Thank you, Madam Chairperson. It would be difficult to argue with the issue of prevention being better than trying to cure the problem of incarceration or the problems that cause incarceration. I certainly agree that prevention is one of the best ways to approach some of our society's problems. Unfortunately, we have a situation where we have to deal with a certain number of people right now. The facilities that are provided for those people are unacceptable. We have been told by people ranging from those involved with the Evans Report to the fire marshal that we have to deal with concerns. I am sure the Member would not want us to leave people in the sort of situation in which they are. I would certainly hope that we could still continue to see an expansion of on-the-land programs. From what I have seen personally, I think they tend to be extremely successful. It does not however take away from the fact that we are still going to have a certain number of people who will not qualify for those programs and are going to have to house.

In this situation, the initial budget that was presented to the standing committee in this House was fairly imprecise that time. The $28.3 million was the estimate we had. As I understand it, sometime after the budget planning process, after going to committees, and after the budget books had been prepared, Ferguson Simek Clark came back and said, in fact, to build this over seven years is going to cost you $35 million. Conversely, you can build this project with the same scope of the project as originally proposed, $5 million less. In other words, $30 million rather than $35 million if you built it over four years instead of seven years. We were presented with the opportunity to either save $5 million over what the cost was going to be to achieve the same functional program, as presented to committee and to this House, or spend $5 million more to do the same thing.

It would have been irresponsible of us not to commit to the saving of this money. I would hope that this saving would allow us to put monies into other programs. Far better to put the $5 million into other areas than into a building that holds people in jail.