Thank you, Mr. Chair. The irony is not lost on me that today I’m sitting here defending this fence when six years ago I was sitting almost in exactly the same seat you are throwing this, actually, exact line out of the budget. At that time six years ago what I wanted to know, and what committee wanted to know, was what has changed in the facility. The facility was originally designed for territorial inmates two years less a day, at a certain security level. At that time we were asking, why does it need a fence when it was originally designed without one. Those are questions I asked before I supported putting this in the budget or bringing it forward, and I wanted to make sure that I had solid answers before I did that.
There are a couple reasons that we need a fence at that facility, which wasn’t in the original design of that facility. One of the things is when that facility was designed, there were no residential lots directly adjacent to that building, and I’m happy to show
you a map of our site where the fences are going to be, but it also identifies the entire residential subdivision that is going out there, and it is basically going right along the building. To get that lease, the builder had to get a promise to put in an honour fence, which will go along the property line, but it’s not a very tall fence compared to what we need in that facility. The fact that that housing unit is there has changed some of the requirements of the building.
The other one and, honestly, more significant, is when that building was constructed, as I indicated, it was mostly designed to be a facility, a correctional facility to house territorial inmates two years less a day. Programs were designed in that way. There was a certain security level on inmates who fall into that category. Since that time the facility has, in a sense, changed the types of inmates that we have in there, given that most, not most, a significant number of inmates that are in there now are actually on remand, and many of them are a significantly higher security risk. As a result of that, we’ve had conversations with Corrections Canada, who have come in and done an analysis of our facility. They’ve done an analysis of our yard, where we do programming, and it was their recommendation, based on the types of inmates and the fact that there is that residential lot beside, that we need to put in a security fence so that we can continue to provide programming to some of the remand inmates as opposed to our territorial two years less a day.
Those are the reasons that we need to put in that facility. In retrospect, I wish we had approved it six years ago because it was a whole lot cheaper at the time.