When I was a police chief in Ottawa, we had a mobile mental health crisis unit, which meant that we had mental health workers working hand in glove with police officers supporting [Technical difficulty—Editors]. The concern is that it's still a downstream service and I would argue that we would be much better off with a large infusion of funding into both mental illness and drug addiction to try to head off that problem, rather than still having police officers show up at the door.
My concern now is.... The Province of Nova Scotia is an example. In some locations, it's over a year wait-list to see a psychiatrist today. I think we need to actually have an infusion of funds into both mental illness treatment that allows people to see them before it becomes a police phone call. The same would go for drug addiction where the average street addict is committing multiple crimes every day just to try to satisfy their addiction. Many of them are still waiting for months and months or longer to get into residential drug treatment. My suggestion would be the money actually be spent upstream, not downstream.