You've made a good point. Sometimes you can get confusion when you're talking with people in this area. They don't go to prison, they don't go to jail, if they've been found not criminally responsible. In fact, they go to a hospital and that's entirely appropriate.
The boards that are set up under provincial auspices include people who will have a look at this individual to see what the best way of dealing with the individual is. Keeping the individual detained is one of the options, of course, but conditional release is another one, or an absolute discharge if in fact it's determined that the individual doesn't need to be detained. These medical questions come into play but there are certain guidelines that are given to these boards. Again, they're modified within this particular bill.
Your colleague mentioned making sure the protection of the public is the paramount consideration before we get into this. So there are a number of considerations taken into account, as they should be. But again, nobody should be confused about this. People aren't being jailed. This is not part of the prison system.
My colleague, Vic Toews, will tell you that he is very determined and very supportive of the efforts within the Canadian prison system to get these individuals the kind of mental health treatment that they need. Again that's another expenditure from the federal government in the whole area of mental health, and one, of course, that I support as well.
But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people who have been hospitalized within the provincial system. I'm a big supporter of giving more money to the provinces to assist them in health care, but that being said, they are within this system and we want to get them the help they need, because everybody benefits from that. The individual benefits, and certainly society benefits. It's a safer, better place in which to live when they do get that kind of help.