I think you've touched on a couple of things that are really important about the court. One is the continuity of personnel. There is a main drug treatment court judge, Mr. Justice Bentley, and a small number of backup judges. I am the main federal prosecutor with the drug treatment court. There is one main prosecutor from the province. We have a very small number of backup prosecutors. The two court liaisons who Richard mentioned earlier from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health are constant.
So when we have the closed pre-court meetings, everyone knows who the participants are. Everyone know who's been struggling and who's been doing really well. It's the same when we come into court. Everyone knows everyone by name.
If you had a lot of turnover of any of the players--the judiciary, the prosecutors, or the treatment providers--you would lose some of that. That results in very much of a team approach. We still have adversarial roles between the Crown and the defence, and the judge is still the decision-maker, but it's not as aggressively adversarial as in a traditional criminal court. It's much more of a team approach, where everyone's goal is to see this person succeed in their recovery.
