Public Safety Committee on March 20th, 2018

[Rob Campney]

Prices range between institutions. In terms of my background and your constituents, I have 10 years of front-line experience working in the institutions. Currently, I'm a substantive deputy at one of the prisons near Kingston. I've worked in male and female institutions.

It's a constant battle to try to eliminate and prevent contraband from coming in. For every tool and everything that we as an organization try to use, the inmates are 24-7 trying to figure out how to circumvent that. We do a daily assessment of what's going on. That's why it's very important to look at all of the results of the urinalysis for our inmates to see what drugs are actually in the institution. That's derived from our random urinalysis. We look at our ion scan results in terms of what our visitors may or may not be in possession of as they're coming through the gate. We look at what our detector dog teams are finding in terms of contraband and drugs. There's constant assessment and reassessment of what's happening in the institution.

We also look at our intelligence component in terms of our security intelligence officers and what they're hearing from their inmate sources. We're also looking at what we're finding in terms of contraband in the inmate's cell. Every institution is different. Every region has a slightly different interest in either obtaining drugs or Suboxone or making their own alcohol from brew. It's very specific to each institution, but it is one of the key activities of our correctional officers. They're constantly on the lookout and trying to intercept and prevent these drugs from coming into the institution, because, ultimately, that has a huge impact on the offender's rehabilitation. It leads to a drug subculture, which is not conducive to trying to get our inmates to pay attention to their correctional plan and participate in the programming.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

I imagine the treatment programs that are being offered are not going to be that effective if the inmates who are supposed to be going to that treatment program still have access to the drugs that they're supposed to be treated for. Would that be a fair assessment?

[Rob Campney]

Yes, precisely.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

I don't want to put you on the spot with a yes or a no, but I think people ought to know this. I've heard that a package of smokes inside—illegal contraband cigarettes—costs over $100. To your knowledge, would that be true in some cases?

[Rob Campney]

It ranges for the institution and region.... Depending on what the interest is at the institution, yes.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

How would an inmate actually have hundreds of dollars of cash at their disposal to pay for these things inside a prison facility?

[Rob Campney]

Again, it would be the subculture. It's not just what's in the institution. It's also the inmate's access to telephone banking and Internet banking through their family or their community contacts. There are many ways to conduct business outside of a prison. Just because you're in prison walls....

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Isn't that something?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Calkins.

Mr. Fragiskatos, you have five minutes.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thanks to all of you for being here today and for your service.

I want to start with some basics, I suppose. I think my question is probably going to Mr. Lightfoot, but anyone can take it. How does the ion scanner actually work? I was never good at science. Can you get into a layman's explanation of how exactly the technology detects?

[Phil Lightfoot]

Sure. I would be happy to do that, Mr. Chair.

In fact, I think there's a fairly good description from your previous witness in November, Professor Hannem. She went through that in some detail.

How it works is that you use a piece of material to swab a surface and hopefully pick up traces of, let's say, cocaine. You insert that into the machine. The machine heats it up to vaporize what's on the swab. That gas goes into what's called a “mass spectrometer”. It's this little tube, and it's ionized with an ionizing source, and then there's an electrical field in there that drags the ions down the tube.

Depending on how big they are, what shape they are, or how much they weigh, they go faster or slower. Depending on what the molecule looks like, it can arrive more quickly or more slowly at the detector at the far end. That gives you a little graph, where you'll see that this one arrives, then that one, and then that one, etc. That's essentially how it works. We pick up electrical signals when the ionized molecules bump into the far end.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Do particles from each drug move at a particular speed, if I could put it that way? Is that how you're able to detect one drug and differentiate it from another?

[Phil Lightfoot]

That's absolutely how it works. We're quite careful about looking at different drugs and making sure they're well separated. We look for potential interferences. This doesn't actually look at every atom in the molecule and say exactly what it is, but each drug has a characteristic time in the machine.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Have there been significant changes to the technology since it was first employed here in Canada in 1995?

[Phil Lightfoot]

Well, it's thought that the machines have become more reliable. They have had a lot of upgrades and better software, etc., but the fundamental principle remains largely the same.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Mr. Coons, why are full-time staff excluded from a test? What exactly is the reasoning?

[Supt Warren Coons]

First of all, I wouldn't necessarily say that they're excluded from the test, but it is true that they're not generally tested.

First of all, when staff are engaged by the Correctional Service of Canada, they go through an enhanced reliability screening to determine whether they have any activity in their background that might prohibit them from working in that environment. As well, on a regular basis, they're obviously supervised by other CSC staff, and their activities are monitored on a regular basis by CSC managers.

The other reality is that when you're dealing with circumstances where you have visitors coming into the institution, for instance, it's a question of volume as well, of creating a bottleneck. If you have tens of individuals coming to visit during visiting hours and you also have the staff.... For staff, it's not just that they come in and then they leave at the end of the day; they take breaks and lunch or whatever the case might be. If we were to try to test every individual coming in and going out, including correctional staff, it would have the potential to create a bottleneck in those services.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

You've offered numbers, and there have been a few references to the 2016-17 annual report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator. I think, for the record, you might want to go back and look at this particular document. Just to put it on the record, I'm going to quote from the Library of Parliament's document that it has provided. It's obviously a very objective source of information.

It says that the Office of the Correctional Investigator:

reviewed [over 3,500] incident reports between February 2015 and April 2017 and found that “approximately 25% of these incidents showed a positive hit on the ion scanner.” The OCI added that the “refusal rates for visits due to positive ion scanner tests were about 18%.”

That is right from the document.

I wanted to put that to you, because we've heard the number 25% cited and 18% cited. Just so there's no confusion, if you want to go back and look, it is on the record now and you know where to look.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

I'm quite happy to leave it there. It's an important question, and I hope somehow you'll respond to Mr. Fragiskatos's inquiry, but unfortunately we're out of time for Mr. Fragiskatos.

Mr. MacKenzie, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

One of the things I noted in that particular line of questioning, which is very appropriate, is that it's a very small percentage of the total number that Corrections Canada has dealt with. I think you almost need to get the investigator, the author of that report, back to determine how he selected those reports. There may be a very good, reasonable explanation for it.

On the history of the scanner, how long has it been in play approximately?

[Rob Campney]

It's been since the early 2000s. I don't have the exact date.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

So we'll be getting up to 20 years eventually here. That's not too far away.

My question is this. Part of this is for the safety of the inmates. Mr. Fragiskatos is well aware that the provincial institutions in his community are going through a terrible time with the deaths of inmates. I assume the federal institutions have had the same thing. Has this resulted in a lower number of deaths to inmates as a result of scanners slowing down the process of drugs getting in, particularly opioids?

[Supt Warren Coons]

No such study has been conducted. However, the reality is, the evolution of narcotics, in particular in this case the fentanyl crisis, is really a relatively recent phenomenon, since October 2015, so as a result, there haven't been any comparisons. The ion scan has been there as long as the opioid crisis, for instance, has been.

It's similar to a question that was raised earlier in the sense that it's very difficult to determine what the significance of one tool out of a number of different devices and a number of different strategies would be in terms of increasing or decreasing the amount of narcotics in and out of the institution.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

I appreciate that. I could liken it to the Breathalyzer and the roadside scanner with impaired driving; it's just one part of the whole package. I appreciate that that's what you're dealing with here. I suspect you might have those numbers about the interdiction of opioids coming in that are taken off the floor, if you will, by having scanners.

[Supt Warren Coons]

We do have incidents of people who were interdicted as a result of the TRA process, as a result of a positive hit, for instance. They're been interviewed, and as a result of that, there's been a subsequent investigation through which we've uncovered narcotics, or the recent use of narcotics. We do have that kind of anecdotal evidence but no specific statistical data along those lines.