The person has never left the criminal court. The drug treatment court is not the Gladue court. The Gladue court is a separate aboriginal court. The drug treatment court is still a criminal court. It's still presided over by a criminal court judge. We have a 30-day assessment period when someone pleads guilty and comes into the program. Within the first 30 days, they're getting a sense of us and we're getting a sense of them. Within the first 30 days, if they decide the program is not for them, they may have their guilty plea struck and go back into the regular criminal process--start all over again, have a trial, do it however they want to.
Once the 30 days are up, they're put to the choice: do you want to stay with the program or go? If they choose to stay, then the option of having the guilty plea struck is gone. If they then do not satisfactorily complete the program, or if they don't satisfy all the conditions for graduation, they will proceed to sentencing before the same drug treatment court judge who took their guilty plea initially. They will not get treated more harshly on sentence for having tried our program and failed. They may get a benefit from the judge for having tried at all.
But when they come in, I, as the Crown, say, “This is the sentence that I'm looking for if they do not complete the program”, and I'll put a sentence position on the record. Unless there's something that changes dramatically, that's the sentence position the Crown takes, if they then end up not successfully completing the program and being sentenced. It's still open to the judge, then, to give them a lesser sentence in part in recognition that they tried the court. But they certainly would not be treated more harshly because they didn't succeed in the court.