches those inmates wonderful skills, and for the Government of Canada to be closing them down makes no sense at all, but it comes back to my original point that the government does not care about rehabilitation. The government only cares about penalties and it is actually going to lose. Once those farms are gone they are gone forever.
There are many questions that have been raised by even the people in Kingston, where the government wants to close that institution down, so it can sell off the assets to pay the massive debt that it has imposed on our children and grandchildren as a government. Or is it looking to build a super jail there and go the way that the United States has gone where we will build more jails in Canada and incarcerate more people, and adopt a system that has been found in the United States not to work.
Let me come back to the bill. The major provisions of Bill C-4 are articulating that the protection of society is a primary goal of the Youth Criminal Justice Act, there is no problem with that; altering pretrial detention rules to make it simpler for judges to keep violent and repeat offenders in custody prior to trial; adding specific deterrence and denunciation of the sentencing principles for youth; expanding the definition of what constitutes a “violent offence”; allowing for more serious sentences for youth with a pattern of extrajudicial sanctions for so-called repeat offenders; requiring the consideration of adult sentences by provincial Crown prosecutors for youth 14 and older, or 16 and older in Quebec, who commit serious offences like murder, attempted murder aggravated sexual assault; and requiring courts to consider lifting publication bans on the names of young offenders convicted of violent offences even when youth sentences are applied. Those are basically some of the areas and some of those points we agree with.
However, on the negative side, and this is unfortunate. The government has been in power four and a half years now and each day of the week that it is there it begins to wear on Canadians more and more. It is just like an old machine getting rusty, that is for sure.
It is unfortunate that what the government has shown over its four years in government is that it would rather create jail spaces than child care spaces. There is no evidence to indicate that jailing more people works as a deterrent.
That is what I said earlier when I compared it to the United States. This analysis builds on what has been provided by other experts and the Conservatives have chosen to ignore. Penalties in and of themselves are not the answer. We need systems of social programs that assist people, that help families in trouble. We also need them within the jail system itself.
This plan, along with some of the government's other so-called law and justice proposals, will lead to higher incarceration rates and increased costs for Canada's justice system without a significant improvement in Canadian safety.
I will close with a couple of quotes from others who know the system well because I believe they make the point. Rick Linden, who is a criminology professor at the University of Manitoba, states:
It's designed more for the political effect than to actually have much affect on crime.
That goes right to the mantra of the government. It is all about messaging. I believe we have called it a culture of deceit in question period just the odd time. That is what it is about with the government. It is all about messaging. Do not let the facts get in the way of a good story. It is all about messaging.
There is lots more that could be said about the defaults of this bill, but I will close and turn to questions.
