I would bet that if the commissioner of corrections were here, he could find you 300 people in half an hour in the general population who would very well use an intermediate facility, plus people coming out of the RTC. I think people from both directions could use these kinds of facilities.
The Correctional Service of Canada has a lot of people who have mid-level mental illness, for sure. I don't think finding the number of people would be the problem; I think the difficulty is in the complexity of that kind of research. With the homelessness research we have going on, people who know about research—and I don't pretend to—tell us it's the biggest operational research on homelessness that's ever been done in the world. It's a very commendable project.
It's very expensive as well. These things are not something one can do without a significant piece of funding. That program, over five years, costs $110 million. I was deputy minister of housing in Ontario, and I know how much housing costs. Dividing $110 million by five doesn't give you a lot of housing dollars if you're putting people in rent geared to income accommodation. It costs a lot to live in our housing situations these days. Housing plus treatment is an expensive process.
Housing plus treatment plus research would be an expensive process, but it would very worth doing. It might very well alleviate a lot of the difficulties in the general correctional institutions federally that are caused by, if you can put it that way, people with a serious mental illness--people who are making the lives of correctional workers and their fellow inmates unbearable because they don't know what to do with them and they're very complex cases to deal with.
I think it would be doable to have that kind of research project. We have a lot of people who know a lot about research, and we can help the Correctional Service with that. We are running about 25 research projects now, plus these ones on homelessness.