There are several important issues here. I would revert to saying that the most important issue is that Canada has a history of drug treatment of convicted drug offenders, in Matsqui, and I would urge everybody who has not examined that history to take a careful look at it. It's really quite revealing. It's very well studied, and the treatment was very well done, and it didn't work at all.
Now, given that, it is of course true--and I would agree with the comments that have been made--that coerced treatment does sometimes work. It is true that everybody needs a gentle push from time to time--not just people who use drugs. All of that is true.
It is true that there are successes from people who have been coerced into treatment, but not very many. It can never get us around or out of the drug problem and the addiction problem, which is tending to swamp us, and you need to know that pushing people into treatment, or gentle persuasion, has been going on for a very long time. It has been the case in Vancouver for the decades that I've been here that judges will simply say to people, “I don't want to see you back in court until you've been in treatment, and you're going to jail next time you're here.” That has always happened. There's nothing new in the gentle pushing of people into treatment.
The important thing is that the act institutionalizes this in a way that is ugly. That is, it's having people face mandatory minimums, quite arbitrary mandatory minimums, and saying, “Okay, do you want to go to jail or do you want to take that mandatory minimum?” This is not gentle persuasion. This is not a gentle push. We're talking about an institutionalized shove of people into treatment, which is quite a different thing.
May I say, as a psychologist, that treatment really is a delicate art; it is a gentle kind of process. And there's nothing in this bill that favours gentle persuasion.