When the legislation was brought in to increase the victim surcharge fund, many.... Many of the charity-based victims services organizations get no funding at all right now from the victim surcharge fund. Most of it goes to the provinces. They use it to fund their own services.
As my peers have said, there are limitations within the service provided already. Our hope was that with the increase in victim surcharge funding, which we totally supported, the system would for once become better funded, so that the provinces and the territories would have enough funding to fund their own systems and there would be enough funding left over for organizations such as MADD and Boost and other such things.
Right now we support thousands of victims in the court system each year. We get zero funding from the federal government or any provincial governments. We do it all out of charitable donations. The risk to the service we provide goes up and down based on these donations. It's absolutely critical that in victim services....
If you look at other countries, for example, my counterparts in the U.S. get the majority of their funding from victim services, basically from the federal surcharge system there. It adequately funds the system so that the U.S. can have professionals and can be guaranteed victim services throughout the country.
We're far from that. It was the hope that this would happen. It would be a terrible decision, if the courts struck these down and the victim surcharge funds stopped flowing through the system. The other thing, too, is that all of a sudden all of the great services that the provinces provide—we're talking about resources—would be gone too.