It's good to see you and thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
The Drug Prevention Network of Canada is basically in support of this bill, but we agree with Rebecca and Mr. Sapers that it doesn't really begin to address the important issues. There are two constituents at least involved in this bill, parole officers and people coming out of prison; for lack of better words, we call them felons or criminals. Neither of these groups of people are well served in particular by this bill because the bill is okay. It's basically saying that if you break the rules, we're going to yank you back into stir. That's fine because we're asking people to just behave themselves. But we're not giving them the tools to do that, and it is possible to give them those tools.
Parole officer, unfortunately, used to be a very admirable profession. People ran from schools of social work to become parole officers because it meant engagement with people who were struggling. Today, the life of a parole officer is a guy stuck behind a desk. He barely knows who his clients are and he's filling out papers. There's not much a bill like this can do about that, but it's worth looking at what the parole service thinks it's doing.
But let's talk about the other constituents, the drug addicts. I agree completely with Rebecca with whom I just spent the last two days locked up in a hotel in Ottawa and 50 other people who are involved in recovery work. Don't write your own jokes, please. Just relax.
This really does nothing to further the cause of people getting a grip on their addictions. Fortunately there is a piece of good news. I want to ask all of you, when you have a moment, to google the Nanaimo Correctional Centre where the former warden, Don Moody, did something very courageous and unusual some years ago. He created a drug-free unit. The federal government in 1970 gave me a fair bit of money to do exactly that at Matsqui Institution, and after three months I gave them the money back and said, “This can't be done. You can't create a drug-free unit in a maximum security prison because the environment is so negative.” But he proved me wrong and he created a phenomenally successful program. He's retired but the program still continues at the Nanaimo Correctional Centre, which is a provincial institution. They have very tough, wonderful, dedicated people, meaning these prison staff and 50 inmates who are being clean and sober in this unit. The tragedy is that the moment they come out they're like lemmings falling into the sea, because we then haven't provided the halfway houses and other kinds of resources where these folks can go while they make the transition back into normal civilized life.
Again, we don't have a problem; the Drug Prevention Network of Canada doesn't have a huge problem with the bill. We feel the bill is probably savvy, and politically it looks good. It's a good move politically, but it can't really with these few words address a complicated issue. What we need to begin looking at is how we provide treatment resources right in the prisons.
Understand this, ladies and gentlemen: there are more drugs per square inch in our federal prisons than there are on the streets. Prisons are a hotbed of drug and alcohol use. Corrections officers are involved. Everybody is involved. The temptation to make money, the temptation for special favours, is just too large in such a tight, limited environment.
What are you going to do? You're going to put people there, leave them there for a couple of years, and they learn nothing. They come out and they're going to continue to cost us a fortune. At minimum half of those inmates could be released early, not on their own but released to some kind of program where they learn something.
Again, I'm going to make this very simple. The bill is okay, but it can't really begin to address the real issues and yet it's possible to do that. I don't have to echo, I don't have to repeat the wonderful enumeration that Rebecca gave you because she spelled it all out.
Thank you.