The legislation that establishes my office, the CCRA, the same legislation that establishes the Correctional Service of Canada, gives me full discretion in how I deal with complaints. So I do have more flexibility, as we mentioned in our comments.
The Correctional Service of Canada has established, in fact, a four-level system. The Correctional Service of Canada, though, has never fully implemented all the options it has for dealing with inmate complaints.
Let me give you a couple of examples. If an inmate makes a complaint to a correctional manager on the floor of an institution, that can be dealt with rather informally. The warden has the ability to refer it to an outside panel. The warden also has the ability to ensure that an inmate committee is established within the institution. The correctional manager also has some discretion in terms of trying to informally manage that, and of course, we know from Professor Mullan's review, that there can also be expanded use of mediation as an informal conflict resolution process.
Instead, what we see are many complaints not being dealt with until they are well beyond the timeframe. They then generate a second complaint, the complaint being about the lack of response, which is then dealt with at the next level. Typically, that will not be dealt with at the next level in an expeditious way, generating less satisfaction and more complaints, which then create backlogs at the third level.
It is this continuous pattern of not dealing with matters at their lowest level, immediately, that in fact makes the problem so much worse.