Thank you for the invitation to speak to this committee on this very important subject. Our unique workplace exacts an exceptionally heavy toll on front-line correctional officers, and we are pleased to finally have a forum to discuss measures to address the urgent issue of our members' exposure to mental health injuries.
As the representatives of some 7,400 correctional officers at federal institutions across Canada, UCCO-SACC-CSN is well positioned to ensure that the correctional officer perspective is taken into account in this conversation. Our unique work environment merits that officers continue to have a place at the table during this ongoing discussion.
We are the first responders in the truest sense. We are paramedics, we are police officers, and we are firefighters behind the walls of Canada's federal prisons. We are responsible for policing inmates who could not follow some basic rules in society. It is our duty to ensure that these same inmates follow the rules inside of our institutions. Let me assure you that this role does not always endear us with our inmate clientele.
At the same time, correctional officers are responsible for the safety and security of these inmates. It is correctional officers who must respond when inmate gangs go to war, or who must act to protect vulnerable inmates from attacks by other predators inside.
In each instance, when officers intervene, there is a real possibility that any of the inmates involved will turn on the officers with the intent of inflicting grievous bodily harm. As a result of the unpredictable human behaviour that we deal with every day, 88% of our use of force incidents are spontaneous .
We are the ones who must often compensate for the lack of nursing staff after hours and on weekends. We are the first responders for suicide attempts and for any medical emergencies. For example, in 2010 our members were directly involved in 1,800 medical interventions across Canada in federal institutions. In the last fiscal period of 2014-15, our members were involved in over 2,000 medical interventions.
In the correctional environment, where rates of infectious diseases are higher than any other community in the country, it is our officers' duty to administer CPR to inmates in distress, only a few centimetres away from an inmate's face, usually covered in bodily fluids.
We are clearly the forgotten-about public safety officers who are not in the spotlight of the public eye, within a system that most Canadians would prefer to ignore. Unfortunately, the traumatic effects of the work that we do is not often recognized.
Let me give you an example. I'll recall a personal example where I attended Millhaven after the fatal shooting of an inmate. Another inmate was very seriously shot as well. I remember walking into the institution. The first words out of the officer who had to fire those shots were, “Jason, I tried everything to stop it. I tried, I tried, I tried.” Right from that point, we could tell he was suffering very severely from that incident.
There was also another inmate who was injured in that incident. A few days later I had an opportunity to talk to the officers who responded to that. In that case, those officers had to go into the gymnasium, pull another injured inmate out, and they had to hold his stomach together on the way to the hospital in the ambulance. They eventually saved the inmate's life after eight hours of surgery. If you want to talk about a critical incident, there's a good example of where we're doing both. We're the police officer. We're also the paramedic in that particular situation.
I myself have been personally involved in fires, slashings. I've been assaulted, and I've performed CPR on inmates.
Historically, and despite available evidence of higher incidence of mental stress injuries, correctional officer mental health has received no special attention. Although exact statistics are often difficult to establish, it is noteworthy that all serious studies into the matter have revealed that rates of PTSD and PTSD-like illnesses are quite high amongst our group.
Our stress is cumulative with years of service, so stress for us increases with years of service, which is normally the opposite of most public service jobs, where stress decreases with years of service.
A 1992 study by Lois Rosine placed the rate of occurrence at 17%, just behind post-war Vietnam veterans. During recent testimony by the assistant deputy minister of Public Safety, Ms. Lori MacDonald, before the present committee, she testified that 36% of respondents to a survey suffered from PTSD in corrections.
One thing is certain: correctional officers are repeatedly exposed to traumatic events, perpetrated by some of Canada's most violent inmates, as we fulfill our public safety duties on the front lines within the country's penitentiary system. In addition, conditions such as shift work and conflicting workplace roles, security versus caregiving, create an environment that is conducive to psychological injury.
We have been encouraged by the recent adoption of R2MR, the road to mental readiness program, at CSC. We believe this program meets a very special need of our fine men and women in uniform, and it is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. Our deputy minister is very much behind the program.
However, much more needs to be done to help officers and their families deal with the fallout of the traumatic events they will inevitably encounter at work. Funding for such initiatives needs to be increased and recurrent, rather than a strain on already stretched departmental budgets.
We believe that correctional officers deserve to receive the best possible resilience training available in order to minimize the risk of mental stress injury as much as possible. In the course of the discharge of our union duties, we come across many officers who are psychologically damaged as a result of workplace stressors they have encountered.
Frequently, these officers come to us after a workers' compensation board has denied their claim for mental stress. Sometimes it is the WCB's policy that does not recognize their specific path to psychological injury. Far too often, it is their manager who has not been supportive of their claim. We have seen letters from managers that do not support claims for recognition of PTSD on the grounds that violence is a normal condition of our employment.
I have another example for you from Miramichi, where we had an officer suffer an exposure that we refer to, and excuse my language, as a shit bomb. That is bodily fluids that have all been compiled together and thrown at an officer. This particular case was extremely terrible. In this case, the officer put the claim in, and of course it came back with the response that “this is a normal condition of your employment”. We don't know of a workplace in this country where that is a normal condition of your employment.
In another example of employer disengagement, cases of correctional officers whose injury on duty prevents them from working for beyond 130 days have their pay files transferred to workers' compensation. For officers suffering from PTSD, who are disproportionately represented in this group of officers, the changeover to direct pay represents financial hardship for our members, an additional stress. In addition, the officers' benefits are different depending on the province of employment.
These examples highlight the need for all stakeholders to better understand the effects of their decisions on the officer whose psyche was damaged in the course of duty. We believe that better-educated managers would be less likely to make decisions such as these, which have severe negative impacts on officers suffering from PTSD. More work also needs to be done to favour early recognition of problem signals by co-workers and managers. This can only be achieved through better education.
Recent initiatives have given reason to hope that we are moving away from such ignorance of the problem. This committee is itself reason to believe that the government whom we serve in the interests of public safety intends to take the matter of our mental health seriously. Mr. Trudeau's electoral commitments to UCCO-SACC-CSN on the subject of mental health are a welcome sign that our officers' plight will be given the attention it deserves.
For those who exceed their resilience limits, two provinces, Ontario and Manitoba, have adopted a presumption that recognizes that correctional officers, as first responders, are at an elevated risk of incurring mental stress injuries. The legislation in these two provinces presumes that the mental health injury is a result of the workplace incident.
We believe that the federal government has a role to play to ensure that officers who are victims of mental health injuries are subject to the same presumption, independent of the province of employment. Employee assistance programs also need to be reinforced and adapted to our members' heightened-risk reality in order to help them and their families get on with their lives. The most effective correctional officer should have access to state-of-the-art treatment centres dedicated to their needs.
Finally, in order to best align resources on this matter, research resources need to be allocated in order to improve our officers' prospects for the future.
I thank you for listening.
