Certainly, I would refer your clerk to our report that we published last year, Connecting the Dots, in which we addressed a lot of those issues. All of the recommendations were accepted by the provincial government. Some of them are being implemented now.
I think there's a lot more here than I can talk about in a few moments, but certainly identifying mental health issues early on and intervening in the right way--these are solutions. All too often, youth dealing with addiction or mental health issues act out, obviously, but the response to that is usually the criminal justice system, not treatment. They're not diverted away from the criminal justice system.
I think that takes the right training. I think it takes youth mental health courts. There's a pilot in Ottawa now, which I'll be visiting on Friday. I hope it really takes off, because I think it's a wonderful approach to diverting youth away from the criminal justice system into treatment. It's multi-disciplinary and multi-departmental so that people are not working in silos. They're actually working together. Once a youth is identified with a mental health issue, that youth is directed away from the criminal justice system into treatment.
If we can do that, if we can identify early enough and provide the right response, then they won't be coming back time and time and time again, so that people like you and me, as former lawyers, can make a living at representing these people. We'll be providing treatment. They won't be going to prison, where they become better criminals. In prison, they're dealing with mental health issues, so they'll be coming back out and we'll be facing property crimes, theft, and violent crimes. In prison, they're just going back into the system, where it costs $100,000 a year just to hold them in a cell while they're not improving.
Solutions include early detection, early intervention, the right kinds of intervention, the diverting of youth dealing with mental health issues away from the criminal justice system into treatment, better coordinated efforts, and better sharing of information. As parents have told me, “My child with autism changed schools and it's like starting all over again.” There's no reason for that in a province like New Brunswick. Moving to a different region should not be like starting all over again. Those parents didn't know anything. They couldn't get the files from the other region. Privacy has become almost an obsession with civil servants; they're very nervous about it, and even when it's in the best interests of a child or a family to share information, they're not doing it.
I think there are solutions out there. There are really good models and good practices being established in all parts of the country. We just need to make sure that we're able to learn from them and support those kinds of models.