How long do I have?
On the restorative issue, I think that again there are initiatives going on in restorative justice on a community-by-community basis across the country from the southern regions to the territories.
Unless you know the actual people who are involved in those initiatives, you'll never see the report. You'll never have access to who they are. Someone who's interested in northwestern Ontario and who is doing the same thing would not even know who's in Yukon doing it. Again, that's what I would make the pitch for, a clearing house of information, ideas, and people. So if somebody wants to develop a restorative initiative, here are the people who are involved in it.
There's work out of the U.K. and they actually say, “Here's a project. Here's what the results were. Here's where you can get the report. Here's who did the study. If you're interested, call them or send them an e-mail”. Really it's a matter of facilitating these connections.
Restorative justice plays out in all sorts of different ways across the country and it's evolved over the last number of years. Police have been very involved in many jurisdictions in restorative justice, in running family conferences. School liaison officers pull in kids and run conferences and mediations. Again, it's under the radar. I think there is potential to do more, but with restorative justice, a lot depends on the community context.
What we saw across the north with circle sentencing for example, is that some communities have the capacity and/or interest to become involved in these, and others don't for a variety of reasons.
You have to make sure that the capacity is there in the community to do it. I hadn't really given much thought to connecting it to the report that came out yesterday. I've read through the materials, and using restorative justice as a way to address the issues that were raised in the report, I think, remains an obvious possibility.