Good afternoon. My name is Stan Stapleton. I am the national president of the Union of Safety and Justice Employees, also known as USJE. As a national organization representing employees working on the front lines of the pandemic, I am immensely appreciative of the opportunity to be here with my colleague David Neufeld, who is the national vice-president.
USJE represents over 16,000 federal public service employees who work for 18 federal departments and agencies in a safety or justice capacity. However, the largest number of our employees work for the Correctional Service of Canada.
Unlike the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, UCCO, which plays a security function at federal penitentiaries, USJE represents a diverse range of employees with crucial rehabilitative and administrative functions. These include food service officers, parole and program officers, teachers, managers of assessment and intervention, facilities and maintenance crew, and licensed practical nurses. Hundreds of federal parole officers and case management teams from coast to coast oversee the reintegration of federal offenders. Their job is to ensure that federal offenders across the country adhere to their supervision plans and are not at risk of reoffending.
I will be very honest with you. When COVID-19 hit, I do not believe we were prepared. Whatever pandemic protocols may have been in place were not immediately applied within CSC. On March 18 I wrote a letter to Commissioner Anne Kelly, appealing to her to immediately implement proactive measures to minimize the spread of COVID in federal prisons and contain the footprint in the community. We needed CSC to do what was effectively being done in Canada's long-term homes—namely, heavily control who was coming in and out of federal penitentiaries; significantly increase cleaning and sanitization protocols; ensure appropriate use of PPE, and encourage face coverings within; begin widespread testing; stop employees from working at multiple sites; and isolate presumptive cases among employees or offenders.
For several weeks, we found that new protocols were not always applied consistently. For example, there was limited access to testing and PPE, sanitization was inadequate, employees were moving between sites, food delivery within affected prisons was presenting opportunities for further infection, and there were not enough laptops to enable work from home. Quite frankly, when considering the living and working conditions at CSC during this pandemic, it is remarkable that major outbreaks were contained to five federal sites and two deaths. Although extremely unfortunate, it could have been much worse.
USJE's senior leaders worked around the clock for several weeks to highlight the challenges, gaps, oversights and opportunities to do things better when it came to COVID. One could say we were relatively lucky this time. However, many CSC employees working at full capacity and under enormous stress during the past few months would not view the situation so favourably.
Thankfully, at this stage CSC and its union partners are in a much better place. This is in part because of the creation of a joint transition task force established by CSC, USJE and other labour partners. The task force is something that USJE called for in order to keep employees and offenders safe. The work of this task force has been very encouraging in terms of the level of respect and engagement. We commend Bev Arsenault's leadership with this task force. I believe it could represent a new direction in how CSC treats its labour partners, who have first-hand knowledge of the challenges on the ground.
I will now turn it over to my colleague David Neufeld.