Thank you, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the witnesses. I want to share my time with Ms. Karetak-Lindell.
Certainly there seem to be some positive developments. Whether they're yielding positive outcomes seems to be questionable.
I'm really struck by a couple of statements. In your presentation, Mr. Demers, you said that in 1996 the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People said that prisons were the end of a whole series of decisions, societal trends, societal pressures, or whatever you want to call them. The end result has been a lot of aboriginal people ending up in prison or being incarcerated.
Let's make the assumption that some of those forces have been discriminatory, with systemic discrimination and all kinds of barriers in this particular fashion. When I read the correctional investigator's report, it says:
...our Annual Reports have made specific recommendations focused on addressing the systemic and discriminatory barriers that prevent Aboriginal offenders from full benefit of their statutory and constitutional rights and that significantly limit their timely and safe reintegration into the community.
It would seem that there wasn't a cutoff at the prisons, that somehow discrimination was out there in that world and it wasn't happening within the prison system. It would seem to me that at least what the correctional investigator is saying is that this discrimination, this prejudice, is going on within the prison system itself. So you have this vicious circle. Why they end up there is prejudicial and discriminatory. While they're in there, it's prejudicial and discriminatory. They have slow release, but once they're back out, they reoffend and this type of thing.
How would you respond to that particular comment or that particular view of the correctional investigator?