Thank you.
Very briefly, the evidence on drug treatment courts, as the two previous speakers have suggested, is equivocal. There are any number of justice system actors in the U.S., where they have a much more extensive system of drug treatment courts, that are raising very serious questions about how those courts are structured and how they work and whether they actually have the benefits that are claimed.
I will share with the committee, by way of follow-up, some material that we prepared recently that reviewed the available evidence about drug treatment courts and showed that the outcome is equivocal.
The second thing I just wanted to say, though, is that even if you accepted for the moment that drug treatment courts were the way to go, and set aside the question of whether or not we should be spending money to use the criminal justice system to coerce people into treatment when we already know people don't have enough access to voluntary treatment, the way that Bill C-15 is written now casts the net so widely that many people would be excluded from being eligible for participation in drug treatment courts. We've given you some examples of that in our brief, so I won't elaborate on them here, but I think to some extent the gestures toward drug treatment courts in Bill C-15 are, to a certain degree, window dressing to try to make the rest of it more palatable, and it's just not.