I hope I can change that pattern, chair. I haven’t done formal written remarks, it’s not usually my style to do that, but I’ve lived through most of the issues that are on the table today. I want to touch on three things in particular.

Correctional Service Canada, or CSC, has always had the authority to transfer inmates to hospitals, whether for assessment or treatment, and that was in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, or CCRA starting in 1992. That authority exists, and obviously has been used. Senator Boisvenu has spoken about the availability of Philippe-Pinel, a forensic psychiatric facility. He has praised it with good reason. The former chair of this committee was a huge proponent of the Brockville Mental Health Centre, particularly when they developed a forensic unit for women, and again, that’s something that is available to CSC. There are resources out there, whether they are within CSC’s control or the private institutions that they contract with.

This is not to say that there’s an unending supply of beds out there, but there are options, and of course, CSC itself has run regional psychiatric centres, such as the one in Saskatchewan, for example. These measures are available if there’s a willingness to use them.

On the issue of the 48-hour limit on segregation, I just want to flag that I hope that there is protection in the bill that will prevent what one would call the 47-hour switch, which is once 47 hours has been reached, CSC pulls the person out for half an hour, and then puts them back in and the 48-hour cycle starts all over again and they avoid the necessity of going to court. I just want to flag that this is an important issue.

The third issue, the Arbour recommendation, yes, I was with the Solicitor General of Canada and all that thereafter. The recommendation is not unknown to Canadian criminal justice. People who are in pretrial remand get extra credit, more than a day for a day, because the conditions in remand are known to be more difficult than sentenced time. That’s an analogous situation. The Youth Criminal Justice Act has provisions for the young offender to go back before the court to have the custodial sentence reduced or to have the conditional supervision period reduced. These are just a couple of examples. This is not a foreign concept to have this return to court.

Why was the Arbour recommendation not pursued? We’re approaching 30 years since that recommendation was made. As I say, I was at the Solicitor General at the time, and if you go back and look at the government response in 1998, it noted that we had referred it to the Department of Justice because it was a sentencing matter, and that it was “under review” and a draft report was expected in the fall of 1998. Fast forward to the tenth anniversary in 2006, and a report on the progress at that point — you will not be surprised — said that it was still under review by the Department of Justice. In a moment of great candour, the report also said that there’s no indication from the Department of Justice that they will be pursuing legislative amendments in support of these recommendations, and that was the end of the matter. Then, of course, officials leave, governments change, ministers change, and that recommendation didn’t go anywhere. That was its fate until Senator Pate has brought it forward in this bill.

That is all I’ll say right now. I’m happy to answer any questions.

Certainly, there will be practical challenges with it; I don’t quarrel that at all.

I think some of the merit in it will be, as Mr. Spratt has indicated, the deterrent value of it and that the Correctional Service Canada, or CSC, will be, hopefully, better capable of planning for these situations so that they’ll have resources in place in the institutions that can manage the person, so that you’re not waiting until the last minute, and, oh, gosh, suddenly, what do we do with this person?

I think the need for the preparation will become abundantly clear to CSC. Will it be a struggle? Yes, it won’t be easy. But for a lot of these people, the mental health issues don’t appear just out of the blue. They’re quite apparent early on.

I visited a range once at Stony Mountain penitentiary for people with special needs, and I have to say, I didn’t know how they had even been found capable to stand trial, frankly. CSC knows that these people are there, that they’ve got to make some accommodation, and I think without that kind of legislated deadline, I’m pessimistic that they will do what they need to be doing.

I can’t speak to any research or data. I mean, your comment raises for me the issue of recent social concern about loneliness, particularly since the pandemic and loneliness among older adults.

I think it’s a way to relate the issue of isolation. Society has started to realize that there is a lot of loneliness out there that has a real mental health dimension to it. Really, what is isolation or segregation other than, in fact, a form of profound loneliness?

I would hope that there would be further research on the impact of that isolation in a custodial community and the long-term impact of it. Right now, the people that end up in segregation often just have lifelong challenges, and the period in segregation may do some temporary good, but without profound treatment it is not going to change the cycle. They’ll return to being very isolated individuals without social supports.

I think that’s quite a profound issue, not just inside, but a profound issue in society that all of us should be concerned about. Because as you point out, most of these people are coming back into the community.

Yes, there will be challenges in implementing it. One of the challenges is having adequate medical resources within the system, and we know how difficult it is to attract doctors, psychologists and therapists to come and work in an institution. It’s an ongoing challenge for various reasons. We’re familiar with that, so there is nothing new there.

The challenge will also be in educating all of the staff of the legal obligations. I don’t want to paint a broad brush of everyone in corrections. It’s a tough job, and there are many good people doing the best they can, but there is often a big gap between Ottawa and the range at Stony Mountain or Matsqui. Staff don’t always have a good awareness of what the law is and what their particular obligations are. When I spent more time in the institutions, I used to say if I had a nickel for every time I was told that some proposal or some rule was the law, I’d be very rich. There’s not good awareness of the difference between law and policy. I think the education of staff on these measures will be crucial to their success.

I hope there will be a bit of a deterrent effect that staff will realize they won’t need to go the Arbour recommendation route as long as they avoid creating or contributing to conditions that are harsh or illegal.

I think there will be a lot of work to be done, such as always a reallocation of resources. I have a lot of thoughts as to how CSC could reallocate its money, which is, after all, the money coming from every taxpayer in Canada. But I don’t want to downplay it. Yes, it will be a challenge, but they are capable of meeting that challenge. It’s going to take some real leadership and really good staff education.

I agree. I think Senator Pate’s bill will not be a total solution, but it will be an important step in the right direction.

What is it about corrections, or CSC, that is so depressing? I just spent all day yesterday with about 20 colleagues. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the Correctional Investigator this year, so a group of us were invited to spend some time talking about the successes and non-successes. There were a few of us in the room, including one person who is a noted legal expert from the West Coast who is now 80 years old and has worked in corrections from the outside for about 50 years. Even he was expressing, what has the last 50 years of work been for? What have we really achieved? Partly, I’m expressing a mood that I spent a day immersed in yesterday.

Many of us concluded that the changes have been at the individual level. There are individuals who have been helped. In terms of systemic change, you’re right, it is a constant challenge. I think just the notion of locking up other humans in cages is one that just breeds a kind of punitive attitude or disregard.

We accept incarceration. It wasn’t always accepted. In England, when imprisonment as a punishment was first proposed, many people said, “What are you talking about? That’s so expensive. Why would we lock people up as a punishment?” Of course, they had worse options that they were quite happy to continue with whether it was death or transportation.

There is something just inherent in prisons, I think, that you always have to be fighting against. That’s why bills like this and many of the other ones are so important, because they keep pushing back against that drift, and it has to be done.

I would certainly argue that radical change is needed. As people here have said, so many people in prison have mental health issues or other cognitive challenges. At the same time, some of them have done things that are truly harmful to individuals and society. Which do you address first? You want society to be safe for everyone, yet some of the people appearing in the courts — many of the people — are there because they didn’t have any control over their behaviour. I’m not speaking of everyone. There are some people, obviously, who knew exactly what they were doing and need to be out of society for a period of time or potentially forever. They simply can’t manage in society.

However, I think we do need to rethink how we are treating people at the margins of society, because it’s just far too easy to send them to prison and forget about them. That’s why the Office of the Correctional Investigator was created 50 years ago. It was so closed in the prison, and when the riot happened at the Kingston Penitentiary, it was this outburst of rage and anger. I visited Kingston Penitentiary about eight years later, and they had kept the one range as it was, and you see porcelain fixtures that had been pulled out of the concrete wall. It makes you wonder how enraged a person had to be to do that. The Office of the Correctional Investigator was created in large part to provide an outlet for prisoners to bring some light to bear — to give them some access to a remedy.

Fifty years later, we haven’t come that much further. People say that if an inmate is not happy or something is going wrong, they can call a lawyer. Well, first of all, they have to find a phone. This is so prosaic — find a phone. They have to find the name of a lawyer and find the phone number. They have to find a lawyer who will take their call. If they’re just left to their own devices, access to remedies is formidable. I’m not sure everyone realizes that.

Again, I’m not saying that everyone inside is suffering from some disability or deficit, but so many of them are, and they’re just cast aside.

Yes.