Mr. Speaker, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the answers I got from the Minister of Justice with respect to the women’s correctional facility in Fort Smith, and that would be putting it politely.
We passed a motion in this House to remove from the budget money for the planning for this facility. To me that should register on the other side of the House as: “Wait. There was debate.” The idea with waiting was to maybe assess these structural issues with Arctic Tern and look at the possibility of re-profiling that facility. For me to hear the Minister of Justice say that they could potentially look within the Department of Justice for $320,000 for planning money is a little frightening. First of all, (a) they didn’t get the message, and (b) that means that they’ve got $320,000 worth of discretionary funding
somewhere within the Department of Justice at a time when we’re trying to cut $135 million from the budget.
I’d like to ask the Minister: did you understand the motion to say that we did not want to proceed with any further work on this facility this year?