I think it might be a pity at this early stage of the development of mental health courts to have them try to deal with all comers, the most difficult kind of person. If someone has committed a murder and they have a serious mental illness, they're going to have to be handled in a very high security environment as they likely are a dangerous person. So there's no getting away from the fact that, for public safety and for deterrence, some people are going to be in a very secure facility. The general court system needs to learn how to handle those people rather than expecting all courts, all mental health courts, to become the refuge for everyone who appears who has a mental illness. So I wouldn't recommend having the mental health courts at this stage of their development try to do that.
But the general court system needs to have--and it's a must that they have--much more ability to call upon psychiatric assistance when they're making sentences and making recommendations for where the person will be placed. And then, of course, the provincial system or the federal system has to have the adequate assessment process right at the beginning of a person's entry into their system to know where to put them, to know what kind of care to engage them in.
I might just say, because I was involved in the provincial system for 20 years, that all of these people come from somewhere to the Correctional Service of Canada. They don't come from the courts directly there. They're always in a provincial institution for some period of time. If those institutions aren't dealing adequately with them--and most often they're not--then we've lost a tremendous distance with those individuals before they ever get to Correctional Service of Canada.
So just imagine that I have a serious mental illness and I'm in Toronto Jail. I spend a year there waiting for my trial and processing. Who knows what happens to me in terms of my mental health condition, but it's not likely to get better during that period of time.
So fixing the services for mentally ill and substance abuse persons in the federal system isn't enough. We have to fix it for the whole of the correctional system, and I guess I would say we need to see it as an integrated system.