Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 7 - Evidence - April 29, 2004
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 29, 2004
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 11:07 a.m. to study on issues arising from, and developments since, the tabling of its final report on the state of the health care system in Canada in October 2002. In particular, the committee shall be authorized to examine issues concerning mental health and mental illness; and to give consideration to Bill S-17, to amend the Citizenship Act.
Senator Marjory LeBreton (Deputy Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Deputy Chairman: Our witnesses are from Correctional Services Canada, Mr. Motiuk and Ms. Bouchard; from Simon Fraser University by videoconferencing, Ms. Margaret Jackson; from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, Mr. Bill Cameron and Ms. Marie-Chantal Girard; and, as an individual, Ms. Pat Capponi.
Ms. Pat Capponi, as an individual: I would ask the Clerk of the Committee to pass round my briefs. I am here to speak as someone labelled a chronic psychiatric patient.
Institutionalization meant confinement and custodial care on the back wards of provincial institutions, often for decades. Those labelled chronic mental patients were infantilised, over medicated, shocked, lobotomized and controlled. Their world was dramatically reduced to endless card games, daytime television shows and the constant smoking of bales of tobacco, the only reward for good behaviour. There were no expectations placed upon them and no decisions they were required to make. Patients learned over and over again the lessons of absolute dependence in every aspect of their meagre existence, as well as the harsh consequences of resisting those in authority.
Patients were released — ``de-institutionalized'' — in unseemly haste, with prescriptions and bus tickets and addresses of for-profit rooming and boarding homes. However, they carried the effects of the institutions within them as no effort had been made to reorient individuals to life in the real world. Few of the dollars saved from the closure of beds followed them into the community.
They were broken, hugely vulnerable, unaware of their rights or obligations, often illiterate with no job skills, no friends and few remaining contacts with families. They were ripe for exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, and the temporary escape into addictions. They had no defences. In this new world, they were still confined by fear and poverty and the angry neighbourhood reaction to their presence. Exhausted by the medications that crippled them, people slept away long hours of the day and night in over-crowded rooms.
That was the scope of their lives, and the professionals who signed prescriptions for them felt it was all they were capable of. Years went by. Many patients died from suicide or physical illness; others continued in this half-life while advances in care went to benefit those deemed more worthy.
We saw that as the older patients faded away, newly labelled men and women from the same social strata took their places and quickly learned many of the same lessons of the powerlessness and defeat. Institutionalization was continuing in the community, defined by the lack of care and indifference to our plight.
Some of us, a very few at first, started to question received wisdom about who we were and what we were capable of. We exposed, through the media, the conditions we were forced to live in. We began to deal with civic and provincial bureaucrats and politicians. We asked, where were the agencies that were funded to work with former patients but in fact excluded them? We began to engage in a struggle in the early 1980s that would take a quarter of a century to see gains and real differences. We did it largely without help or support from those charged with our care, with some notable exceptions.
Dr. Reva Gerstein, appointed to be the Mayor's Action Task Force on Discharged Psychiatric Patients in Toronto, was the first to listen to us and the first to act on what she heard. This, in itself, was empowering and validating. Over time, we won the right to occupy positions on management boards of agencies and to create patient councils in provincial hospitals. More importantly, we won the recognition of the need to integrate professional staff with psychiatric survivors.
We began to understand that the way we looked and felt, the way we were forced to live, our isolation, exclusion, hopelessness and excruciating poverty had little to do with whatever diagnosis we carried. We looked at the simply poor; how the stresses and strains of trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs mimicked the symptoms of mental illness. We realized we were miserable because we were thigh-deep in miserable circumstances.
We began to tackle poverty and powerlessness directly through the creation of psychiatric-survivor-run businesses. Led by my sister Diana, who had battled mental illness and heroin addiction, they lobbied and developed survivor businesses in the Province of Ontario — a radical departure from traditional vocational rehabilitation. Our community began to see that there were possibilities out there for us. We began to have role models and leaders. We were achieving, breaking myths and assumptions about who and what we were, and we were forming community. Chronic psychiatric patients showed commitment in reporting to work on time. In acquiring new skills, lasting friendships were created and people grabbed every opportunity to learn from each other's experiences. We were successfully attacking the stigma within and without the mental health system where millions of dollars spent on elaborate advertising campaigns had failed.
One example is in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale, where the hostility of ratepayers, local politicians and businesses had been a major factor in keeping the ``mental patients'' scared and isolated. One young employee of the Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses, OCAB, came up with an idea and visited business improvement organizations in the area, offering to undertake the care of the large cement planters in front of each establishment that at the time had been reduced to garbage and cigarette-butt receptacles. Over time, Parkdale Green Thumb Enterprises won accolades and friendships for its professionalism and some of our greatest detractors now celebrate with us every achievement.
Still, for every advance there are setbacks. A mental patient is just that in the eyes of many. We are not entitled to be full human beings behind that label, not expected to have basic personalities that mirror those in the greater population — good, bad and everything in between. A schizophrenic is a schizophrenic and every action is attributed to that disease and not to the underlying nature of the individual or his circumstances. A person who is bitter and angry or who is addicted to crack or other drugs does something terrible and a chorus of voices are raised against all who carry the same label. Our civil rights are affected as laws are passed to ``protect society'' from the mentally ill.
As a result, we have assertive community treatment teams, ACT teams that primarily ensure that the client takes the medication. Though the mandate was supposed to be broader and remains so on paper, there are few decent places for teams to refer their clients to, and even fewer work opportunities. For staff to speak of this is to endanger their jobs. Whistle-blowing is no more popular in mental health than it is in Ottawa. The only resources we have in any abundance yet again are expensive psychiatrists, occupational therapists, nurses, and social workers who are reduced to delivering pills and needles, organizing ``outings'' and maintaining the client in the community.
This goal was first rejected by those who found themselves maintained in terrible establishments — ``maintained'' in medicated fogs. Some years ago when we questioned the value of funding agencies and teams simply to keep people quiescent in misery. We demanded that the success of any program be judged by the client, evaluated on quality-of-life issues: a home in which we are not afraid to live, a job that is not vocational rehabilitation, and friends who are not receiving salaries to spend time with us. Instead, funding has increasingly gone to keep discharged patients in chemical straightjackets for the comfort of the mainstream community. If a client is depressed and upset that his life is so narrowly constricted, if he is fearful of an abusive landlord, if poverty leaves him hungry and restless, his medication is increased. If he has the remaining life inside his body to be angry, the dosages will ensure that anger is forgotten.
We have shown that those labelled seriously mentally ill who work within survivor-run businesses require less medication and spend less time in hospital. We have shown that the worst thing that was done to us was to tell us that we could not achieve and that nothing could be expected of us, without risking another episode of psychosis. Stealing lives, hopes and whatever shreds of ambitions we carried within us and replacing all that with custodial care inside and outside of institutions is an ongoing crime against our community and our country's shame.
We have learned that we cannot depend on those working within the system to advocate for us. We cannot even expect them to see us as full individuals behind our obscuring labels. We need a small portion of the resources captured by institutions and agencies to create our own paths and opportunities and the recognition by the federal government of our right to full citizenship.
We are transforming ourselves in spite of stigma, coercion and poverty. We hope that we are transforming a system that instead of helping and healing, continues to place barriers, obstacles and limitations in our path. We want support, helpers who listen and act on what they hear, resources and access to decent housing, education and employment.
Mental illness is bad enough but the side effects — the consequences of being labelled in Canada — should not be tolerated in our country. We have lost too much and too many over the decades and the time has come for change.
Mr. Larry Motiuk, Director General, Research, Correctional Service of Canada: It is a great pleasure to present before you some information on behalf of Correctional Service of Canada, CSC, in relation to this issue on metal health and mental illness, particularly in respect of the federal correctional system. I have with me my colleague Ms. Françoise Bouchard, the Director General of Health Services at CSC who will begin.
Ms. Françoise Bouchard, Director General Health Service, Correctional Service of Canada: Over the last year, we have produced a variety of reports at CSC.
Our presentation today will focus on the mandate we have in corrections, a description of the issues, and the prevalence of mental disorders among offenders in the criminal justice system — Mr. Motiuk will address that. We will also provide information on the prevalence and nature of mental health problems and a description of the mental health care continuum of care and our CSC capacity at this time. We will invite any questions you have.
The legislative mandate of federal corrections is through the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, which states,
The service shall provide every inmate with essential health care and reasonable access to non-essential mental health care that will contribute to the inmate's rehabilitation and successful reintegration into the community.
Basically, federal offenders are not considered as beneficiaries of the provincial health system and come completely under federal responsibility.
Furthermore, our policy states, ``a continuum of essential care for those suffering from mental, emotional or behavioural disorders will be provided consistent with professional and community standards.''
Mr. Motiuk: If you turn to page five of the presentation deck, you will see a flow showing the process involved for mentally disordered federal offenders.
I will set the frame in which offenders enter into the correctional system. For federal corrections, those who are sentenced to two years or more of incarceration come to our jurisdiction. Those who are sentenced to less than two years go to the provincial jurisdictions. When they arrive to us upon sentence, we conduct a thorough and comprehensive assessment upon admission for each and every individual. I will not go into the full details of the assessment process, but it is comprehensive. It does take a period of time. We ask some fundamental questions in the area of mental health and mental illness.
Following assessment, we develop a correctional plan for each offender. They are directed to either a regular institution or a treatment institution. Ms. Bouchard will describe later the types of services we have in these institutions.
On page six, we have a chart. As I mentioned, we have been systematically assessing our offender population for some time. We invested heavily in the early 1990s to develop an integrated systemic approach for every admission to identify who they are, what kind of problems they experienced and what, particularly, are their needs in order to develop a individualized, case-based treatment plan.
This chart shows the basic trend data over a five-year period ranging from 1997 to 2001. We measure four indicators for each and every admission — of which there are roughly 6,000 to 7,000 each year. We determine if they come with a current diagnosis of a mental disorder, if they have been hospitalized prior to admission and if they have been an outpatient.
As we can see in the graphs the trend line is very clear. It is upward. Six out of every 100 new federal admissions arriving from the court in 1997 were ``diagnosed as disordered currently'' by 2001, this proportion increased to 8.5 per 100, an increase of nearly 40 per cent.
The table on page seven presents a snapshot of characteristics at admission. There is a difference between the admission population and those currently with us. As you can imagine, many offenders spend a long period of time under sentence and some for life. When we take a snapshot of our offender population we determine how many arrived at the institution with a diagnosis or how many had received mental health services prior to arrival?
More than one out of every 10 men and two out of every 10 women under federal jurisdiction were diagnosed as having a mental disorder upon admission. This number tells us that somewhere between 11 and 12 per cent of our population currently have issues in this regard.
On the following page, you can see what kinds of health concerns exist at intake. It comes as no surprise that the majority of our offender population have significant issues with substance abuse and addictions. Currently, we know that 80 per cent of our offender population arrives with a need for intervention in this area. A link can be with the abuse or addiction to their crime or offence in approximately 50 per cent of the cases. Note too that a percentage of men have had issues in terms of suicide and other kinds of emotional disturbance upon arrival.
In the late 1980s, we engaged in a large epidemiological survey to get beyond just prevalence of mental disorder within our institutional populations to arrive at the nature. We have conducted a number of studies and I would be pleased to make these available to members of the committee. They have been published in the past and are available on our Internet sites. These studies provide many details on the nature and prevalence on mental disorder within our offender populations. You can see some figures here that show that there is considerable complexity in the number of issues that our population present.
In respect of the number of comparisons of not only people in the institutions but also those under supervision, Correctional Service Canada is currently responsible for managing about 12,500 inmates and 8,000 or 9,000 offenders on conditional release under active supervision by our parole officers. We realize that some of these individuals present concerns in terms of management in the community as well.
The table on page 11 shows the incidence of co-morbidities or co-occurring mental disorders. It is clear that within our offender population many of these individual cases represent multiple problems. We have done many studies on co-morbidity. Some have been done on both the provincial and federal correction systems. We see that there are co- occurring disorders. The issue of substance abuse co-occurring with other major disorders is quite and high.
We see in our population major categories of disorders that are about two to three times higher in our inmate population relative to the general population in the community. There is also a lifetime prevalence rate of mental disorder in about 84 per cent of our population, which is more than twice that of the general population.
According to recent trends, the percentage of the federal offender population with mental health problems is growing even though overall prison admissions and the institutional population counts have been in decline. Although offenders with mental disorders still represent a relatively small proportion of the overall population, their increasing numbers and complexity of problems — multi-morbidity — are cause for concern. Access to mental health services and treatment — particularly medication — requires an enhanced CSC response capacity.
Ms. Bouchard: We also brought a recent publication of the Canadian Public Health Association that portrays a better picture of the health care needs assessment of federal inmates in Canada. There is a chapter on mental health. It comprises some of the studies to which Mr. Motiuk has referred. It also provides a more detailed description of some of the issues regarding mental health and recidivism. I will leave copies with the committee.
The issue of mental health treatment for offenders is one that we must face as an organization. Inmates come in with two types of need: criminogenic needs — the nature of the corrections business — and mental health treatment needs. Mental health treatment for offenders is required if we want to reduce the disabling effects of serious mental illness in order to maximize each inmate's ability to participate electively in correctional programs; to help keep the prison safe for staff, inmates, volunteers and visitors; and to decrease the needless extremes of human suffering caused by mental illness.
Treatment of mentally ill offenders should improve their chances to follow their correctional plans, to participate in the programs that are offered regarding their criminogenic needs, and to prepare them for community release.
A continuum of mental health services has been recommended that we implement within Correctional Services. That includes crisis intervention, acute care programs, chronic care programs, special needs units, outpatient treatment in terms of the institution versus our treatment centres, consultation services to our regular institutions, as well as discharge and transfer planning.
How well do we do in that?
We have established five regional treatment centres, four of which are psychiatric hospitals in the provinces where they are located. In the Atlantic region we have the Shepody Healing Centre, which has 40 beds available; the Quebec region has 120 beds at the Archambault unit; in the Ontario region, there is the Regional Treatment Centre in Kingston, with 149 beds; in the Prairie region, there is the Regional Psychiatric Centre, a 194-bed facility that is also linked to the University of Saskatchewan through a special agreement; the Pacific region has the Regional Treatment Centre in Abbotsford with 192 beds.
We also provide intermediate and ambulatory care to our regular institutions. Intermediate care for the treatment of our chronically mentally disordered offenders and those requiring crisis intervention and transitional care is provided by mental health staff — mostly psychologists, nurses and contract psychiatrists during clinics — located in regular institutions.
Each of our own institutions has what is supposed to constitute a mental health team to monitor, assess and treat people with mental health problems. Ambulatory care is provided, mostly by psychiatrists and nurses, to those who require additional mental health support while residing in regular institutions. We also have some prevention and psycho-educational programs. We have established a suicide prevention program, for example.
We do have some capacity issues. While our five treatment centres are directed to provide specialized intensive care, they are lacking capacity in respect of resources. We do not have the staffing ratio we would like to achieve, and which is needed to manage those cases. We have many psychologists; however, they are primarily engaged in providing risk assessment related to the inmate's correctional plan. Therefore, often we are struggling to answer the urgent needs, more than the long-term needs.
Currently, there is no formal training for our staff — I am referring to correctional staff. Increasingly, as we have offenders with those kinds of disorders, it is clear that staff have to have the special skills needed to manage and answer their needs.
Addressing the needs of offenders who require specialized mental health intervention can reduce the ``revolving door'' phenomenon. There is what we call a revolving door between corrections, both federal and provincial, but also the community, where often people who are afflicted with mental health disorders find themselves in the criminal justice system. While mentally disordered offenders are often less likely to reoffend — including violently — they are more likely to return to prison due to a breach of their release conditions — often as a result of inadequate support while they are in the community.
Based on the points we have shared with you, we have some observations. There is a need for a comprehensive, inter-jurisdictional strategy for the identification of management of offenders with mental disorders. While we try to do a comprehensive assessment at reception, much still needs to be done in respect of those identifying offenders who have mental health problems early in their sentences. That should also occur within the provincial systems as early as possible.
There is a need to have better links between the justice system and the health care system within the provinces. The search for solutions should start before imprisonment for those afflicted with mental health disorders. Within the federal corrections system, work is under way to improve capacities to assess and treat. However, we have no guarantees we will ever have additional resources to do that. We are, right now, conducting a review of our utilization of beds in our treatment centres to maximize and direct them to those who have the most needs. Sometimes that calls for a change of culture between correctional culture and treatment culture, so there is lots of work still to be done.
Our last observation is the issue of continuity of care when people are released. This calls for better links between us, at the federal correctional level, and our provincial counterparts and the community mental health care out there. Partnerships are key to address those gaps, but what will be the incentive to create those partnerships?
Ms. Margaret Jackson, Director, Institute for Studies in Criminal Justice Policy, Simon Fraser University: Madam Chair and honourable senators, thank you for this opportunity to talk about this issue.
I would like to touch on a number of the issues that have been raised this morning, primarily arising out of prevalence of mental illness and substance abuse among federally sentenced inmates. Some of what I will say will be redundant, but I suspect will be framed and possibly interpreted a bit differently, so I do ask for your patience.
I will speak about the prevalence rate, then reference noted difficulties arising from problems associated with what I see as a lack of holistic programming to link these various areas of disorders — that is, mental disorder and substance abuse. Finally, and more generally, I would like to place this consideration within a wider policy framework.
I would like to acknowledge that my main sources of current information, apart from my own background, are this current edition of the Canadian Journal of Public Health that was referenced earlier and passed around, as well as an interview with Dr. Johan Brink, who is currently the director of research for the Forensic Services Commission of British Columbia. He is the author of one of the only two prevalent studies on mental disorder among federally sentenced inmates considered in that overview that you have and elsewhere.
I will outline what I see as a key issue, starting with the high prevalence rate. In part, it is understandable given that such studies are stressful by definition and may exacerbate any existing disorders. The prevalence is thought to be highly underestimated because of inadequate resources for assessment, treatment and follow-up of mental disorder, especially given the high rates of co-morbidity that were referenced earlier; that is, someone could be diagnosed as having a mental disorder as well as having a substance abuse disorder.
This is made more of a problem because of a lack of standardized assessment protocols upon entry to CSC for mental disorder. Studies in other prison systems have shown that detection rates of mental disorders in prisons during initial assessment can be low; and that only a minority of those who are acutely psychotic or have other disorders are identified. It is the opinion of Dr. Brink that the normal detection rate is quite low upon entry here in Canada as well. His B.C. study found that 84 per cent of inmates had at least one current or lifetime DSM4 psychiatric diagnosis including substance abuse — more than double the 40.7 per cent prevalence rate found in a Canadian study in a general male community population. It is true that substance abuse disorders are extremely common in the majority of inmates meeting diagnostic criteria for abuse or dependence.
With this issue of co-morbidity, there is the issue of appropriate programming that reflects and acknowledges that problem of co-morbidity. You can have, for example, 75 per cent of those diagnosed with schizophrenia also being diagnosed with one or two other disorders. Women prisoners, although figures have not been validated in existing studies, have been found, interestingly enough, to have higher rates of mental disorder and substance abuse problems, including higher rates of suicide than male offenders, and they experience similar problems arising from co-morbidity. The prevalence table provided to you gives another kind of breakdown from this review article according to security level and gender breakdown.
In addition to difficulties upon entry into CSC with appropriate diagnosis, there is also insufficient focus and attention on the identification of mental illness and disorder in the remand centres, and there are inadequate resources for true diversion. Few are referred for specialized pre-trial psychiatric assessments and, though it is true that more is known about the rates of major mental illness, there is less known about disorders traditionally regarded as less serious but suspected of contributing significantly to criminal behaviour. For example, we have attention deficit disorder, serious impulsivity, FAS/FAE, anxiety and mood disorders, history of traumatic brain injury and serious personality disorders other than antisocial.
The problem in part may arise from the disjuncture between the correctional as opposed to mental health systems paradigms and goals. Understandably, correctional programming is focused upon the identification and reduction of criminogenic risk factors referenced previously with the goal of reducing recidivism. Mental health treatment goals are to address the mental disorder and thereby improve the inmate's ability to function. I would argue that those needs should be dealt with before the inmate can benefit from the other kinds of programming, such as cognate programming.
Also, within correctional settings in the community, as we have heard from the first witness there is a stigma attached to mental illness and thus resistance to seeking out and maintaining treatment. For diagnosed mental illness problems, the regional psychiatric centres have established treatment programs that are good models. However, fewer such resources exist within the penitentiaries. There are various substance abuse programs in the penitentiaries and a wide array of other programming such as methadone treatment program and the offender pre-release substance abuse program and the community-based choices program. The point is that both kinds of disorders should be considered together because they often exacerbate one another.
The same problems exist once the offender is released back into the community, as we have heard, often untreated for an undiagnosed mental disorder because of the same stigmas and resistance by the community, mental health facilities, clinics and boarding homes in accepting the mentally disordered ex-offender. Thus, that ex-offender may become homeless and without a support system. The actual case sketched out for you in the handout speaks to this but I believe that the testimony of the first witness was more compelling in delivering the story of such individuals.
Often there are inadequate counselling and treatment services on the outside and that can lead to the old notion of bus therapy or the revolving-door syndrome, which means that these individuals are shunted back and forth between the mental health and correctional settings with no real solution for them. This has occurred in part because of the long-term trend towards the de-institutionalization of individuals who traditionally would have been cared for in mental health settings. Thus, we have the de-institutionalization from the mental health system and the institutionalization of the mentally ill within the criminal justice system.
The main issues in the phenomenon we are discussing today have to do with policy and procedure. The Corrections and Conditional Release Act, 1992, which was referred to earlier, obliges CSC staff to ensure that the human rights of all prisoners are protected. In addition to the protection of human rights emphasis, I would argue that there may well be section 7 Charter concerns on a related issue of security of person for these individuals.
I also agree that, ultimately, we have to look at the mission statement and its objectives for the Correctional Services of Canada as the ultimate measure against which we have to make meaning of the problems, the diagnosis and the treatment of mental disorder in correctional settings; and the lack of holistic connections in treatment, and programming between substance abuse and other mental disorders.
The mandate of the CSC is to actively encourage and assist offenders to become law-abiding citizens. It is to provide opportunities for the development of social and living skills, while exercising reasonable, safe, secure and humane control. This is the obvious measure to judge CSC's effectiveness in respect of the diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation of mentally disordered offenders in their system and after release from the system back into the community as law-abiding citizens.
In using that measure, we have seen evidence this morning of a lack in achieving those goals. I support the recommendations made by the previous witness. I have additional recommendations that I will speak to during questions.
The Deputy Chairman: Ms. Jackson, we will ensure our records properly describe your position.
We will now hear from Mr. Bill Cameron and Ms. Marie-Chantal Girard from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
Mr. Bill Cameron, Director General, National Secretariat on Homelessness, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: To clarify, we are with HRSD but the National Secretary on Homelessness reports to Ms. Claudette Bradshaw, Minister of Labour and Minister responsible for Homelessness.
The National Homelessness Initiative was launched in 1999. It is a community-based initiative directed toward trying to alleviate and, to some extent, prevent homelessness in communities across Canada. There are roughly 61 communities in Canada involved in the program, which represent over 75 per cent of the population. The fundamental principle of the National Homelessness Initiative is community based. In other words, the community groups and stakeholders come together to develop a community plan to address homelessness in both the short and long term within the community. Part of that planning process is to identify the gaps and the priorities that need to be addressed when looking at homelessness.
The second key element of the National Homelessness Initiative is that the community itself decides on which one of these priorities are to be funded and the community is responsible for seeking the funding through a request for proposal. The National Homelessness Initiative is primarily a community-based initiative led by the community. Decisions are made by the community and, in some cases, delivered by communities, municipalities and a wide range of partners from Aboriginal entities to municipal entities. There is an Aboriginal component to the program. We work in conjunction with a wide range of partners across Canada.
The objective of the National Homelessness Initiative is to provide a comprehensive continuum of support to encourage self-sufficiency and to prevent those at risk from falling into homelessness. There is a wide range of supports around needs assessment; outreach; emergency accommodation — shelters; transitional and supportive facilities, used when people move from shelters to transitional and supportive facilities to move toward a more sustainable and independent lifestyle; and, of course, community capacity building. We need to work with communities to try to address homelessness with a wide range of groups. This is a complex and difficult problem and community groups need all the support they can get.
[Translation]
Mental health issues are dealt with on two levels within the NHI. Firstly, investments are made in communities to meet the action plan's established priorities for research partners. According to its approach, each community decides for itself which area it wishes to invest in and establishes priorities according to its goals.
Results from these projects have revealed that people suffering from mental health problems are one of the targeted groups.
[English]
The community decides where to place its investments and what priorities it will address.
Our community reports indicate that we have invested approximately $35 million into projects that have indicated that one of their subpopulation groups is suffering from mental illness. Primarily, all projects sort of fill in a template indicating the group a particular project will serve, and one of those groups is people suffering from mental illness. The project could involve training, it could specifically involve FAS/FAE, or it could involve support facilities.
We have two examples of the kind of work we are doing. In Calgary there is an organization called the Horizon Housing Society. That organization acquired an apartment building to be used as transitional housing for persons with mental illness, who are homeless or at risk of being homeless. Another example is the Centre of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto which is conducting a pilot project to partner with agencies that work with homeless people to enhance their client access to mental health and addiction services offered through the centre.
One of our key products is their investment. The second way the NHI directs its activities to this subpopulation in addressing mental health is through our research agenda.
Health has been identified as one of the categories under our National Research Program. Mental illness is the number one concern in this area. In fact, tomorrow we will be putting out a request for a proposal, and we will be asking the following mental health questions: What is the incidence or prevalence of homelessness among the de- institutionalized? What is the impact of de-institutionalization on the homeless and on society? How available and accessible are mental health care services and supports for homeless people with mental health problems? What are the existing gaps and shortcomings in the current models? What are the best practices? Is there a tendency toward criminalization and victimization among homeless people with mental health problems?
In the area of homelessness and mental health, we plan to look in the area of availability and accessibility of the medical services to the population.
As part of our research agenda we are currently working in partnership with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research on the Reducing Health Disparities and Promoting Equity for Vulnerable Populations Initiative. One of the projects funded in 2003 under this partnership was the community research think-tank that brought together researchers and community representatives active in the field to identify research directions and approaches in health and homelessness and to explore potential avenues for ongoing collaboration. You will note throughout our presentation that the community is always involved.
This discussion paper written for the think-tank can be found on our Web site.
Providing an overview of existing research, one of the points the paper brings out is that, contrary to popular misconceptions, only a small portion of the homeless population suffers from schizophrenia, and that affective disorders are more common.
From our research along with information coming from the community plans, we have been able to pull together information concerning the situation faced by the homeless population with mental health issues. Some facts we have discovered from these sources include, and this again comes from the community: Approximately 30 to 35 per cent of homeless people in general have a mental illness, and that approximately 20 to 25 per cent of homeless people suffer from concurrent disorders, meaning a combination of severe mental illness and addictions.
Anecdotal evidence also suggests that a large portion of the chronically homeless, the long-term homeless who consume a disproportionate amount of resources such as emergency medical and law enforcement service, has a disabling condition such as mental illness. In fact, between 20 to 25 per cent of the chronically homeless population would probably use up almost 50 per cent of the emergency costs and health cost.
Many health care services to homeless end up being delivered in emergency departments. Subgroups such as youth, women, Aboriginal persons and those suffering from mental illness may also suffer from unique health conditions that require a specialized approach.
Homeless people face many barriers that impair their access to health care. For example, many are unable to make health appointments, and their ability to receive coordinated care is impaired by their lack of an address or a place of contact.
The prevalence of substance abuse is lower among homeless single women than homeless single men, but the rate of major depression is higher. Although most homeless women do not have major mental illness, homeless women exhibit disproportionately high rates of major mental disorders and other mental problems. Many homeless women with serious mental illnesses do not receive needed care, apparently due in part to the lack of perception of a mental health problem and the lack of services designed to meet the special needs of homeless women.
A causal link between homelessness and mental health is difficult to establish. We know that mental health problems can lead to homelessness, but they can also result from homelessness, given the traumatic impact of being destitute and living on the street.
Excessive drug use by homeless addicts often goes hand-in-hand with physical health problems and trouble with the law.
[Translation]
The community plan allowed us to uncover some shortcomings with respect to services provided to this group. Specifically, we noted a lack of emergency housing to meet the needs of people grappling with mental health problems. We also noted a shortage of supervised housing where people suffering from mental health or chronic physical problems can stay temporarily. We also noted shortages with respect to mental health-related community care.
[English]
In responding to the question of what we can do for homeless people who have a mental illness, we know that having a safe place to live is an important part of moving people off the streets. The Canadian Mental Health Association in its submission to this committee last June recognized the fundamental importance of accessible affordable housing as a key factor in the health and success of homecare for this population. However, we also realize that this may not be enough for those who have severe mental illnesses and addiction issues.
Experience shows that chronic homelessness can be reduced by opening the backdoor out of the cycle of chronic homelessness, in other words transitioning out of homelessness. A key factor in opening this door is the existence of safe, affordable housing with individualized support services. The challenge facing communities, though, is the need for more long-term supportive facilities and services to help the chronically homeless of which the mentally ill are a great number.
As one player among many, the National Homelessness Initiative has already assisted communities to meet a number of these challenges. During the first three years of the initiative, emergency needs, shelters and supports were prioritised. Phase two of this initiative is designed to enable the community move beyond emergency needs, prioritizing transitional, supportive housing and supports in order to foster pathways to self-sufficiency. People with mental health problems do need to have supportive housing. Shelters are not a healthy place to be. One of our strategies is, if you are in a shelter, you are still homeless and need to be moved into supportive facilities and get the proper help.
A second approach known to help reduce chronic homelessness is to close the front door and thereby prevent people from becoming homeless. An example of preventive activities could include dedicated affordable house resources to house individuals discharged from psychiatric care institutions, and the provision of short-term intensive support services immediately after discharge from hospitals, shelters or jails.
In order to move the focus toward prevention, we will need to work with our partners, including other federal departments, provinces and territories, as well as municipalities and communities as many of the tools rest with them.
Although the federal government, now through the Canada Health Transfer and the Canada Social Transfer, provides provinces and territories with funding in support of mental health services and income support, the levels of funding for mental health services, per diems for transitional and supportive housing providers, and income assistance for individuals are all within the provincial, territorial and municipal jurisdictions. I think that is an important point.
In closing, whether we are talking about mental health or homelessness, no one level of government can solve the problem of homelessness, nor for that matter can a federal initiative such as the NHI address homelessness. We need a holistic approach from the federal government and from all levels of government.
To combat homelessness, governments and society in general need to address the root causes. This is how we close the front door. All levels of government need to review and adjust their policies and programs to ensure they work to prevent and not contribute to homelessness.
We need cooperation, coherence and commitment to fully understand the consequences of the policies being developed and implemented.
I have been around for a while and I have worked in many federal programs.
Certainly the most rewarding one is working with homelessness — not the investments that we make but to be able to visit the transitional and supportive facilities and the front-line workers to see what they are doing, how hard they work and how much they give back to the community.
If members of this committee are interested, we offer a tour of transitional and support facilities, of shelters, to talk with front-line workers to get the story from the people who know. One of the most rewarding things for me is dealing with these people. I am certainly in awe of what they are doing. If any one of the senators is interested, we have a tour in Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal.
Senator Fairbairn: Calgary?
Mr. Cameron: Calgary, too.
Senator Morin: I did not think you had that in Alberta.
Mr. Cameron: And in Edmonton, Medicine Hat and Red Deer. We have 61 communities.
The Deputy Chairman: You can be sure that we will take you up on the offer if we ever get all these breaks out of the way and some consistent time for this committee to continue to deal with this issue. We are planning to go on the road.
Ms. Girard, are you just answering questions or do you have anything to say?
Ms. Marie-Chantal Girard, Strategic Research Manager, National Secretariat on Homelessness, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: No, that is fine.
The Deputy Chairman: After these witnesses have been heard and questioned, we will have witnesses on Bill S-17, an act to amend the Citizenship Act. When you are asking your questions, if you could be as brief as possible so as to give our witnesses a chance to properly answer, it would be appreciated.
Senator Morin: It is unfortunate, really, that we do not have more time on this. These are two extremely important subjects for our country and for the patients themselves. I was hoping that we could make recommendations on these two subjects in our report. It is very unfortunate that we have so little time.
I would like to pose my first questions to Mr. Motiuk and Ms. Bouchard.
I am interested in the fact that there has been a tremendous increase in the number of federal admissions of those diagnosed with mental illness. The figure I have is 40 per cent, while the number of inmates has gone down. There is a real phenomenon. Is it a result of the fact that we are making more diagnoses? A number of diagnoses of disorders are quoted here. Do we know which of these disorders has increased by such a percentage? That is an important issue here.
Mr. Motiuk: In response to the question that you are asking about the data, we cannot disentangle the nature of the disorder. We are aware from a case-management perspective that they are presenting a diagnosis —
Senator Morin: Let me interrupt you here. This is so important. Is it drug abuse? Is it alcohol? That is the first thing. If you want to prevent these problems and treat these individuals, the first thing is to know what it is. I have the impression that maybe we diagnose more often. Something, perhaps drug use, has increased for sure. That is the first thing to know if we want to treat them. I am surprised you do not have this at your fingertips.
Mr. Motiuk: We have knowledge of addiction and we systematically assess for addictions.
Senator Morin: Is the 40 per cent increase due to an increase in addiction?
Mr. Motiuk: Partially.
Senator Morin: When we talk about drugs, are we talking about marijuana? I notice that there is a high incidence of marijuana use among inmates. I do not want to get into this debate. We are not talking about schizophrenia when we talk about a marijuana addiction.
I thumbed through the ``Health Care Needs of Federal Inmates'' and I did not find this breakdown, but I think this is very important. I am sure that you will think about that.
I would like to talk about treatment. I was interested to see that our federal correctional facilities do not have the same level of resources, if I understand correctly, as the provincial facilities. There are five treatment centres. However, they are not resourced at levels comparable to the facilities in the provinces. If that is a fact, I am surprised. There is also the jurisdictional issue around the community services for our inmates who leave federal correctional institutions. I have read about that. That is a big issue, although I do not want to get into that because we do not have time.
I would like to talk about suicide. Suicide rates are extremely high in our institutions, much higher than in other countries. Those are real, hard data. If we cannot prevent suicide that means we are not treating our patients well. It is not soft information; that is an easy thing to measure. Compared to other countries, our rates are high. There is an extremely wide variation from province to province. These are real issues. You think about the person suffering, and it is preventable. These patients are in institutions, for one thing. They should be able to prevent that. It does lead to the notion that the treatment of these individuals is not adequate.
As you know, Australia and other countries — I think the U.S., too — have tackled the matter of suicide in institutions, with remarkable results. We are way behind those countries on an issue where there is great variation around the country. I would like to see you address this. Let us deal with this and then I have a question on homelessness.
Ms. Bouchard: You raised many points, and I want to talk about a few of the things you mentioned. First, we have been tracking our suicides. We also investigate every suicide to identify the risk factors for those special individuals and try to implement some systematic approach. You are right; we have a higher rate than some other countries. I am not sure how comparable those are because suicide by overdose might be classified as overdose and not suicide. We have to be very careful when comparing ourselves to other countries. Also, we must be cognizant of the fact that compared with the general community we have a population that is already high risk when they come to us, with problems and disorders that carry a high risk of suicide. We make comparisons with the general community, but true comparisons should be made with comparable populations in the community with the same types of problems. If we were able to do that kind of study, we would probably learn more.
We recognize that issue and we are struggling with it. We have to be much more comprehensive in assessing our people in high-risk categories and putting measures in place.
You asked whether there is a higher prevalence when they arrive. We have better diagnostics now, so the rates today probably reflect that better diagnostic assessment. However, it is hard to document trends because we do not have the capacity right now to track those, other than through the studies that are often conducted by my colleague, Mr. Motiuk. We have to struggle with the fact that our data are limited. However, we have documented a higher prevalence of problems than in the general population.
We are currently conducting a review of the treatment facilities, staffing and resourcing. I will be able to provide to the committee a comparison with a forensic facility. I was comparing forensic psychiatric facilities in the community. Some provinces have established a few in recent years. They provide us with a benchmark for comparable resourcing. I can provide those figures to the committee to help establish that.
We should look at our own resourcing and state where the staffing differences are. We have to compete for resources. We have a problem with recruitment and retention, especially in the psychiatrist area, and attracting people to come and work within our correctional facilities.
We have been trying to attract people. We need to attract a critical mass and retain them. That is also an issue with which we are struggling. We have to compete with other health care facilities.
We are facing this lack of resources even in the community. We need to cooperate better with our partners in provincial corrections and try to find a way to best use the available resources in that area of specialization specifically, which are already limited in our country.
I take your point. I agree.
Senator Morin: This is an extremely important issue, and I hope we will have more time to discuss it.
I have a question for Mr. Cameron. Why is it that the number of homeless persons has increased recently in all large cities in Canada? What are the reasons for that?
Mr. Cameron: There are several reasons. Affordable housing is becoming more and more of an issue.
I will give you an example. In Calgary, 50 per cent of those in shelters are working.
Second, the economy has an impact. Certainly, if one person loses a job in the service industry and two people are financing an apartment, they become at risk.
From our perspective, there are many more problems with youth. The coherency of what we are trying to do is an issue. You are looking at one small program addressing homelessness.
It is a three-year program of $510 million. It is trying to address health, behavioural problems, abuse and a wide range of issues in our society today that put people on the street. In a nutshell, affordable housing is a real issue.
Second, income is a real issue in being able to afford that housing. More and more people, for whatever reason, find themselves on the street, especially youth and Aboriginals from reserves. We are looking at income, abuse, mental health problems and affordability.
Senator Morin: You do not think that mental illness plays a role here?
Mr. Cameron: For sure.
Senator Morin: There are no longer institutions. Is that a factor?
Ms. Girard: It is more prevalent in certain areas of the country than others. If we look at the plans of the 61 communities, they have identified their priorities. For example, the municipalities in Quebec — Montreal and Quebec City — identify mental illness as very high on their list of priorities. It means that the institutionalized phenomenon that they went through in the 1980s and early 1990s must have had repercussions for the subpopulations that are overly represented in shelters.
Anecdotal evidence also slows that there are more families with children in shelters and also more recent immigrants. Those are the recent trends in that regard.
Also, we talk about the accounting issue. We also need to realize that perhaps we know more about people who are homeless today because communities are better equipped than they were in the past to address it. More people are using those services. There is also a factor here of being able to provide some services that were not available in the community four years ago.
It is difficult to come up with an absolute number or to note specifically what factors play into the equation.
Senator Callbeck: I wish to thank all of you for your presentations today. I know that we have a time restraint here.
The Deputy Chairman: Which is too bad.
Senator Callbeck: I have a lot of questions, but I will be specific and zero in on one area.
We received a document today prepared by Corrections Canada. On the last page it states that ``Inmates have substantially higher prevalence of mental disorders compared with general public rates and most disorders are higher in female than in male inmates.''
In the last paragraph of that page, you note that you will develop a `` comprehensive strategy for addressing the assessment and management of mental disorders in male inmates.'' What about the females?
Ms. Bouchard: I must apologize. You just pointed out an error on our part. The plan includes female inmates as well. It will be for all inmates.
Senator Morin: They forgot about them!
Ms. Bouchard: I apologize.
Senator Callbeck: That jumped right off the page at me, because I hear a lot about females not getting the same services as males.
Ms. Bouchard: However, we can provide you with some information. In the past year, there has been a lot of investment by the women's sector within CSC to specifically address the needs of women. Significant progress has been made. When we devise a strategy for mental health, we should not focus on one gender. Thank you for pointing that out. I do not think that was the intention.
The Deputy Chairman: Senator Callbeck, Professor Jackson was indicating that he wanted to jump in on this as well.
Ms. Jackson: The point that I made in my presentation was the strikingly higher rate of these disorders and of suicide among women offenders. Certainly some attention should be directed their way in terms of resources to attend to their needs.
Senator Callbeck: I am particularly familiar with Dorchester because I come from Prince Edward Island. I hear about the lack of services for the inmates. We are particularly dealing with mentally ill inmates.
I would like to have from you, in writing, the progress that has been made in the past five years in services provided to mentally ill inmates in those institutions.
The Deputy Chairman: I wish to ask a supplementary to Senator Callbeck's question. In your presentation, you said that there is an enhanced CSC response capacity. Yesterday, our witnesses were dealing with the lack of people entering the entire field — psychiatrists and psychologists. It goes back to education.
What kind of a strain is that putting on CSC? You indicated that it is often hard to keep people on the job. What kind of human resource problem has that created? Is it an immense problem? Will it take a long time to overcome it?
Ms. Bouchard: We have a variety of problems. One problem is attracting people to the system, especially those who are interested in the types of problems that offenders present in our environment.
Most psychiatrists are currently on contract. They are not employees of our institutions, so they also have a practice outside of corrections. Priority is a factor in their work. That leads us to try to have a systematic and standardized approach to those problems.
As you pointed out, our institutions exist in eight provinces. There is variation in understanding and practice among specialized groups from province to province. There was reference to ADHD, for example. There are sometimes differences of opinion among psychiatrists.
Creating a systematic approach is a challenge when you have to rely mostly on contract physicians, but one that we must address. We have to determine how we can work with our contract people. That applies as well to nurses who are interested in working with mental health patients.
We have the capacity to attract psychologists. However, additional needs have been placed on the correctional services agenda.
Senator Forrestall: I have a supplementary to Senator Callbeck's questions. From the evidence we have heard this morning, I have not been able to locate the extremely disturbed people in penitentiaries. Could you tell me where they are housed? Do we have an adequate number of beds in the Atlantic centre? Do we have an outpost there?
Ms. Bouchard: Are you referring to the Shepody Healing Centre in the Atlantic region?
Senator Forrestall: Where is it located?
Ms. Bouchard: It is in Dorchester and has been established as a separate institution. It is recognized as one of our treatment centres. Over the last five years, prior to my arrival at CSC, issues had been raised about our capacity to treat people with mental health problems in the Atlantic region specifically. The mental health treatment centre has undergone some organizational changes in recent years with the establishment and recognition of the Shepody Healing Centre, run by a director who is specifically focused on mental health issues.
Senator Forrestall: Do we take psychiatric care to the penitentiaries or do we take the prisoner to the centre?
Ms. Bouchard: The psychiatric centre is within our correctional institutions; it is one of the treatment centres.
Senator Forrestall: Is that in Dorchester?
Ms. Bouchard: Yes.
Senator Forrestall: How do you find people who want to live in Dorchester?
Ms. Bouchard: We have physical plant issues. We realize that the physical environment is often not a reflection of what a hospital should be. That is one of the issues we have to address. In the meantime, we have dedicated, specialized personnel. We have been able to address the issue of psychiatric resources in New Brunswick. We have been lucky in recruiting a team of psychiatrics to work on contract with us, at least for that region, which was a problem before.
Senator Forrestall: Keep after that one.
Ms. Bouchard: Yes. We have an agreement with New Brunswick whereby we provide the services for their offenders with mental health problems.
Senator Fairbairn: I thank all of you for speaking to this huge issue. One could do an entire report on this alone.
Ms. Capponi, I found your presentation incredibly moving. It shouted out to be answered because you have been there, and you talked about Reva Gerstein and others. I know what that must have meant, to raise those very dark issues in your presentation to the committee today.
This does not have to be now, but I would like you to think of the three most important things that this committee could recommend to the federal government on this whole issue.
Ms. Capponi: I would do it right now, and I will sneak in something else, if I could.
Senator Fairbairn: Good.
Ms. Capponi: You asked if people are in jail because of deinstitutionalization. That is the Catch-22 that surrounds us. We should not deinstitutionalize them because they end up in jails. We should not deinstitutionalize people for whom there is nothing out there. That is the bottom line. It is not that we are better off with institutions, because we surely are not.
We require human development within our community and a de-emphasis on the system. You asked about diagnoses. Most psychiatric patients have more than one label, depending, almost, on what day of the week they go into hospital. There are catch-all diagnoses such as schizophrenia, which was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. People were put on medication for schizophrenia, re-diagnosed, as it became more of a pseudo-science, as manic-depressive, and then re-diagnosed with autism as it became the favourite.
I would like to comment on a number of women, especially, at the centre of addiction, where I was on the Board of Directors of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which Professor Jackson talked about. In the early days, that was Queen Street. Dr. Ruth Gallup from the University of Toronto researched the original presenting complaint of these women, which was sexual abuse. That complaint was not listened to because no one wanted to hear it. The behaviour of these women was in response to what had happened to them when they were labelled and medicated. After a few years of that, a person will begin to act out and will probably drink at any opportunity because life is so terrible, and when drunk, you are likely to break a law.
There are more mentally ill people on the streets not because of a preference, but because the gulf between the haves and have-nots is getting wider and wider. More people are using the food banks and so the share for the chronic mental patient has been dramatically reduced. A landlord will rent his house to people who he thinks will be less disruptive than a former mental health patient. People get squeezed out. Shelters prefer to house immigrants or battered women because they will not be seen as potentially disruptive. The stigma about the crazy people that we are exists.
One thing we need is human development such that we would be allowed ways to develop as a community, much like Aboriginal community development, with recognition of the wrong that has been done and an effort by the federal government to put that right with seed money for that development within the chronic psychiatric patient community — and not through professional auspices. I have travelled all over Canada and survivors have been influenced by what we have been able to achieve in Ontario.
Another thing we need is recognition that although psychiatry may be a pseudo-science, it is not 100 per cent. Dr. Gerstein wrote an introduction to my last book. She was part of that deinstitutionalization movement in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that thought all we needed was one good pill, but that is not the reality. All people need much more than that in their lives. We need recognition that science is not everything.
I do not know what you can do about this big barrier that occurs in every province, except, perhaps, to just advertise it. It is scary for people who finally get on a provincial disability pension program, which includes drug cards, to take the risk of going to work.
If their worker then cuts them off from the disability pension, they are thrown on welfare, and welfare rates are horrendously low. It can take months and months to get that pension back.
It is almost as if you are defeated before you start. It is a total disincentive. There used to be step programs. I remember, when I was in my boarding house, there were 70 crazy folks all discharged from provincial psychiatric institutions and the door shut behind us with a resounding crash. However, when a welfare worker came to see me, he thought I was more middle class, maybe but he could relate to me, and he would tell me things he did not tell the others, such as you could get a clothing allowance once a year. You can do this. We do not know these things, as a rule, as a community.
The other thing is, when you go to tour places, do not just talk to the front-line workers. Do not go to institutions and label that ``community,'' because institutions are not community. The people to whom you should be talking are the recipients of service. Talk to them in ways in which they can answer without fear, which means talk to them away from staff — although not all staff are bad. I was a staff member, too, but you will hear truer things from clients.
For example, I remember a drunk walking by in Parkdale screaming, ``I may be a drunk but at least I am not crazy.'' There is a pecking order, and God help us, because we are at the bottom. It is frightening to go into a shelter, not just because the guys there will beat you up, but also because the staff will treat you badly.
I was one of the founders of the Supportive Housing Coalition in Toronto that received many group home beds. I thought, ``How wonderful,'' but none of the chronic patients could get in because they did not want to offend the neighbourhood. People who might have done well on their own were given places in supportive housing and our folks were left in rooming and boarding houses, with no controls over the landlord or how that house was run.
Mr. Cameron: ``Not in my backyard'' is not just a major issue in mental health and homelessness. We have millions of projects on hold because of NIMBYism. One of the things we try to do is organize workshops and training for community groups on how to go out and dialogue with the communities, explain the services and touch individuals and build that coalition. As we move further into more transitional and supportive facilities the greater the problems with social issues seem to become.
Senator Fairbairn: I have one question relating to Western Canada in particular. We have a huge and growing population of young Aboriginal people. Indeed, in the province of Saskatchewan, it will not be long before the majority of the population is Aboriginal. I admire very much what you have been doing on the homeless issue with such a small resource base. I think particularly of Alberta. I am from Lethbridge and we work on it there. However, I am thinking of what is being done in Calgary. I am wondering if you could give us a kind of snapshot of the impact that this particular part of our population has on the issue that we are dealing with today. I am thinking of the young Aboriginal people who come in off the reserve, where Lord knows what they have been going through. There they are in downtown Calgary in great numbers. How is this affecting the way that you can deliver the program, limited though it is, although it has had some remarkable success in bringing in the rest of community as partners? How do the young Aboriginal people fit into that?
Mr. Cameron: We have something called an urban Aboriginal homeless component to the initiative, whether in Calgary, Edmonton or Red Deer, which is a good example. This is again the Aboriginal community identifying the priorities, where the needs are and making decisions on funding those priorities. In Red Deer, it is a community-based approach where the full community comes together. They have pooled their money. Every homelessness project in Red Deer has an Aboriginal component to it and the Aboriginal community is part of that process.
It is staggering. I do not know if you watched the national news last night, showing a young Aboriginal girl who has been a prostitute since 12. The Aboriginal young people are coming to the cities. They are culturally lost.
Senator Fairbairn: It has a tremendous impact on their mental state and stability.
Mr. Cameron: It has impacted their mental state, their self-esteem and their ability to connect. There are tremendous housing problems on the reserves — 12 and 15 people living in a house is homelessness. There is overcrowding. When young people come to the cities, they do not know where the services are. They have no connection. Where do you go when totally disconnected and on the street? What happens on the street? Who influences you? It is the people on the street. They get into gangs and into serious situations. Many people think it is an Aboriginal problem. It is a homelessness problem across Canada, but young Aboriginals with FAS/FAE coming into the city can be taken advantage of. They can be told, as you know, the kind of behaviours. There is a wide range of mental health issues. Obviously, there is a background of abuse, et cetera, bringing them to where they are. To be honest, we are not holistic in our approach. We have an urban Aboriginal strategy and a homeless strategy that is off-reserve. One of the things we are trying to do is bring the urban Aboriginal strategy, homelessness strategy and other federal departments together to look at it from a holistic point of view.
The money might be out there. I really do not know. We need to do a diagnosis of how we are spending the money, what we are spending it on and how we are complementary. We are dealing with urban Aboriginals on a wide range of issues. Federal departments are dealing with Aboriginals, and we need some coherency.
The numbers are staggering — and increasing — and we are not able to handle the situation.
Ms. Girard: One challenge is inclusion. If we want to think about effective solutions — and Mr. Cameron mentioned cohesion and having us doing things together — it also means getting all the people involved around the table. This initiative is being implemented throughout the country, but because the communities are taking the lead, we are seeing great success in terms of inclusion in certain communities. In others it has been more difficult to get the Aboriginal community around the table. That is certainly something that we are working on, to ensure that all the partners are around the table.
They bring a very important expertise. We know that services that are offered in large urban centres are not always culturally adapted to the needs of Aboriginal people, especially the young. When we had consultations and asked them about the key issues in the North that we needed to research — the overcrowding and all of that — they talked about certain issues like housing, which we hear across the board, but also, culturally adapted services was a specific issue that arose that we did not hear in other consultations.
Through the years, we have tried different models. Some were more successful than others. The message that they are sending us now is unless you are able to deliver the kinds of services we need, with the philosophy and the approach with which are familiar and comfortable, there will be difficulty in succeeding.
The important thing with young people is to try to provide them with the right skills. They are young and show potential. They have many years to live and to contribute to and participate in their community.
We also need to think about how we define ``participation.'' We have an equation for poor people. You work; you participate. Participation can be defined more broadly. People can participate and be active members of their communities. Investing in the skills of these youth is also very important.
Mr. Cameron: One of the real challenges for the Aboriginal entities and service providers with which we work is sustainability. In other words, how do they continue? We can help, but it is a short-term initiative. What about ongoing funding? How do we make these organizations that are helping Aboriginal people sustainable?
I am not sure if this is a mental health issue, but you should know that we do not have full engagement from the private sector with the Aboriginal community. In other words, if you were to look at partnerships for some kinds of services, the business community is absent. They are absent from addressing homelessness as well in our communities, but in particular in the Aboriginal communities. We have been asking Aboriginal organizations if they can help us in developing a partnering strategy to better connect with the business community to address long-term sustainability.
Senator Léger: If a person has mental illness and commits a crime against society, he is put in the correctional institution, right? Do they get mental health problems once in the institution? Does it happen there?
If you are ill, you cannot be accused. The act was a result of that illness. Perhaps inmates become sick once incarcerated.
Ms. Bouchard: It is logical to think that prison environments are not necessarily conducive to mental health. People are cut off from their community and their support. There are many factors in a holistic approach that create more stress. We know that the prison environment is a stress on people. It probably enhances the problems and can create further problems.
Senator Léger: Does it happen that someone who is ill is sent to prison?
Ms. Bouchard: It can happen. I do not know the data. I know that provincial corrections has started to look at that because the first time people commit an offence, they end up in the provincial system.
Sometimes, the first manifestation of a mental illness will be somebody ending up in the court system for a lack of prior assessment, diagnosis or treatment. Does the criminal court system address those specific problems? Unless there is a diagnosis that this person is criminally insane and therefore needs to be put in the forensic psychiatric facility, it might be missed, which might lead to recurring problems. People may end up in our system the first time that they have a mental health problem.
I think it is a combination of things.
The Deputy Chairman: We heard testimony via video conferencing with Australia about a program they have had since the early 1990s. They have moved between 30,000 and 40,000 youth out of the criminal justice system and into a kind of health and wellness situation. I imagine you are probably looking at the Australian example.
Ms. Bouchard: Yes, we are. Australia is divided into states, so each state has its system. We have been looking at those, because they are different systems. They have an overall strategy.
The Deputy Chairman: They do not seem to have the same problems between the federal and state governments that we seem to have here.
Senator Cook: Ms. Capponi, I tried to put together in one place the gaps and needs in the system. Hopefully, this study will achieve that.
You said in your testimony that you wish for a small portion of the resources that is currently allocated to institutions and agencies. Could you elaborate? How do you see accessing this and what will it do for you in working toward being a total person and able to cope in society?
Ms. Capponi: When I was on the board of the Centre for Addictions and Mental Health, I made the plea that funds be made available to survivor groups from the hospital. It was not well received.
They once had a vocational rehab program within the hospital. It was kind of like a coffee bar. You know how in hospitals it is mostly volunteers who do these things, but in this case it was a vocational rehab program. About three or four years ago, the Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses, which is all psychiatric survivors, started negotiations to have that transferred to OCAB and run as a survivor business, where people would be paid to work in the coffee bar.
It was the first program divested from a hospital to a psychiatric survivor business. People are earning more than minimum wage.
One thing really thrilled people. There is a coffee cart with speciality coffees and other things. In order to take that coffee cart around to all the wards, the survivors working within this place — Out of this World Cafe — must have keys to the doors.
The Deputy Chairman: Master keys.
Ms. Capponi: It was wonderful. I was there the day it was announced that the staff of the Out of This World Cafe was getting keys to the wards. It was the most liberating day.
Since then, my younger sister, jointly diagnosed with heroin addiction and mental illness, has been appointed the client employment person by Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the centre for addictions. She is now working in human resources for them.
Instead of looking at more sheltered workshops and hospital-run housing, which tends to resemble institutions, we should be looking at that sort of thing. Some of that should be divested to consumer survivor groups to run themselves.
Drop-in programs funded by community mental health agencies could be run by survivors. I worked in a drop-in centre for seven years. It is not that difficult to do. With apprenticeship programs, people could be helped to run them as a survivor group. Indeed, there are such places in Canada that are totally run by survivors.
Some money goes for exotic research. For instance, the Clarke Institute really likes to do exotic research. Some of that money might be better used to help people to survive. This is one of the reasons I left that board.
My feeling was that they did not wish to do the practical things. Getting people a decent room, with enough money to fill their bellies and take public transit is not as exotic as looking at homosexuality and birth order, which was the research being done. Money that is used currently for weird research could be targeted so that people could have a life.
Senator Cook: You are talking about funding for the empowerment of the individual?
Ms. Capponi: Yes, which would also work with Aboriginal communities. I had the privilege, when I went across Canada, to attend a first meeting of a nascent survivor group in Red Deer. It was quite fun, being driven by a manic- depressive from the Red Deer airport to that meeting.
We have done a whole lot with very little — talking to street kids, homeless young men and women, who are not listened to, looking at their eyes light up when you say, ``I understand why you left school early, it is really hard to be in school when you are afraid to go home. That does not mean you are stupid. There are ways to learn and we can help.'' It makes a difference.
Senator Cook: Madam Chair, our witnesses will simply have to come back because I have stories to tell, too. For a number of years, I have been a volunteer community board member of a social centre as an advocate to work with consumers who found themselves in the position that you did, and there are good-news stories.
I wanted to follow the funding package so that my friend, Mr. Bill Cameron, could understand and see where funding might better be used. When you mentioned funding, you used the word ``important.'' Am I to understand that your funding goes to provincial jurisdictions and they manage the program, or is there federal involvement?
Mr. Cameron: Our funding goes directly to the community groups and to communities. No money goes to governments.
Senator Cook: I come from the province of Newfoundland. I know there are affordable housing projects for incarcerated people, particularly the Stella Burry Corporation.
Mr. Cameron: We work with the Stella Burry Corporation and Jocelyn Greene.
Senator Cook: These are the good-news stories, which I think we should be able to share and understand.
Mr. Cameron: We work directly with the community. No money is transferred to governments or municipalities. Money goes directly to the community groups who are working with homelessness.
Senator Cook: You agree that Ms. Greene's story is a good-news story?
Mr. Cameron: Yes, it is an excellent story.
Senator Cook: Ms. Jackson talks about the lack of standardized systems. Would that include legislation, given that most provinces have separate mental health acts and we have no national act?
Ms. Jackson: I think that, clearly, the power of established legislation to ensure that kind of standardization would greatly help. Certainly, CSC itself could go a great distance in assuming a federal responsibility for encouraging that standardization. Perhaps the excellent research department of the CSC might consider, as a long-term research project, a pilot looking at the effect of having a standardized protocol — follow the life history of an offender going through the system and into the community to see whether that kind of standardization would assist, how it would assist. I think we are certainly talking about a systemic problem, and at the systems level, a very practical kind of emphasis or initiative would be a standardization of the process of diagnosis.
The Deputy Chairman: On behalf of the committee, I wish to thank all the witnesses. I believe that many of my colleagues will want some or all of you to come back because this study will go on for some time yet. I would very much like to thank all of you for appearing today. I was particularly struck by your testimony, Ms. Capponi. I think it was outstanding.
Colleagues, if we could move quickly now to the next piece of work we have to do, which is Bill S-17, a Senate bill to amend the Citizenship Act.
Our witnesses on Bill S-17 are Mr. Charles Bosdet and Mr. Don Chapman.
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for appearing.
Mr. Charles Bosdet, as an individual: I want to thank the committee for giving us an opportunity to address Bill S-17.
I am a Canadian native, born in Winnipeg. I am currently a U.S. citizen and immigrated to Canada last year as Nova Scotia's first provincial nominee under their new provincial nominee program.
My background bears on the context of my remarks so I will tell you a little about that. I am a former law news and opinion editor at several newspapers in the United States and news and opinion editor of the largest daily law newspaper there. These days, I consult to businesses on policies and procedures. Currently, I am under contract on something I guess that is of interest these days in the U.S., helping companies prepare for audits under the Sarbanes- Oxley securities law.
I am here to support Bill S-17 and ask for your support for it because it corrects what I believe is an inequity in the existing law. It appears to be a longstanding inequity and the department that normally one might expect to resolve this issue seems to be opposed to fixing it. We saw that in the testimony before this committee last week.
The problem is that between the 1977 Citizenship Act and one or two court rulings since then, notably Benner, we can break Canadian citizens into several categories — those who were born in Canada before and after 1977, and those who were born outside of Canada before and after 1977. The group loosely called the ``lost Canadians'' is the only one that appears to have a more difficult time in having their rights protected under Canadian law as a result of this inequity.
As you can see, those born outside Canada are what I would call ``protected,'' in the sense that they can simply write a letter of application to the minister to have their citizenship restored; and in a matter of a couple of weeks or something like that, they are Canadians again. They do not go through something called the ``resumption process.'' That applies whether they were born in Canada or outside. It is a different situation for those people who were born in Canada before 1977.
The testimony received before the committee last week from the department is that these people — we will call them the lost Canadians — should be treated fairly. The definition of ``fairness'' is that they are treated the same as everyone else.
If we look at the chart here — and I think you have a copy of it — and I am not a lawyer, but if you go through the citizenship policy manual, it appears that there are different criteria for restoring citizenship to people identified here.
There is no oath requirement for two of these categories but the lost Canadians would be required to take an oath. There is a waiting period to be admitted for immigration. This does not affect the people in the first two columns on your chart, but it is applied against the lost Canadians. There is a one-year waiting period required after immigration for lost Canadians but for no one else. Permanent residency is required of the lost Canadians but not of the other two categories. Citizenship is automatic upon application for the first two categories but not for the lost Canadians. Lost Canadians have the distinction of being subject to the security and criminality checks, not once but twice, while neither of the other categories must undergo them.
I guess I would liken this situation to: You get to choose your friends but not your relatives. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration came before this committee last week and said clearly that what it wants to do with these lost Canadians is choose its relatives. I do not dispute for a moment there may be some people who might come back to Canada under Bill S-17, if it were enacted, that I might not want to invite to dinner; but I do not get to choose my relatives and this is not an immigration matter.
CIC speaks as if citizenship and immigration are joined at the hip, and they are not the same thing. They should not be subject to reliance upon one another. They are definitely related, but as the spokesperson for the department said last week, you either are or are not a citizen. This really is not an immigration matter, although much of the testimony was directed toward resumption, which involves immigration processing.
We got to this happy state, as I understand it, because the law that went into effect in 1977 had various problems. In the testimony before the House — and I do not recall whether it was also before the Senate — quite a number of problems were pointed out by lawmakers. I understand the department's position to have been, ``Well look, this is the best we can do right now and if we do not do it this year, it will probably be a couple of years before we can come back and do this again, because we have to go through hearings and everything. Take it or leave it. Pass this thing now and we will clean up the loose ends later.'' Parliament passed the law and right now we are still dealing with one of the loose ends.
I want to mention something that does not come up very often. There seems to be a prevailing notion, when people do not think about it too much — I run into it a lot and that is why I will mention it here — that there is an emphasis on demonstrating one's attachment to Canada and whether these are really Canadians. After all, you left at age 5 or age 10. What do you know? I would point out that the first five years or so of anyone's life are probably the most impressionable years, and I think that any number of psychological studies would bear that out.
It is worth keeping that in mind when, let us say, a family moves to the United States, it can be likened to a bubble moving across the 49th parallel. They do not shed their Canadian ethics, values or ways by virtue of crossing the border — all of that moves with them, especially for someone like me, who was thoroughly familiar and in love with the icons of Canada and what they stood for, as I understood them at that tender age. You cannot live on the Manitoba prairie and not have an appreciation for your proper place in nature when a thunderstorm hits. When the house is shaking and you think the windows will break, that really puts you in your place. Nature, the way people relate to one another, civility and all the clichés that go with these icons move with you.
I remember wandering into a drugstore at age seven and asking where the rubbers were, and for some reason the clerk thought that was funny. I just wanted a pair of what turned out to be galoshes down there.
The household does not change; the values do not change and you grow up in that environment. Sure, you are in another country, but you are in a Canadian household. Very often, people I speak with act as though some magical change overcame your household when you crossed the border and suddenly you are someone else. I am here to point out that these characteristics that you take with you from Canada, even at an early age, stick with you for the rest of your life.
A couple of months ago, I remember a manager seeming a bit ``bent out of shape'' when he discovered I was from Canada. I said, ``What is the matter?'' He said, ``How come when I get someone who knows what he is doing around here, it turns out he is from Canada?'' All my life, I have been told by people, in one form or another, that I was different. At first, it was the obvious things, like accent. Of course, I was saying, ``What accent?''
I would suggest that just because we did not live here does not mean that we did not pay attention to every scrap of news that we came across, that we suddenly lost our affinity or our love for the icons that we were exposed to in the first instance. This will sound sappy, but I still have a soft spot for the RCMP. It did my heart good when I came into Halifax airport in Nova Scotia and was driving down the freeway and noticed I was doing the speed limit. I thought, ``OK, he is not going to stop me so I will get a chance to talk to the passing Mountie.'' It sounds ridiculous but it sometimes carries over.
I feel that Bill S-17 would basically restore the lost Canadians to a level playing field, something that they do not now enjoy. There are two ways to go about it, one of which is to restore our citizenship; the other is to simply take away these citizenship privileges that were bestowed upon others retroactively in 1977 as a result of one or two Supreme Court and Federal Court rulings.
I do not think anyone will say for a minute that it is a good idea to go back and undo the 1977 changes. We are not asking for anything extraordinary here. We are simply asking to be recognized in the same way as other Canadians are who were born outside of the country and maybe never set foot here; who were somehow estranged from Canada; made adult choices to go somewhere else; made adult choices to give up their Canadian citizenship because they were marrying someone in another country; made adult choices to give up their Canadian citizenship because it was, somehow, convenient for or even necessary to their family.
Those people have had their citizenship restored on application. They simply write a letter and they are done; that is the extent of the process.
When I applied for my citizenship certificate, there were about 55 documents covering official government identification forms and all the rest of it spanning several generations of my family. I was put through something that I could only describe as an inquisition by my evaluator in Sydney, for no reason that I could establish. She reached the point of questioning the validity of documents issued by people just like her from the Canadian, American, British and Mexican governments. This binder is from Senator Kinsella's office and is still as it was when I handed it over to him. If anyone would care to flip through it after this meeting, I am sure it will be fine with Senator Kinsella's office. There is an index at the front that contains a remarkable list of documents that I am sure few, if any, could assemble in little time. I assembled them over the course of years and at substantial personal cost, but it still was not enough. I received a letter saying that they could not conclusively say that I was not a citizen.
I do not know what that meant exactly and I am not sure the department knows. My understanding is that two evaluators in the department concluded I was definitely a citizen. The department cites fairness and that resumption is a remedy for this. I will give the committee a copy of the Glynos decision, in which the court said, ``1. Resumption is not a remedy. 2. You cannot duck out of court, as you are asking us to, in order to avoid this question; we will decide this thing.''
Glynos says that given two paths toward citizenship, you cannot force someone to take the harder of the two paths. Yet a department representative was here last week recommending and explaining why we should do just that: We do not need Bill S-17 because we have a resumption process that is easy. Allow me to say that what is in that binder is not easy. Glynos has already told them what they need to do with something like this but they are slow to learn from it.
I would like to see as much consideration given to the lost Canadians as to honorary citizenship for a killer whale off the coast of British Columbia or to a former insurgent from South Africa. For that matter, I would like to see as much consideration as was given to the desecrated carcass of a one-winged whooping crane recently returned to a museum in the Northwest Territories because he was, after all, born in Canada and deserved to be here. The government was involved in a many-years-long struggle to retrieve that whooping crane, and thus far we have met, from the citizenship department, resistance to the very idea that we are anywhere near the same as any of these other groups.
Mr. Don Chapman, as an individual: Canada seems to have an identity problem. The country does not really seem to know what being a Canadian citizen is, but when it comes to defining what is not a Canadian, clearly it is a lost Canadian child. This is really Canada's shame. What kinds of parents turn their backs on their own children?
CIC has been consistent in saying that we are not citizens. They are inconsistent on almost everything else. I have been at this for over 30 years — trying to get back to my own country. I started a Web page three immigration ministers ago and I probably know more lost Canadian people than anyone else. I am so ashamed of Canada. These are wonderful people who are Canadians and you have turned your back on your own.
My father died three months ago. He was not even able to be a member of the Canadian Legion. I know you are a cardiologist, Senator Keon, and my father was an orthodontist. He left the practice because he had arthritis in his hands. It was not because he wanted to depart from Canada; it was quite the opposite, because we kept our ties.
We are guilty only of having a father who took out citizenship in another country when we were minor children. We are guilty of being in love with our homeland. Sometimes I ask why in the world I am doing this. I was so lucky. I have come to know some of the Tuskegee Airmen, a contingent of black pilots who flew in World War II. Several of them flew for the Canadian Air Force. Last July, and again about one month ago, I was at one of their conventions. I keep asking them about after the war, when they were in France, where they were treated so well, and yet they returned to the United States of the 1940s, when being black was not the same as it is now. I asked them why they did it. I related so well. They said they did it because they had to correct it for the next generation. There was something wrong in their country and they could not turn their backs on it.
With that, I look around the table at five female senators. If you cannot facilitate change, then pack your bags and go home. You are here now because of five other women, as honoured in the statue to the north side of this room.
Senator Fairbairn: You are right.
The Deputy Chairman: Senator Fairbairn sponsored that and I seconded it in the Senate, by the way.
Mr. Chapman: You are here because of them. By the way, Mr. Bosdet is a landed immigrant, I am a landed immigrant, and Ms. Magali Castro-Gyr is now a citizen, but her brother is stateless. We are not here because we could not get in, but I know many people who could not. If you had childhood diabetes or leukemia you would fail the medical and not get in. You are here because someone took a stance, and I admire that. Look what Canada got. They took a risk by letting women in and what did you get? — Senator Callbeck, the first premier; and Senator Robertson, the first cabinet member from New Brunswick. Why not? Read the plaque on that statue and read the Citizenship Act, 2004. There is about 60 years' difference in time. These laws were written in more barbarous times and they are not relevant today. That is true of the act that classified married women, children, lunatics and idiots with the same disability. Today, Canada has changed the law for everyone but the one group who could not speak for themselves.
Thank you for saying that you have heard me but do not want this publicity, although I will not go away. I am high on the radar. We do not know if my brother and sister are Canadians yet but we think they are. They are either stateless or they are Canadians. This law has split families so badly. We have cases where the parents are now Canadians and the children are not. We have cases where the children are Canadians but the parents are not. To resume my citizenship and show my commitment to Canada, I had to leave my mother, who was widowed three months ago. I told her that I love her but I had to show commitment to Canada.
We do not have time for more so I will conclude this way. To show you how totally unfair this, allow me to say that I could have bought my way into Canada. This is not right. This is a country of equality. A year and one-half ago, an American gave a $1-million donation to a museum in Quebec, and about two weeks later he received a call from Jean Chrétien to say, ``Thank you. Would you like your citizenship?'' The gentleman said, ``No, you have to be kidding. I never even thought of that.'' Within one month, he was a full-bred Canadian citizen. How does that make me feel?
My family has given more than four times that much. There are 1,000 students going to school right now because of my family. That is my great, great uncle. That is an original picture of him on the Supreme Court of Canada. This is a picture of him and the Fathers' of Confederation. The house that Pugwash built. You have one senator who is very interested in the Pugwash conference. That is my great, great grandfather's house. That is a picture of me in the Vancouver Sun. I was playing hockey when I was a kid. I am so tied to this country; I have never been an American.
Mr. Bosdet: That is the truth, because half the time I try to reach him at home, he is either playing a hockey game or not at home.
Mr. Chapman: This is something that is important for Canada because it is no different from the Famous Five. Sometimes, you have to take a risk. This is a citizenship issue.
Last is the issue of the Canadian Bill of Rights, 1960. Canada is in violation of so many international laws here and the UN is about to cite Canada on this one for being in violation of the 1991 Convention on the Rights of the Child. They have to live up to obligations. The 1960 Bill of Rights, which either was ignored last week or forgotten but is huge, gave equal rights to children, and there were only three ways to lose your citizenship. None of us did any of them. Canada is ignoring its own laws. Thank you. I am at the Sheraton Hotel tonight. Call me. I can stay tomorrow. I can do anything you like. This is my country; it is too good a country to allow two classes of people like they had in Germany, one with rights, one without. Thank you.
The Deputy Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Chapman.
Senator Morin: Last week we were unable to get the number of lost Canadians. I know, Mr. Chapman, you have a Web site and a number of people have responded to it. Do you have a rough idea of how many people we are talking about here?
Mr. Bosdet: Mr. Chapman hears from a lot of people, as one would if one has a Web site. I wonder whether a more accurate barometer might be the people we know. In Southern California where I was living, I do not know how many scores of Canadians I knew. I was actually thinking at that time, how many of those people talked about returning to Canada? I could not think of any. I thought that was remarkable, but not so much so after I thought about it, because there were some different reasons for them to stay. Either they went there for a particular reason and became attached to the place, or they went there under one condition and now had family and friends and all the rest of it. I could not imagine that someone would not want to return. I thought, ``All right. I can kind of understand it.'' I do not know how anyone could put a number on it.
Senator Morin: I am sorry about that but I would like to have a ballpark number.
The Deputy Chairman: Actually, this is a good, yes.
Senator Morin: Is it 1,000, 500,000, 50,000 or 550,000?
Mr. Chapman: If I had to take a wild guess, I would say about 100,000. There are probably 100,000 inside Canada. If you read the reports, there were people who did not know they were lost Canadians, living all their lives in Canada, until they applied for their pension. I know of one man right now living on the streets of Toronto, with no country and no social insurance number.
The Deputy Chairman: That is right.
Mr. Bosdet: There are many lost Canadians in Canada right now who do not realize it.
The Deputy Chairman: Yes.
Mr. Bosdet: I discovered a cousin's father, whatever that makes him relative to me, who was denied a pension. The only reason he got it eventually was because the minister who baptized him was still alive. This man was 70 years old and the minister was much older than that. He was really fortunate, because there were no records for that period in the county where he was born. There are many people like that. We have received e-mails from people who say they are worried and what do we think of their case. They are afraid to ask the government because of what they have heard about what other people have gone through.
The Deputy Chairman: There have been many cases cited in the newspaper as well as in Mr. Chapman's work.
Mr. Chapman: We even had one person abducted from Canada as a child who cannot get home. I have so many gut- wrenching stories. I am sorry we do not have the time.
The Deputy Chairman: What is your Web site address?
Mr. Chapman: My website is www.lostcanadian.com. There is also www3.tellus.net/IamCanadian.
I would love to come back here to explain to you, because these are gut -wrenching stories. My dad was a colonel for Canada in World War II. He died not being able to be a member of the Canadian Legion. Senator Graham says the Senate is the place where you hold the level of justice. This is what this is here for, for people who have been overlooked. This is so clear-cut a case. I am sorry that Senator Morin did not hear this, but the average lost Canadian is 20 per cent better educated than the average American and makes twice as much. You are gaining, not losing. This will be a boon to you.
You need people. Here they are.
The Deputy Chairman: You looked at the testimony last week, when we had the departmental people here. There was a healthy degree of skepticism around this table in our questioning of the officials.
Mr. Chapman: Thank you. You have to go. I understand that. I will be at the Sheraton Hotel tonight. I could make myself available. Whatever you want.
The Deputy Chairman: We will be dealing with this piece of proposed legislation again next week, but I do not think we could have asked any more questions that would have been more enlightening than your presentation.
Mr. Chapman: I have a ton. One would be about Paul Martin recently defending the Kadhr family, saying that criminality is one thing; citizenship is another. I was a citizen of this country. I never vowed citizenship anywhere else. I never vowed citizenship to the United States.
The Deputy Chairman: That was one of my problems with the testimony of the departmental officials. They were treating it as an immigration situation and this is clearly a citizenship issue.
Mr. Chapman: Look at the Canadian Bill of Rights.
The Deputy Chairman: I have it hanging on my wall, because a Prime Minister that I once worked for brought it in.
Mr. Chapman: One, you had to be able to make a decision. However, a minor child is not able to make a decision. Two, you had to volunteer to give it up, which I did not. Three, if they revoked it, you had to have a hearing and due process. I never had it.
The Deputy Chairman: Exactly.
Mr. Chapman: You could not have spanked your child back then. Children had rights. People say that my father knew what he was doing. Almost without exception, everyone I come across has said, ``We were told we could always go back.'' The borders were fluid back then. Read my stories. Please, contact me. I will answer any questions.
The Deputy Chairman: You should know that Senator Kinsella has done a very good job of acquainting us with your story.
Mr. Chapman: Thank you.
The Deputy Chairman: Your case is very familiar, even though we did not have a lot of time today — again, my apologies. As you can see by this mental health study that we are doing, we have some very compelling issues before us. I am very sorry we did not have the time to properly question you.
Mr. Chapman: By the way, Marlene Jennings, an M.P., was born in Canada to an American father. I was born in Canada to a Canadian father, who became an American. Why is she Canadian and I am not? There is such incredible inconsistency.
The Deputy Chairman: That is a good question, which ends the session.
Thank you again, Mr. Bosdet and Mr. Chapman. Once again, I express my apologies.
The committee adjourned.