Thank you.
When I was involved at the provincial level in Ontario, one of the biggest challenges we were facing—this was prepandemic; I want to recognize that—was that two-thirds of the population in provincial detention centres in Ontario were in remand. That was a high number. The numbers in Ontario at that time were close to 8,000 people in provincial detention centres, and about 5,000 of them were not convicted yet. They were charged, but there was no conviction.
That was a high number. The majority of them, when you looked at the data, had serious mental health and addiction issues. We had, obviously, deteriorating conditions in our detention centres. The question that always kept coming up when I spoke to people who provided those frontline services was whether we were making the circumstances of those individuals worse by putting them in detention centres as opposed to keeping them in the community and providing them wraparound services, as the terminology goes, around mental health and addictions. We actually created something called bail beds in Ontario at that time, which I think is still operational, to allow for individuals to be in a secure facility but out in the community with minimal conditions, still getting their necessary support.
Are those types of solutions, which I would argue are not innovative or creative solutions, part of the conversation that you are having with your FPT colleagues as you look at reforming the bail system?