Yes. If you look at the legislative framework provided by the Criminal Code, I think there's a great opportunity to have it better represent what's actually happening on the ground. Right now it's kind of a gum-and-string solution. Everyone is trying to figure out how we can divert people with a mental illness, short of serious and persistent mental illness, out of the system. We know that criminalizing and punishing them for their disability is not going to lead to good outcomes. They're trying.
What I'm suggested is that there is an opportunity for the legislation to correspond to the actual practices happening right now. If you do that, you'll get a lot more out of the system. You'll find a lot of efficiencies. You'll take a lot of the uncertainty out of it. You'll take a lot of the randomness out of it.
If you give it that kind of structure and that kind of certainty and that kind of vision, then you can plan around it and you can make longer-term plans as opposed to trying to cobble together a program from year to year. What often happens is that a particular judge, crown counsel, or defence counsel takes a local leadership role in all of this, and if they leave, the program might leave with them.
I think there's a tremendous opportunity here. From the federal perspective, you can tackle the Criminal Code provisions. You can expand what we mean by an accepted mental disorder for the purposes of diversion and support of bail. I think there should be funding for more research. I like the idea of benchmarking; it's a wonderful idea. In Ontario I see that there are 52 courthouses, and all 52 are doing something different. It would be great to find some standardization across them.