Drug Treatment Court Funding Program Evaluation

1. Introduction

The Drug Treatment Court Funding Program (DTCFP) is a federal contribution funding program that provides financial support and administers funding agreements to six Drug Treatment Court (DTC) sites that were selected through a call for proposals in December 2004. The sites include the two original DTCs in Toronto and Vancouver and four additional DTCs located in Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Regina. The Program was last evaluated in 2009.

This report presents the findings of the evaluation of the DTCFP. The evaluation complies with the Treasury Board Secretariat’s 2009 Policy on Evaluation, which requires that all direct program spending of the government be evaluated every five years. In addition, the evaluation ensures compliance with the Federal Accountability Act. This evaluation was conducted between June and September 2014 and covers the work of the DTCFP between fiscal years (FY) 2009–10 and 2013–14. An evaluation working group (an advisory group with representatives from the DTCFP and the Evaluation Division) provided ongoing input into the evaluation.

This report contains five sections, including the introduction. Section 2 provides the background on the DTCFP, describing its structure, resources, DTC models, and the logic behind its activities; Section 3 describes the methodology used in the evaluation; Section 4 summarizes the key findings; and Section 5 presents the conclusions.