Thank you for that question. I would like to respond to that.
The commissioner of corrections was before this panel some time ago—I believe it's in my submission—and he made a statement to you that I think shines some light on this. He was here on May 29, 2006, and he told you, and I'm quoting from his testimony:About 80% of our offenders have substance abuse problems, either alcohol and/or drugs.... About 12% have a current mental health diagnosis and the challenges that go with that.
That is an understanding that is essentially archaic in our larger, newer understanding of how mental health and substance abuse disorders co-occur. I'm glad you asked this question because it gives me an opportunity to address this point directly, which is that up until very recently it was broadly understood at a popular level of understanding that substance abuse disorders and mental health disorders were essentially separate and could be treated separately, and furthermore, that some substance abuse disorders were failures of personal character and therefore those persons could be in some way stigmatized for bad personal conduct.
Today we understand this situation quite differently. Today the current medicine, the current science, tells us that substance abuse disorders usually occur after the onset of a mental health illness, a mental illness of some kind, often by as much as 10 years. So if we filter the commissioner's understanding through what we know about the co-occurrence of substance abuse and mental health, we can say reasonably that roughly 80% of the current prison population suffers from a concurrent disorder.
So to come directly to your question of why, it's because our understanding of mental illness and substance abuse has come along very slowly. That's why I urge you to bring the Mental Health Commission of Canada into this, because they are bringing forth the best evidence, the best science, and as you move forward in your deliberations you will learn that it's imperative to treat persons with mental illness and substance abuse disorders in an integrated treatment model. My concern is that as we grow the rate of incarceration—I presume the government is serious that it wants to grow the rate of incarceration—we need the resources to address these treatment problems, because currently CSC is unable to fill these positions, to staff these therapeutic positions. So that's the concern I leave before you.