Infrastructure is certainly a major issue, but it's broader than that, simply in terms of being faced, for example, with a very significant change in our offender profile and population.
We're looking at inmates who have more extensive histories of violence and who are more problematic in terms of substance abuse. There are all kinds of problems in terms of mental health problems: 12% of our male offenders and 26% of our female offenders are assessed with a mental disorder upon admission, so we have to respond to that. We're working within a context in which we're now developing almost a bimodal offender population; almost a quarter of our population are lifers who are going to be with us for a long time, but at the same time the trend is to shorter sentences, so we're getting a tremendous increase in the number of offenders with two- and three-year sentences.
We traditionally have been geared to the normal distribution in terms of our program planning and delivery, and we have to find a way now to give effect to the correctional plans, particularly for those offenders with short terms, to try to get the maximum effectiveness of intervention within the time we have available.
Within that, over the years, of course, our resource situation has become more difficult. We have internally reallocated--which has been our past characteristic--as much as we can. We have held back on maintenance, for example, in order to use those resources to fund other sorts of priorities. This has exacerbated in some respects our infrastructure problem, so what was needed is now an emergency.
Our message to people clearly has been that if you're looking at us in the short term, we're broke. We're really struggling to maintain the results that we have been able to achieve within that. While we are awaiting the results of, let's say, the deliberations of the corrections review and whatever that may bring, the government has given us some two-year bridge funding that we need to at least sustain ourselves and carry out the very basic kinds of things. We are now developing an implementation plan that we will take to Treasury Board.