Thanks very much for the opportunity.
I want to add further to what Jenny Jeanes was saying, because your question was about whether facilities are going to be available in federal correctional institutions for mental health supports. The truth is that there are no guarantees of that. Our questions to the immigration and refugee department were very much to ask if they had been scoping out where such potential zones could be created in federal corrections. We haven't done the map yet. We don't know. Have they determined to what extent mental health services will be available? We would have to figure that out.
It's a high-risk scenario, and it's unclear where in the country they would be creating such places for immigration detention, but since they are identifying a small number of people and the level of criteria they feel they have to meet is high, we can imagine that they could be very physically dispersed. This could mean that the people placed in federal prisons for immigration detention could end up being far from communities, far from services and far from their care providers, so to us, the risk related to access to mental health services is very high.
The other point I want to identify is about the question you spoke to: Why are they doing it now and what is the timing? For us, the main point here is that it is outrageous they are doing it. We have 10 provinces across the political spectrum, with Conservative provincial governments, Liberal provincial governments and Quebec, where I usually work, saying that this is absolutely not on anymore. There has been a groundswell of public outcry.
We have public direction and political direction in the country moving very specifically against putting people in administrative detention in prison, and the federal government is choosing now as the time they are going to do this. We know that federal prisons are the places for people who have convictions of more than two years, and it's much more serious to be placed in a federal prison.
In terms of Canada's reputation, we just had UN detention experts visiting Canada. They were appalled that this was happening. It is a radical departure. “Why are they doing it now?” is really more a question of it making no sense that they do it. The provincial contracts are ending in a matter of days, so we know, even the BIA aside, that we won't have the ability.
There's obviously already a plan in place for how to manage the fewer than 30 people who are left in provincial jails. There is capacity in immigration holding centres. There is no reason to radically shift Canada's paradigm. Clearly, across the spectrum and across the country, we're opposed to putting people in administrative detention in federal prisons. It must be summarily rejected, especially in the context of slipping it into a budget implementation act.