No, absolutely not.
Unfortunately, it's a recurring disease and often relapsing, and so on. The old saying is dope fiends shoot dope, and drunks drink. It's a very hard habit to free oneself of.
The problem, Mr. Falk, with this bill is that the very language of it shows a lack of understanding of how addictions work. The language is about drug-sniffing dogs and urinalysis tests. As soon as you're in that territory, you've lost the war, because the horse is already out of the barn. You have to be talking about people, what their expectations are, what their needs are, who they think they are, the crazy traumatic lives they've led, and so on, and the skills that they haven't yet developed, or the skills that they've abandoned. It's amazing how many people with addiction problems have great, great sets of skills, but they're so caught up with their substance use that they just abandon the ability to play the saxophone or run a company. The language of it itself has to change.
I mean, I agree with Howard Sapers. Parole officers already have a lot of these tools, and it's fine to give them another one. I don't think it's a bad thing to enact this bill, but don't expect it to do very much, because it really doesn't come to grips with the reality in front of us. The reality in front of us, Mr. Falk, is that I would estimate as high as 80% of inmates in correctional institutions across Canada are largely not a huge danger to the community. There are people who are a huge danger and they have to be locked up, and good for us for doing that, but most of them are just goofy people who have made really bad choices and they are driven by an addiction. What are we going to do about that?
I've been involved in this business off and on for 50 years, and consistently for 50 years we haven't done anything about it. We don't train correctional officers in the prisons very much and we don't train classification officers in the prisons very much to actually engage inmates in real discussions about who they are and where they have to go.