Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the panel for being here.
As Mr. Ménard mentioned, he was involved in the legal profession for a long time, and some of us on this side have the same story from a different perspective.
One of the things I think the law enforcement side would say is that over the last 30 or 35 years, mental health issues within the provinces have changed a great deal. It certainly used to be one of the tools in the tool box that police officers had, which was to properly, I think, use the mental health act across the country and to frequently divert people who had mental health issues from the criminal justice system into the mental health system.
I recognize that corrections, both at the provincial and the federal level, are now ending up with people who make it very difficult for the correctional system to deal with. What would be ordinarily offenders with a problem...more importantly, now we have mental health issues, people who have a problem who end up being dealt with in the criminal system. Perhaps—I'm not accusing anybody of anything—the tools have changed a little bit in an unfortunate way.
When you talk about the need for treatment--as all of my colleagues have, and we would agree there's a need for treatment--the difficulty, as I understand it from both what you've told us here and what we've read, is that proverbial “you can take the horse to water, but you can't make him drink”. We can have great programs—I believe we do and we perhaps need more—but there is no mechanism. I think Mr. Holland addressed this. There is no mechanism to force that treatment on someone who doesn't wish to take it.
I don't know if you're in a position now where you would have some suggestions as to how we might do that. Do you need more resources if they were available? Or is the problem a bigger one in that we need to find a way to get the people who need the help to get the help?