I believe that’s the direction that we’re going and I look forward to the Member sharing that book with me once he’s done reading it. We have a 10-year strategic plan and we have a five-year implementation plan, and a lot of it is about prevention, quite frankly. We need to find ways to keep our jails as empty as possible.
We are working on a Community Safety Strategy which we have had a lot of discussion about and a draft strategy has been developed, and we’ve got a general idea of what it’s going to look like and now we’re looking at doing some piloting around that. I would be happy, obviously, to talk to committee more about that if they’re interested.
Diversions are huge. Diversions could happen at many different levels. The RCMP over the last number of years from 2003, 2004, when we probably had our highest number of diversions, diversion levels have been just plummeting. Since I’ve become the Minister, and in working with committee, it’s become so clear how important these diversions are and that we really need to get back to where we were, because it helps keep people out of our facilities where appropriate. Bad people still are going to need to go to jail when they’ve done bad things, but we can work with individuals where appropriate.
I am happy to say we will provide committee with more numbers as we roll up at each of the end of the fiscal years, but since ’11-12, diversions have gone from a low of under 100 and just above 50, to almost where we were in 2003-2004. Our numbers right now are looking to be just almost 200, which is a significant increase just in the life of this Assembly.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with the commanding officer at “G” Division. He agrees wholeheartedly that we have to do more diversion. He’s making it happen and he wants to see more. He’s not happy with just getting back to where we were. He wants to see increases as well.
The community justice committees, we’ve already talked about how valuable they are. We’ve got youth justice committees as well. We’ve got a lot of things where we’re getting input from the communities, because that’s where the solutions are. This would be something more appropriate for when we get to corrections, but we want to do on-the-land programming, and the Member and I have had a significant number of discussions in the House, and he knows that this department is committed to trying to make that happen. He also knows that we’re committed to doing rehabilitation or reintegration programs, and we’re starting to have some really great conversations around that.
The types of things the Member is talking about are the things that, I feel, we’re pushing hard in this department and we’re going to see results, and we’re already starting to see results. I thank the Member for his comments, and I look forward to working with him in committee to make these things become a reality.