Thank you, Madam Parliamentary Secretary.
Indeed this morning I was at the Royal Ottawa hospital for an announcement, along with our commissioner from Correctional Service Canada, as part of our strategy to deal with mental health in our facilities and also a response to the coroner's inquiry that was done by the Ontario government following the death of Ashley Smith. As you know, this was a tragedy that occurred in one of our facilities. This is why we took, and are taking, very seriously the recommendations of the coroner. Correctional Services had already taken initiatives under the mental health strategy, which addresses many of the recommendations presented by the coroner. Indeed, at this point in time, already a third of the recommendations of the coroner have been implemented. More than 50% of those recommendations are under evaluation and work at this current time.
What I announced this morning is that we are going further, as we had planned in December, to present the final report based on the recommendations. One interesting thing is that we are now expanding the range of services, the capabilities, offered by Correctional Service Canada, including a health facility with which we have partnered, namely the Brockville centre.
We also renewed the agreement with the Institut Philippe-Pinel in Montreal, which has 12 beds available to inmates with acute health problems.
We are also actively working with the east, with
...the Dartmouth mental health clinic in the Atlantic region.
We are currently undergoing many agreements. Those three are well advanced. We also have agreements in principle like the one in Brockville. We also have many beds within Correctional Service Canada that have been adapted to the very serious and acute needs of inmates.
This being said, the penitentiary, especially at the federal level, occurs at the end of the continuum. One of the most important things we need to do, not only at Public Safety but also working with other federal departments and provinces, is to see how we can, up front, prevent individuals with mental health issues from falling into the trap of the justice and correctional system. Obviously this is not necessarily the best place for them, but since we have some of these individuals in our facilities, we need to adjust to that. That's why we are moving forward with the strategy that was presented by Correctional Service Canada, the action plan.
If you wish, I could elaborate more on the pillars, but essentially they are aimed at making sure that once an inmate arrives at one of our facilities, we are able to assess if there are any mental health issues associated with that particular individual. We can then make the interventions that are appropriate. We can make sure that our officers are trained to deal with those particular cases, and then we can provide guidance, make sure there's good follow-up, and eventually provide them with a facility like Brockville.
In a nutshell, that's basically what the announcement this morning was all about: Correctional Services implementing the recommendations of the coroner's report, integrated in this action plan.