Bill C-83 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another Act

This enactment amends the Corrections and Conditional Release Act to, among other things,
(a) eliminate the use of administrative segregation and disciplinary segregation;
(b) authorize the Commissioner to designate a penitentiary or an area in a penitentiary as a structured intervention unit for the confinement of inmates who cannot be maintained in the mainstream inmate population for security or other reasons;
(c) provide less invasive alternatives to physical body cavity searches;
(d) affirm that the Correctional Service of Canada has the obligation to support the autonomy and clinical independence of registered health care professionals;
(e) provide that the Correctional Service of Canada has the obligation to provide inmates with access to patient advocacy services;
(f) provide that the Correctional Service of Canada has an obligation to consider systemic and background factors unique to Indigenous offenders in all decision-making; and
(g) improve victims’ access to audio recordings of parole hearings.
This enactment also amends the English version of a provision of the Criminal Records Act.

Corrections and Conditional Release Act

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Unfortunately, time is up. I did allow a little more time, but if the hon. member wants to add anything else he can do it during questions and comments.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, in his speech the member talked about the role of government and how one of the most, if not the most, important role of government is to keep its citizens safe. I could not disagree with him more. On this side of the House, we believe that when people are incarcerated, we as society have a role to properly rehabilitate individuals so they can be reintegrated into society as productive contributing members of society in those communities.

The Conservative approach, and what we are hearing from them, is one where they want to lock people up, leave them in there until their sentences have expired and then let them out into the public. How can he possibly suggest that such a plan and such a position on rehabilitation, their lack of interest in doing that, really at the end of the day ensures that citizens are properly protected when those inmates are released years down the road?

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Madam Speaker, that is a very naive question, because he is assuming these are mutually exclusive. Keeping Canadians safe and implementing treatment and recovery programs go hand in hand. In fact, I said that in my speech. The Liberal government should support treatment and recovery programs to get addicts off drugs. Of course we want prisoners rehabilitated. Of course we want them to reintegrate into society. However, we want to be sure that before they do that, it is safe to do so.

We had an example this summer where a high-risk offender was transferred far prematurely to a low or medium-security facility. We agree that perhaps toward the end of a sentence, at six months or a year before the end of a sentence, there should be some of those programs, but to do it eight years before the sentence ends is foolhardy.

I will go back and say that, yes, the responsibility of government is to protect its citizens while at the same time ensuring rehabilitation and recovery treatment programs.

[Anne Minh-Thu Quach, NDP, Salaberry—Suroît, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to know what my colleague thinks of the fact that many of the inmates who are put in administrative segregation for an indeterminate amount of time, sometimes up to 23 hours a day, suffer from mental health problems.

In my opinion, it would make more sense to give them access to mental health services and programs to address the root causes of these problems instead of exacerbating them by placing the inmates in administrative segregation. In fact, when they are released, they pose a public health threat. It makes no sense to propose such a solution in our prisons.

Should the government not review these measures, which have also been deemed unconstitutional?

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Madam Speaker, again, we are assuming they are mutually exclusive. We can have adequate mental health services along with appropriate segregation that keeps a prisoner from harming himself or others. However, at the same point, we need adequate personnel to provide the human contact the prisoner needs, not only to protect the prisoner but to actually engage in rehabilitation and treatment programs.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Madam Speaker, a quote from one of the CSC officers says, “We are the ones working the ranges, day in and day out, 24-7, yet we have to wait for a decision from our managers as to whether we're going to act or respond to a specific behaviour”.

In the public service survey 77% of correctional service officers said their work suffers because of overly complicated or unnecessary procedures imposed by the government. My colleague talked a lot about the lack of consultation on the bill. I wonder if he could expand on that and how it is hurting such issues at hand.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Madam Speaker, as I said in my comments earlier, I used to represent the riding where Grand Valley prison facility is housed, but the changes to the boundaries in the last election moved that. It is currently not in my riding, but it is next door. I have had the privilege of visiting the Grand Valley institution on a number of occasions and speaking with the front-line workers there. I have also had the privilege of speaking personally with Jason Godin, the chief of the correctional officers union. I know one of their major concerns is their own safety.

When we implement these kinds of changes without consultation with them, this is where the big problem lies.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join the debate on Bill C-83, a bill dealing with some of the rules around incarceration in Canada. I want to make a few general points about the principles that should guide our approach before I move to the particulars of the legislation itself.

Our approach to criminal justice should affirm the dignity of the human person, which includes personal responsibility and the capacity to change. Both are key elements. Its primary goal should be rehabilitation and the protection of society, which obviously go together. If people are rehabilitated, then they no longer present a risk to society. If they are not rehabilitated, they can be a risk to those around them, even when they are in prison.

It seems to me that both extremes in the criminal justice debate deny in some way the dignity of the person. Some believe individual criminality is necessarily the result of social factors as opposed to bad moral decision-making. Social factors can obviously contribute to a person's situation, but the extreme leftist analysis, which reduces everything to social factors, denies the dignity and agency of persons who are in vulnerable situations.

No matter people's circumstances, they do have a choice. They have a choice to try to make the best out of their situation or on the other end, a choice to engage in criminal activity. It seems that this recognition of dignity, and therefore responsibility, is the necessary grounds of rehabilitation. People must recognize their own agency in order to turn their lives around.

We also reject the extreme that those who commit crimes cannot turn their lives around. Some would want us to write people off too easily. However, our own life experience should teach us that people can change their patterns of behaviour for the better. Many people who have committed crimes can change, and there is a public interest and moral obligation for us to do all we can to help with the process. This means maximizing incentives and supports to people who are on that journey.

A criminal justice policy that fully affirms human dignity, recognizing personal responsibility for crime and the ability to change, would assign sentences that are both tough and variable. Tough and variable sentences is an approach that ensures people who are rehabilitated can get back into society and contribute. However, people who refuse to take the steps necessary to turn their lives around remain in prison until they do. Providing strong incentives and program supports that maximize the chances of turnaround is indeed in everybody's interest.

Our approach to sentencing should also take scarce resources into account. If people who are no longer a threat to society remain in prison, they are consuming resources that could be better spent on crime prevention programs, policing and rehabilitation. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has shown us that the average cost of incarcerating someone is about $115,000 a year. The average cost of segregation is $463,000 for a year.

Incarcerating people, or putting them in segregation, should never be done lightly in any event. Even for guilty persons, we should only incarcerate them to the degree that the cost of their incarceration would more effectively advance public safety than any other expenditure of the same funds. Clearly because of the costs, the system should have an interest in avoiding incarceration and segregation whenever effective and less costly options exist.

This analysis is not to penny-pinch for its own sake, but it is to recognize that there is an opportunity cost associated with any expenditure. Proactive policing and effective crime prevention is good for victims and public safety, so striking that right balance is indeed of critical importance.

Some will point out that we can never know for sure if people will reoffend, which is true. However, when the likelihood to reoffend is very low, perhaps resources would be better used for other kinds of interventions, like more policing, which are more likely to advance public safety than continued incarceration.

About a year ago, I had the opportunity to visit a prison in my riding and have some good dialogue with employees and inmates. A few points stuck with me from that visit. One is that there are a variety of programs available to people who are in prison and a variety of not-for-profit organizations, including many churches and other faith-based organizations, involved in connecting with and supporting inmates while in prison.

The process of transition from prison to life back outside of prison can be a real challenge. Prison life is structured and regulated in a way that life outside is not. There are far more services inside than outside. The process of transition back to normal life often involves economic challenges and pressures, as well as the temptation to fall back into old social groups and patterns of behaviour.

It seems to me that we need to look more at the area of transition and post-prison supports. How can we help people leverage new skills and experiences to find meaningful employment and develop a new peer group? How can we better partner with faith communities and other not-for-profits, recognizing that post-prison ministry is just as important as prison ministry?

Speaking of skills that help with transition, the prison in my riding offers inmates the potential opportunity to seek trade certification. Inmates who get a trade certificate almost never return to prison, according to the staff I spoke to.

That made me wonder. What if we built into our criminal justice a system a mechanism by which sentence lengths would be automatically adjusted if an inmate acquired a specific employment-related qualification? Inmates acquiring employment-related qualifications in areas of skill shortages in particular would help the economy. It would give employers a greater incentive to hire former inmates in cases where there would be a skill shortage. Therefore, perhaps there is an opportunity there for a win-win.

There should be positive incentives associated with rehabilitation and with making choices to turn one's life around. There also needs to be negative incentives associated with bad and disruptive behaviour that creates problems for the rehabilitation and for creating an environment in a prison setting that is conducive to rehabilitation. That brings us to the question of administrative segregation.

Bill C-83 would replace administrative segregation with something called, “structured intervention units”. We know that one of the Liberals' favourite things to do is to change the names of things, be it the universal child care benefit to the Canada child benefit. The workers' tax deduction had its name changed. Many existing programs had their names changed and the process relabelled under the current government.

Certainly the critics of administrative segregation do not see a meaningful or sufficient difference between the old and the new forms of segregation. However, there are some specific differences. Whether they are sufficient is a question for us to debate.

I will note the differences. The legislation would require that the person in the new Liberal rebranded form segregation to have a minimum of four hours per day out instead of two. It specifically mandates meaningful human contact.

What is frustrating for me is that the government does not seem to have a plan associated with it to actually link these objectives with the resources that are required. So often we see the government's desire to brand itself on something. The Liberals are eliminating administrative segregation. However, they are simply making an adjustment with respect to the name, but there are not sufficient resources associated with the commitments they have made to deal with the reality that having four hours instead of two is significantly more costly from a policing and administrative perspective. If they mandate it without having the resources in place to deliver on that commitment, they risk the inmates and the prison itself. They risk creating an environment of much less safety in the prison because they have a requirement for people to be out of a segregated environment when they may be very dangerous, yet they do not have the resources to ensure that is policed in an effective way.

It is interesting as well to have legislation that mandates meaningful human contact. It is interesting for the state to even be in the business of trying to define what is meaningful human contact and to mandate it. There are probably many people who are not in prison, who for various reasons with respect to life circumstances would like to have that much meaningful human contact and do not. The goal of rehabilitation should be to get people to a place and disposition where they are able to reconnect with and have meaningful connections with people in their lives. Although it is a laudable objective, I question what the legislation could mean and how the government would propose to operationalize this requirement of meaningful human contact.

I will close with this. In the area of criminal justice policy, there might actually have been an opportunity for some cross-party co-operation if the government had listened to the arguments we were making and understood the need for balance; that is a criminal justice policy that affirms human dignity, recognizing personal responsibility as well as the ability for people to change and recognizing the need to properly resource the proposals it is putting forward. Instead, we have an inadequate bill that serves to meet a branding exercise.

The Liberals want to say that they have done away with a particular aspect of prison life when they do not have a plan to resource it, they do not have a plan for public safety and they are not interested in the kind of meaningful, substantive reforms that people across the spectrum are looking for, the kinds of sentencing reforms on which we could potentially co-operate on. Again, we are not seeing those ideas proposed by the government.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is worth noting that the courts in both British Columbia and Ontario have struck down the administrative provisions for segregation. If those laws take effect, which they are scheduled to do in the coming months, it would make segregation no longer an option. I find it extremely concerning that the Conservatives continue to support this approach.

The member talked about rehabilitation and how much the Conservatives were in favour of that. He even went on to talk about maximizing supports and incentives. That is interesting. If we look back at the last Conservative government and its legislation and policy, it did the exact opposite. The Conservatives removed things like prison farms, which were incredible at building social, valuable life skills. That was the testimony of many inmates who had been in and out of prison. After going through that program, they developed those skills and were able to become positive contributing members of society.

I am curious if the member could expand on that and share a little about these maximizing supports and incentives that the previous Conservative was able to bring aboard. If not, maybe he could suggest what some of those could be with his suggested policy.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, with all due respect to the member, his question betrays a real lack of understanding of what our role is as members of Parliament and what we are supposed to be doing. We are here to advance our own views about policy issues and to outline ideas and visions for moving us forward. That is exactly what I have done.

With respect to the member's criticisms, as well as those of other members of the government, about criminal justice policies that were pursued in the past, most of the policies around mandatory minimum sentences were supported and voted for by the Liberal caucus. It is very interesting to hear those members complain about some of the effects of that. They complain about money allocated to build new prisons and so forth, but then in every case, they voted for the sentencing bills around mandatory minimums that came forward. We unfortunately see a lot of hypocrisy from the government on this issue.

I want to comment on what the member said about administrative segregation. The courts have quite rightly criticized cases in which the administration of segregation was not effective. This does mean that it cannot be administered effectively and certainly it would be administered less effectively with a government mandating policies that it does not have a plan to resource.

[Karine Trudel, NDP, Jonquière, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like my colleague's opinion on the follow remarks by Senator Pate.

I will read a few excerpts.

Bill C-83 also maintains the status quo regarding a lack of effective external oversight of correctional decision making. Under the new legislation, all decision making regarding when and how long prisoners are to be segregated will be made by a CSC administrator without the review of any third party.

She adds:

This change represents another step away from Justice Louise Arbour's recommendation for judicial oversight of corrections following the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston.

I would like to know what my colleague thinks of that.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, my colleague is right to say that the government is not moving in a particularly dramatic way, that it wants to say it has eliminated administrative segregation but has rebranded it. The system is relatively similar except the Liberals are mandating a greater number of hours for which the resources are not sufficient to address that.

The member's proposal is one that I would want to study further before taking a definitive position on, but it is certainly an interesting idea for exploration. The principle of oversight to some degree makes sense. It is just a question of the logistics around its use in the particular way in which she has discussed it.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, it is good to be here this afternoon. It is unfortunate that we do not have a stronger bill with a little better content in it, but we will deal with what we have today. As usual, this is the kind of thing we have had to face with the government. It should be no surprise to us that it is in the chaos it is in, because we see a fairly consistent presentation that leads to bills that are this weak. I will talk about those weaknesses later.

The bill is basically a knee-jerk reaction to two Supreme Court decisions. The Liberals decided to play both sides of that game, so they are appealing those decisions at the same time as they are bringing forward whole new legislation. I think the public needs to understand that. Unfortunately, on this bill, they have missed the boat both on content and knowledge. We heard that from witnesses who came forward at committee. Witness after witness said that, first of all, they were not consulted, and second, the bill was not going in the right direction and needed to be reworked or thrown out, set aside or whatever.

One of the things the Liberals have done consistently since they have come to power is bring things forward and then actually look at them and decide whether they are worth bringing forward. Then they start to get people's opinions and they find out that they are on the wrong track. Then they start to backtrack and begin to amend their legislation. Once it comes back in here, they start forcing it through. We are here today on a bill with time allocation. The Liberals not only brought in time allocation at report stage but have already brought it in for third reading as well. We have seen this many times before, and we are seeing it here today. Fortunately, on some of these occasions, the Liberals have actually set bills aside and decided that they were not going to see them through. I guess electoral reform would be one of those that was obvious. Bill C-69 is another one that people across this country are begging the Liberals to set aside, because it would basically destroy the energy industry in Canada if they brought it through. Sometimes they can listen, but usually they find it very difficult to do that.

It is ironic that we have time allocation today, because had we had petitions today, I wanted to bring one forward. It is an electronic petition, E-1886. I found it fascinating that over 10,000 people signed this petition. It is an electronic petition from people across Canada, and it has to do with this issue.

This morning I asked a question of the public safety minister. He has been here for a long time. He was here before I was. One of the things he was part of before I came here was an attack on and actually the jailing of western Canadian farmers. These were farmers who had said that they would like to sell their own grain. One of them had donated one bushel of grain to a 4-H club in Montana. The public safety minister was one of those ministers who led the charge against those farmers. By the time they were done, they had five departments of the government working against individual Canadians. The CRA was involved. Justice was involved. Immigration was involved. The RCMP was firmly involved. Members can read stories of what happened in a couple of books by Don Baron. He writes about raids on people's farms in the middle of the night and their trying to confiscate their equipment, and those kinds of things. The public safety minister was then the agriculture minister. I asked him why it seems that every time we turn around, he is going after regular law-abiding Canadians.

We see this again with the initiative coming from the other side on handguns, which have been very restricted since the 1930s. People in Canada use them for sport. Many people across Canada have gone through the process to be licenced. This government seems bound and determined to try to make some sort of criminals out of handgun owners across this country. Again, my question to him was why he continued to come after law-abiding citizens, especially when on the other side, they are not all that interested, it seems, in actually protecting people from criminals.

That brings me back to my petition. Everyone is familiar with the case of Terri-Lynne McClintic, who was convicted of first degree murder in the horrific abduction, rape and murder of eight-year-old Tori Stafford. She was moved from a secure facility to a healing lodge without fences, where the government confirmed the presence of children. She is not eligible for parole until 2031. The Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, which happens to be in my riding, lacks the necessary security measures to ensure the safety of local citizens in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan and surrounding areas.

Over 10,000 people across Canada called on the Government of Canada to exercise its moral and political authority to ensure that this decision was reversed and could not be allowed to happen again in other situations. We all know that it took the government weeks before it would acknowledge that there was a problem with this transfer, and in the end, it semi-reversed that transfer.

The interesting thing is that some of the same things are in Bill C-83. Right at the beginning, subclause 2(1) says, “the Service uses the least restrictive measures consistent with the protection of society, staff members and offenders”. There is no sense of some sort of disciplinary activity taking place in our prisons. The government says it has to find the least restrictive and most friendly way to treat people being held in our prisons right now.

I could go through many of the provisions of this bill. It talks about prisoners receiving the most effective programs, but when the minister was asked if there was a costing for this, he said that the government had not done costing on the bill. We can talk all day long about effective programs and health care, which this bill does, but if it was not costed before it was brought forward, how would the government even know what it would be expected to provide?

The bill talks about the criteria for the selection of the penitentiary. It says that it must be the “least restrictive environment” for the person. Correctional Service Canada has to deliberately run around and try to find the least restrictive place to put people. Many of these people are very dangerous individuals. Some of these people are actually bad people. I heard some heckling from the other side basically implying that they are not and that they can all be reformed if we treat them well, and if we ask for their opinions, they will give us good, solid opinions, we will all get along and we can hold hands and sing songs. The reality is that there are some people in these prisons who are very bad people and do not deserve to be running around as they choose.

One of the strange changes in this bill would allow the commissioner to designate a penitentiary or any section of a penitentiary as any level of security he or she chooses. That is very strange. The Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge is a minimum security prison on the edge of the Cypress Hills area. It is a beautiful location right at the edge of the trees. There are no fences around it. There is a series of cottages. The women right now spend time in the cottages. They have programming in the main lodge. Does that mean that the commissioner can designate one of those cottages a maximum security unit without changing the security level of the facilities or anything else and just say it is now a maximum-level unit, and someone can be put there who is supposed to be in a maximum security prison? All of us would put our heads in our hands and say that this is a crazy idea.

Within prisons there are some people who do not want to be in the general population. They are okay with being segregated. There are a number of reasons that might happen. One is that they may get hurt or injured themselves. The second is that they may hurt or injure someone else. They do not want to be put back into the general population of the prison. This bill basically says that the department has to continually work to do everything it can to put them back into general population.

A common theme throughout Bill C-83 and legislation on crime the Liberals keep bringing forward is that they want to try to make life easier for the most difficult prisoners. They should be looking at public safety. They should look at the people who work in the prisons. Why do Liberals not ever seem to focus on them instead of trying to find a way to hug a thug. They seem to really enjoy doing that.

This bill contains a lot of rhetoric and very few specifics. We were told that it was not costed. Once again, it is a demonstration of how soft the Liberals are on crime and how willing they are to close their eyes to reality. This is a series of promises that again will not be kept. This bill should be set aside. It is unfortunate that the government has moved time allocation for the 60th or 70th time to force this bill through.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Madam Speaker, I have heard members of the opposition say that this is a branding exercise, that there are not dramatic changes and that it is just a lot of rhetoric. I have to say that having studied this bill, I could not be more proud of it. I actually believe, firmly in my heart, that years from now, not only federal institutions but provincial institutions and institutions around the world will be looking at Canada for the way we have ended segregation.

When the minister appeared at committee, he was asked if it had been costed. That was prior to the fall economic statement, when $448 million was allocated to implement the revised SIUs.

I am wondering if any of the members have actually read the bill to see that there is oversight in it. It is actually my amendment. If this is such a terrible plan to end administrative segregation in prisons, what would you propose we do?

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, Carol Hughes]

Again, I would remind the member to address the questions to the Chair.