Public Safety Committee on March 23rd, 2010

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Yes.

[Christine Perreault]

The problem we do have is that when you go back into the community you are confronted with all the stressors, which has a huge impact on people with mental health problems. There is a link with the motivation, the treatment adherence, the acceptance of the illness. Sometimes they don't understand what we do expect from them. Sometimes it's just a problem of understanding the rules in a CCC or a CRC. It's just understanding what is expected of them. And sometimes they are in breach of conditions just because of that. They are suspended and they come back behind bars because for the moment these are the means we do have.

This is a huge problem we are having with people with mental health problems. It's just that they don't understand, and we are still working on adjusting the way we are taking care of them in the community. So they don't reoffend more, but they are suspended more just because of that. It's a breach of condition, but only based on a lack of understanding of what we are expecting from them.

And sometimes they will go back to self-medication, because for someone with a mental health problem, going back to substance abuse is a slide that one can take very easily. That's because self-medication makes it sometimes easier to deal with that and it masks the mental illness. So they will go back to substance abuse and they will abandon their medication. They don't understand what we are expecting, but it's not in the anti-social frame of mind. They don't understand, period.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

You say in the last paragraph that shorter sentences are more frequently the case. You talk about how the system could improve, perhaps helping people on shorter sentences within our institutions. One line that popped off the page for me is “ensuring that these offenders are in the right program, at the right intensity, at the right time”. That is so salient to our discussion about looking for ways we can improve the system.

Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share with us about how to improve delivery of services in terms of timing?

[Christine Perreault]

We're going to have a new way of dealing with correctional programming. We're going to work with domains. We'll have an integrated approach to correctional programming that will be more efficient.

Right now there is overlap in our programs, so we will have a more integrated approach that is domain-focused. In different correctional programs you can find the same domains that are targeted with intervention from all the professionals working in the correctional programming. So now it's going to be more integrated. It's going to be by domains, and we'll be able to put more people in programs. The level of risk with the level of intervention, according to the research, is very important. For high risk, a high-intensity program works better. So we have to do that, keep that, and stay on that track. If it's a shorter sentence we need to go faster; start at the very beginning and do programming with them from the very beginning.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you. We'll have to leave it there for now.

Mr. Desnoyers.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome.

At the community correctional centres, we're talking about thousands of offenders under your responsibility, either internally, or on parole, or day parole, etc. My questions concern the usual number of offenders under the permanent care and custody of every person who works in those community centres. What is the standard?

Then, when the person winds up on the outside, when that person leaves the rural centre, does that standard change? Does the correctional officer or the person who takes care of that person receive additional assistance in handling the individual, and even more as the situation progresses?

[Johanne Vallée]

Mr. Desnoyers, you're challenging me. Oh, oh!

I never calculated the resources in that way. I can tell you that, currently in the Quebec Region, we have 3,331 inmates—and that may vary from day to day, depending on the number of individuals released and incarcerated—who are actually in institutions, in penitentiaries, and we have approximately 2,100 parolees in all of Quebec. To supervise those 5,000 or so individuals, we have approximately 4,105 employees in Quebec distributed as follows: 1,882 correctional officers—and that can also vary from day to day, but that's an average—203 nurses, 85 psychologists and 102 program officers, parole officers. I've never made that connection, but obviously in the penitentiaries, you have to understand one thing—and I always say this to people who don't know them well—it's like a hotel, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with food services and all that entails in custody terms, both in the penitentiary and within its perimeter.

The ratio will obviously be a little lower at a community correctional centre, apart from the Martineau CCC for specialized care where there is specialized staff: a health care centre open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, there is always surveillance, 24 hours a day, which is provided in all community correctional centres. We have parole officers and program officers at the community correctional centres. When I say "community correctional centres", I'm really talking about everything that is done in the community, under supervision.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

When a person winds up on the outside, I imagine it's the same rule for women as for men, as regards services and staff. It's the same rule for aboriginal offenders as well, I imagine. There aren't any different rules.

[Johanne Vallée]

There aren't any different rules in that sense. There are different rules from the standpoint of a number of employees, which will vary.

More employees will obviously be working at a maximum-security institution, such as Donnacona and Port-Cartier Institutions, for example, because they are, precisely, maximum-security institutions.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

All right. When someone leaves the institution to go back to the community... You mentioned a partnership between community agencies.

Is there a big rotation in those agencies and do they maintain the same service as that provided in community centres? I imagine that, in mental health, as you said earlier, a major follow-up must be required with regard to medication and so on.

However, when it comes to community agencies, major cuts have often been made and agencies have therefore disappeared. Hasn't that created situations in which it is more difficult for your service to maintain services?

I am continuing along the lines of a question that my colleague from the Liberal Party asked you earlier. Some bills currently before the House of Commons will definitely result in an increase in the number of offenders. You said you were studying that and conducting analyses. Would it be possible to have copies of those analyses?

[Johanne Vallée]

First I'll answer your first question. As regards the community agencies that work in partnership with the Correctional Service, I would say that Correctional Service Canada has excellent partnerships with the agencies.

I'll tell you about Quebec. The partnership with the community agencies has definitely been in existence for more than 40 years, across all of Quebec. In Quebec, we have what's called a "tripartite agreement", which involves both the Government of Quebec, the federal government and the community agencies. That tripartite agreement provides for service standards to ensure quality of service, whether it be at a community correctional centre or at a community residential centre. The community residential centres belong to the community and are managed by volunteer boards of directors. However, within those agencies and houses, it's the professionals who provide the services: criminologists, social workers and psychologists.

I believe that the funding granted to the community agencies could be increased, and that's an issue in the discussions that we constantly have with them. However, the level of funding has enabled us to stabilize the community agencies in Quebec. So we have partnerships such as that with the Montreal YMCA, a partner in business and in the supervision of our offenders in the community for more than 35 years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

We'll have to wrap it up here. I'm sorry, but you're two minutes over.

Go ahead, Mr. MacKenzie, please.

[Luc Desnoyers, Bloc, Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC]

All right, but the last question I asked concerning... I don't want her to tell me about analyses; I want her to send me copies of the analyses.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

I'm sorry, but you have no time. We'll have to come back to you.

Go ahead, Mr. MacKenzie.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: my friend and I understood that you're far too young to know when the provincial institutions close.

I enjoyed your information because I think it's very valid information. As my colleague said, we want to know what we can do to improve the mental health and drug addiction situation in the prisons. One of the things we've seen as we went across the country, and even in some other countries, is that retention of professionals in the health care field gets very difficult, it seems. It may be even more difficult when the institutions are located outside urban areas, because there's an attraction for professionals to work in urban areas.

Could you elaborate, in French or English, about what you see in Quebec with respect to being able to first get and then retain professionals to assist in those areas?

[Christine Perreault]

In Quebec we are in a much better position than the rest of Canada in terms of recruiting nurses, mental health nurses, psychologists, psycho-educators, and the mental health specialties we need. It is very hard to recruit people for Port-Cartier, which is a maximum institution. There are offenders with mental health problems there, so it's not easy to recruit. But we are in a much better position.

In fact with the institutional mental health initiatives we were able to staff.... We have 24 mental health specialists who we were able to add to our regular staff during the last two years. We were quite lucky in Quebec to get those people. I'ts the same with community mental health initiatives.

A better way to keep people--it's very easy to get them sometimes, but we want to keep them--is diversification of the tasks they have. It's the training. It's working on the culture also, because working in corrections when you are a mental health specialist is not always easy. So we are working on the culture. We are training our people. We give them the possibility of changing their workloads and the people they work with.

So I guess in Quebec we are in good shape.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Can you illustrate if there is the ability to do those things when you are closer to an urban area, as opposed to being out in the--

[Christine Perreault]

It's much easier. We can have a relationship with universities and we can have students come in to do their internships. So yes, it's easier.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

I think we see that where there tends to be an opportunity to work with universities and community partners it's far easier to build those partnerships in an area where partnerships can exist.

[Johanne Vallée]

Yes, because you have a diversity of partnerships also.

When we have specialists, like psychologists, working in an institution in northern Quebec, it's important to support them and to make sure they will not be isolated from other professionals in their field of expertise. As an organization, we need to build that kind of partnership to attract and retain them.

It's also difficult because of what we see right now in the health care system. The competition is quite aggressive--for example, in Port-Cartier we have one institution and one hospital and they both want doctors, nurses, psychologists, so the market will compete to attract them.

It's very difficult. I think that in building partnerships we will be in a better position to retain people and to stabilize the quality and the services to offenders. That's one of the biggest priorities we have.

We need to stabilize the team. We had a discussion before we came, and our challenge now is not only to hire the people but to stabilize the team. With the demographic, there are a lot of people leaving the organization right now and we have hired a lot of new people. Younger generations know they can work there and have all sorts of opportunities.

This is the kind of discussion we sometimes have with human resources--what we can do, how they can support us, innovative ways to manage human resources.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Is it fair to say that's it's not only compensation but lifestyle that's important to people?

[Johanne Vallée]

Oh, yes. If you are coming from the University of Ottawa and we offer you a job in Port-Cartier, if you don't know the community and you have problems integrating into the community, certainly it will have an impact.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

It's the same kind of scenario as in communities that are a bit outside the norm--not outside the norm, but smaller communities that have difficulty in attracting medical practitioners.

[Johanne Vallée]

Yes. An institution we have, La Macaza Institution, had a lot of problems in attracting psychologists and has built a partnership with the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. They have marketed the fact that if you want to live outdoors and near Mont Tremblant, you can do it there, and at the same time, they have maintained a good relationship with the university, so the psychologists who work at La Macaza are not isolated and can work with their colleagues at the university. I think we also need to do that elsewhere.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

We'll move to the Liberal Party now.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.