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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Committee would like to thank all the witnesses, all the participants in the various roundtable discussions and the National Forum, and all those who submitted briefs. The Committee's work was greatly facilitated by the high quality of the presentations made to us during our public hearings in Ottawa and during our five trips to different parts of Canada.

We would also like to thank the people in charge of all the detention centres and programs we visited, for their kind cooperation. They and the specialists we met who are working with adolescents made the Committee's work much easier, and above all they enabled the Committee's members to penetrate into a world that is little known to the general public. Our special thanks go to all the adolescents in detention centres, closed custody, open custody and various diversion programs who agreed to meet with us.

The Committee is as usual grateful to its staff for their excellent work, their dedication, and the long hours they devoted to this study.

In particular we owe a great deal to the expertise and unflagging hard work of our research team: Patricia Begin, Philip Rosen and Peter Niemczak.

The Clerk of the Committee, Richard Dupuis, and the Co-Clerk, Miriam Burke, were invaluable: with professionalism, dedication and skill they planned all the work, dealt with all the administrative, financial and logistical problems and organized all our trips, always within very tight deadlines.

We would like to express our appreciation to the personnel at the Committees Directorate, in particular Georgette Dubeau, the Clerk's Administrative Assistant, Pauline LeBon, Patricia Tremblay, Ginette de Repentigny and Sharon Scullion; to the House of Commons support services, in particular the Publications Service; and to the Translation Bureau's interpreters and translators, who often had to work in difficult conditions.

Lastly, I would like to express my personal gratitude to the members of the Committee for the many hours they devoted to preparing this Report, while coping with so many time and resource constraints.

Shaughnessy Cohen, MP

Chair

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