I would say that it could be. It would be going to the court if in fact you have a robust provision that says no segregation, so if, for some reason, the Correctional Service decides they have to do some kind of separation, they should have to establish that.
Right now all that would be required with this bill, with respect, in many of the mechanisms being proposed is that the Correctional Service of Canada would have to develop a case record, and what we know and what we saw most clearly through the Ashley Smith inquest is that those case records are developed largely to benefit those who are recording them.
Ashley Smith, for instance, was described as out of control and violent all the time, and yet when we actually saw the videotape of the evidence and cross-examined correctional officers, all of them described that they knew that information from what they had read about her, not from their actual experience with her. It reinforces that we need to actually pull people out of that process.
Similarly, it sounds wonderful to have external oversight of health care, for instance, through people responding to health authorities within the prison setting, but in every instance where that has been implemented—I mentioned the regional psychiatric centre, and there are a number of contexts in the youth system where that approach has been implemented—if the people are then embedded in the prisons and prisoners are not taken out, as clause 29 would allow you to recommend and require be done, and are not taken directly out of the prison into an externally administered service rather than having external people coming into it, then you see a far less robust oversight process. Instead, what you see when they are in the system is what I repeatedly had happen, whether it's a youth system or the regional psychiatric centre: the head of therapy coming to people like me saying that this person needs an advocate.
Many lawyers and judges don't even know that exists, because while they're looking at the legislation and they're hearing from individuals, they're not necessarily seeing first-hand what the conditions of confinement are.