Justice committee  Thank you very much. Offhand, I can speak to a few of the groups you mentioned. I would refer you to a large study completed relatively recently by the National Trajectory Project, which looked specifically at those found not criminally responsible or unfit to stand trial. As f

Justice committee  I think a lot of the vision or the goals that Legal Aid's mental health strategy is driving towards would also be goals that you could achieve by following some of the recommendations I'm making here today. For example, that strategy identifies the value in having continuity of l

Justice committee  I suppose if you took the approach of thinking about this in terms of vision or where we want to go with this, you could think about such things as perhaps earmarking funds.

Justice committee  I think that a bit of investment in this particular group of accused could go a long way. If you tie those funds to models that are shown to be effective, you'll have set a standard that courts can attempt to achieve. Why not have performance benchmarking? Why not set targets? Wh

Justice committee  Sure. Right now, in practice, an accused person with a mental health or addiction issue comes into court, and there's a whole panoply of potential diversion options that might be made available to that person, through either bail or a mental health court or a drug treatment court

Justice committee  I think systemic thinking would actually be encouraged. Right now if one court has a few more resources than another, they might share who goes where. This happens already in Toronto, where the mental health court at Old City Hall takes the high threshold clients, and the other c

Justice committee  Yes. If you look at the legislative framework provided by the Criminal Code, I think there's a great opportunity to have it better represent what's actually happening on the ground. Right now it's kind of a gum-and-string solution. Everyone is trying to figure out how we can dive

Justice committee  It's difficult to measure. If you look into the literature and the studies that have been done, you'll find numbers all over the place. What they all add up to is that a very, very significant proportion of criminally accused people have some kind of mental health issue or an add

Justice committee  Yes, I have been leading development of LAO's mental health strategy over the last four years or so.

Justice committee  Oh, yes.

Justice committee  In essence, what I'm suggesting is that there seems to be a groundswell of opinion and widespread recognition that all of these kinds of mental health programs, diversion programs, bail beds is good stuff. Everybody wants to get behind it. What I see, though, is a lack of coordin

Justice committee  Thank you very much. I want to begin by giving you a bit of my background, since I appear before you today in my personal capacity. I have been an advocate for mental health rights for over 10 years. I have served as legal counsel to the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office, whic