Madam Chair, thanks very much for the opportunity to speak about it. The problem is this. We have a whole bunch of societal problems, and we've decided that they are going to be dealt with by policing. We're going to arrest our way out of the problem of mental health. We're going to arrest our way out of the problem of drug addiction and arrest our way out of the problem of poverty. This is never going to work. Our resources are being thrown heavily into issues that are not going to be resolved by the criminal justice system.
Addiction and mental health are strongly related, but let's just look at what we're doing. Let's compare our criminalization of drugs with what we do regarding alcohol. Let's say that you knew that one out of 10 bottles of wine is going to kill you, and yet the government insists that all of the labels be removed from the wine bottles, which is what's happening on the streets of Vancouver right now. These are not, if you will, overdoses; they're poisonings. People aren't deliberately overdosing; they're taking things when they don't know what they are because there's no label. We have a whole bunch of problems that we are throwing into the criminal justice system. Instead of investing in poverty reduction, or in mental health or addiction treatment, we're investing in the criminal justice system where we're caging people.
You know, there's a new regime that thinks about the way we look at these things based on trauma-based evidence. The fact is that most of the people in the criminal justice system have suffered trauma in their lives one way or the other, What we're doing is that we're inflicting more trauma on them. Can you imagine taking someone with a serious mental health problem and thinking the solution is to put them solitary confinement in a jail? This will not work.
We have to divert things from the criminal justice system, and as Mr. Brown said, the barriers have to be removed very quickly. The thing people want to avoid is a criminal record. They're not avoiding the counselling; they're not avoiding the stay away; they're not avoiding not having a weapon. They're avoiding a criminal record because it prevents them from working, from going on a school trip with their kids or travelling in the States. They don't want the record.
If there were a way to do all of this work up front, be it probation, counselling or whatever it is, and then have the charge dismissed, as they do in many American states, we would resolve a lot more. There are solutions out there. We need to have fewer people in the system, and we need to make it easier for them to get out of the system; otherwise, we are going to have way too much to deal with for a very long time.
Thank you, Madam Chair.