Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and to the honourable member.
Addiction has been found by our courts and certainly by our medical system to be primarily a disability. In fact, in Ontario, there was a decision last week that found it could be a cause of one's primary disability in terms of applications for disability funding. Drug courts entrench a criminal justice approach that suggests addiction or substance use is a moral choice or a moral failure rather than a symptom of a disease or a condition that can be best treated through other means, other than incarceration, of course.
Drug courts inherently have a problem in that to get into the drug court program you lose rights. You have to plead guilty and therefore you lose the right to appeal. So there's a loss of human rights and civil liberties inherent in the drug court system. The real problem, however, is that when you fail in the drug court program, when you fail a urine test or you're caught using drugs again, you serve the original full term of your sentence. It is literally the equivalent, if we accept addiction as a medical condition—