Thank you very much, Chair.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak. I'm obviously filling in for Mr. Davies, who's required in the House to speak.
Thank you for your presentation. I was here for most of it. I read your report. As a former Ontario corrections minister, I'm certainly familiar at the provincial level. At that time the provincial system in Ontario was as big as the federal. I don't know if that's still the case, but I suspect that.... At least so far it's like that. Who knows what will happen now.
But also, prior to that, being on Hamilton city council as an alderman back in the 1980s, I headed up a task force looking at mental health services in the community for those who pretty much were on the street. What we found—and I was referring to what you mentioned on page 2, the revolving door—was that there would be an incident of some sort. The police would be called. They would take them to the hospital. That would hold for a while. They may get out, or they may not. Eventually, they end up in jail for a short period of time. Then they're back out on the street. Then the police, then the hospital, then the jail, and there's just a revolving door. I haven't seen anything since then, either in my time as the minister or since, that suggests that's getting any better.
We know the shame of it, certainly in Ontario. I don't know about the rest of the country, but in Ontario, when the decision was made to deinstitutionalize the psychiatric hospitals in the late 1960s and 1970s, as the back wards were opened up and people were allowed out on the street, that money that was saved was supposed to be reinvested into the services that would be required in the community, since these people were now being removed from those back wards—and they were back wards: locked, dark, forgotten-about places in our society. And that money was just soaked up by the government of the day and taken into general revenue. So what was a problem in the prisons and in the hospitals became a problem on our streets and in what we in Hamilton call second-level lodging homes, which provided services for them. Anyway, all of that is to give a context for the Ontario experience.
The American example is the closest we have in terms of an acceleration of the number of inmates increasing in a short period of time. The American system, as I understand it, is still predicated on private prisons. For a while, in the last decade, the biggest growth industry in the United States was building and operating prisons. If you're running prisons for a profit, it makes sense that the more prisoners there are--guess what?--more profit.
I'm curious: in that system and in that experience that they've gone through, that we're about to head into, are there any lessons at all to be learned in terms of services for drug and other substance abuse programs, the hiring of professional services? In other words, did the privatized system take care of this problem in a way that can provide us with any examples that we want to follow? Or are there some lessons there on the downside that we need to take into account?