Thank you, Mr.
Speaker.
Today I would like to talk about the proposed women’s correctional facility in Fort Smith.
I don’t know how many more mistakes we’re going to make in terms of Justice and infrastructure related to Justice than we already have. I remember when we went through the battle in this House over the closure of the Dene K’onia Young Offender Facility in Hay River, which just had to move to Yellowknife and be added on to the new North Slave Correctional Centre. I was here when we talked about the millions and millions of dollars of cost overruns on the North Slave Correctional Centre, which I’m sure came in at around $50 million. We’ve been through a debate on the establishment and construction of a new court facility here in Yellowknife, which is probably another $50 or $60 million. We keep making mistake after mistake with respect to corrections facilities, and I think that we had better take a very serious long look before we invest any more millions of dollars in capital infrastructure for corrections facilities.
Mr. Speaker, I don’t know what’s wrong with the facility that’s existing in Fort Smith. I hear it’s old. I say: “So what? If it works, who cares if it’s old?” Why would we need a $6 million facility for a minimum security facility in the Northwest Territories? I don’t know how many women are incarcerated in the Northwest Territories, but I would suggest that it’s not very many.
We need to get our priorities straight as a government. We need more money. At a time when we’re in a reduction mode and trying to find $135 million in reductions over the next two years, we need to look at priorities like front-line resources for children with special needs in our classrooms, treatment for young people who are suffering with addictions, daycare facilities, youth centres and programs for our young people. We need to get our priorities straight as a government, and I would suggest that spending $6 million on a corrections facility should not be a priority spending item for this government.
Mr. Speaker, I could swear, after we had this debate in the House about voting that planning money down for that facility, that I heard the Minister of Justice on the radio saying that they were going to find the planning money from someplace else. Later today I’ll have questions for the Minister of Justice whether or not, in fact, he did make that statement, and if he did, then we’ll have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of what we’ve been doing here for the last several weeks.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker.