Public Safety Committee on Nov. 7th, 2017

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Zef Ordman]

There's always the potential.

I use the word “inmate” because when you're in prison, you're an inmate. When you're out, you're an offender.

Here is one of the difficulties I see. Someone asks, “What do you do as a parole officer?” Well, at Bowden Institution, which has about 700-plus inmates, give or take, I would say probably 70% are aboriginal or indigenous, and that's by self-declaration. You could be Sven Svenson. If you self-declare that you're indigenous, you're indigenous, but that's neither here nor there. The vast majority of my caseload are indigenous, at times 100% indigenous. The system's not working on many levels.

You have 30-plus broken human beings who've done horrible things, and they're all getting out, with the rare exception. There's a small minority, but generally in one year, two years, five years, 10 years, or 15 years, they're getting out. The question is, how do you mitigate risk?

As a parole officer, you're wearing many hats. I see my inmates all the time. I was right in the unit with 120 inmates. My door was open. I had murderers, rapists, thieves, fraudsters, and others. I'd see them every day like this, talking to them, walking past them when I get coffee.

The difficulty is...it's all great. CSC loves to say our programs work, and maybe they do on a macro level, but when you're the parole officer and you have to write your name to the risk assessment, you're looking at that individual. In many cases, they don't have supports. There are reserves that ban them from coming back. They say they won't take them back. There are inmates who say, “Zef, I grew up in Calgary. I'm going to Calgary.”

The intensity of the workload has changed. The parole officers who are trying to do the risk assessments are swamped. Now CSC has done a reverse onus thing, so for 60 or 90 days the offender comes in. We're dealing six months or a year down the road. You have to write up a report. You might have only seen the offender for 30 minutes, but the report's due in 30 days, and inside an institution 30 days go very quickly.

It's like the legs of a stool. Okay, you have a program. I have some doubts personally that programs do what they say they're going to do, and I think they could be done better, but it's employment, it's housing, it's all these things. The white middle-class kid who's got parents on the outside and is 19 or 20 has employment, has education, has housing. The aboriginal kid doesn't have any of that. When they ask why the parole officer is not recommending this guy for release, it's because there's only one leg of the stool, and that's the programming.

Attending all sessions of a program is considered successful programming. To me, that means he sat in there and didn't tell anyone to eff off. I get, “Oh, he successfully completed the program”, and management comes down on the parole officer, asking why I'm being so risk-averse. Well, there are no legs for the stool.

My final ask would be for real training, real professional training, for parole officers, and we need real, full, extensive, aboriginal-centred programs that address all their needs: health, education, work, and housing. I could go on and on.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Ms. Damoff, go ahead for seven minutes.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much to both of you, not only for being here today, but for what you do.

You mentioned that you work in the shadows, and I've often said about you folks that if you're doing your job well, we never hear about you, so thank you for what you do to keep us safe and to ensure that people in our institutions are being treated with compassion and fairness.

You were talking about that circle of support, and needing employment and housing. I understand that before offenders leave prison, or when they leave prison, they are going to need a health card, their SIN card, and their driver's licence. They're going to need all that ID that we take for granted. Often they come into the prison institution without all of that.

Can you explain some of the challenges around that and suggest some recommendations that might assist with that? You can't get a job if you don't have your ID.

[Zef Ordman]

Generally speaking, many of the inmates who come in don't have any ID. They don't have health cards. They don't have a driver's licence. They have nothing.

To access health, you need a health card. If you're in the province of Alberta, Alberta won't give you one, so by the way, you're going back to Manitoba. You get these hurdles, and it also becomes something of a workload issue. At one time we were doing escorts to the registry in Innisfail, but you can understand how the public reacts when there are two guards standing beside a guy getting his driver's licence, and then there's pushback from the community.

Then you try to facilitate, but federal CSC ID is not recognized. They can't even take the ID that we have for them as inmates and use it anywhere outside of the prison, so it becomes difficult. How are you going to get a job? How are you going to get a bank account? To do anything inside of the prison takes, actually, a lot of effort, because there are all these people, so you have to get an escort. What's their security level? If they're in a medium, how many guards do they need? Is it one, two? Do they need a van? All of that costs a lot of money.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Sorry to interrupt you, but I was just going to say that these days we are able to do a lot of things online. Certainly I renewed my driver's licence online. You know who the inmate is. They have federal ID. You'd think there would be some way to bring those provincial agencies to you to be able to facilitate doing that on site, prior to release.

[Audra Andrews]

I have to be careful. I would preface this by saying I'd like to keep my job, so I have to be careful and measured in my responses.

I know that on our site we actually did an ID clinic, and we had Indian Affairs come in. I think that would be helpful. My recommendation would be to have our provincial partners and Indian Affairs come in to the prisons prior to the offenders getting out, so that they have the proper ID.

I can give you a personal example of an offender who didn't have his ID. We had a job set up for him. He couldn't get it because he didn't have his birth certificate or his SIN card, and he ended up failing.

It would make a huge difference.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Does Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada come into the institutions to ensure that the offenders have status cards?

[Audra Andrews]

They do not, to my knowledge.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Would that be helpful in terms of employment and education upon release if the people who were eligible for status cards were able to receive them prior to release?

[Audra Andrews]

Any identification they could get prior to getting out would be extremely helpful and would increase their chances for success, because in order to access any other programs in the provinces, you need to have your health card. You need to have your birth certificate. You need to have your social insurance card. Without any of those, you can't even access employment programs in the community, which are extremely helpful for our offenders.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

When we talk about encouraging more indigenous peoples to work in our institutions, what challenges do you see to achieving that goal, and what steps could the federal government take to make it easier and to be successful in encouraging more indigenous people to work in our institutions?

[Zef Ordman]

I think one thing is that you have to go to them. I don't want to call it marketing, but you have to go and recruit the best people possible. The process is outrageously long. When I entered as a correctional officer, I then had to go for three months and not get paid, so you have to be very young or very committed. The process prevents a lot of people from entering, and a big entry into at least the institutions, the prisons, is from the correctional officer side of things.

The other thing is the security clearance. They upped the level of the security clearance nationally a couple of years ago, I think, and the problem is like this: if you're 32 and you did something a bit stupid at 19, you won't get hired.

Should that be something that excludes them? Some indigenous individuals would be great for working around, but they grew up in dysfunctional environments and made some mistakes. Now they're 28 or 30, but because they had a criminal record or something happened, they are excluded.

[Audra Andrews]

I would also recommend, though, that one of the things you can look at is building bridges with organizations that provide services for offenders for employment.

For instance, in Edmonton they have Women Building Futures, which is trying to get women into the trades program. Well, we can't get our offenders into that program until they have no conditions imposed on their release.

We could start building bridges, making agreements with some of those organizations and bringing them into the prisons instead of using the whole made-in-CSC approach, which we tend to do in terms of providing it all in the institution, using CSC stuff.

Some of these people have already done the program, so why are we reinventing the wheel? We should be bringing them into the institutions and utilizing those resources so that we make that bridge again for the offenders when they get out on release.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I only have 30 seconds left. Just quickly, do you think if CSC were doing more outreach into the communities and building those bridges, it would be helpful overall?

[Audra Andrews]

Absolutely. We need to do a better job of getting back into the aboriginal communities, and the community in general, and telling them what we do, and in doing so, build some paths that would work for our offenders.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Damoff.

Before I turn it over to Mr. Motz, I just wanted to pick up on the comment, “I'd like to keep my job.” You are protected by parliamentary privilege. Nothing ranks above parliamentary privilege. If there are any consequences that flow from your full and honest testimony before this committee, this committee will want to know about that. I hope that provides you with some assurance. As I say, parliamentary privilege ranks above all other laws in this country.

Mr. Motz, you have seven minutes, please.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I appreciate your comments, because I was certainly going to suggest that to our witnesses.

Thank you both for being here. From my perspective, we require you to be completely honest and forthright in your opinions, which is why you're here.

You explained that the system isn't working, and a systems approach only works if there are appropriate systems in place. We understand that. I guess I'm curious to know how you fix the system. You have touched on the idea, which Ms. Damoff has brought out, of potentially filling some gaps where inmates are not able to access identification, but there are other systems that are broken, in the opinion of you guys.

What are they, and how do we fix them?

[Audra Andrews]

I have an answer to that. We talked about utilizing elders; our elders are mired in paperwork in the institutions. That's not what they were designed for.

An elder I used to work with said their culture is not paperwork. We should be freeing the elders up to do their jobs, and most of that job is working with the offenders, bringing them into ceremony, working with them on a one-to-one basis. They should not be bogged down with paperwork.

I don't know what the answer is to that, but I would recommend that the elders be freed up to do their work. Their work is important, and it makes a huge difference in the lives of our offenders. That's one of the things I would recommend.

I also recommend building up community capacity, as I said in my statement, because when the offenders get out, they need that support. I can probably give you tons of examples of success that happened because we built a circle of support around offenders in the community, and they were able to succeed. I can give you many examples of that, and some in which we fell short because they didn't have the supports they required.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Okay.

Go ahead, Mr. Ordman.

[Zef Ordman]

My best analogy is when I look at the typical suburban kid, the 19-year-old or 20-year-old young adult, who does something bad, and the supports they have. In some ways, if we're going to have the same results, we need to mirror those supports. You need education, and that exists to a degree, but you need real trade skills.

When I go to EIFW, Edmonton Institution for Women, the women's facility in Edmonton, I see a whole bunch of sewing. If I go to Bowden, they have this horrible food that's boiled in a bag, and you don't need all these offenders to work in the kitchen. What are they doing? You walk in and there are 30 offenders and they're trying to give them something to do, but there's really not a lot to do.

CORCAN was a great idea, but a lot of the times, whether it's based on sales or purchasing.... They have state-of-the-art woodworking shops, state-of-the-art welding shops. At Edmonton Institution, they closed it down, because they were having issues there.

The inmates, whether male, female, aboriginal or not, need real job skills. Many of them have never worked. Just getting up and going somewhere for us is pretty insignificant, but for them it's like a milestone. You got up and you actually went somewhere and you did something. Then with school, I can't tell you the number of drug dealers who've come up to me and said, “Zef, I got 99% on my math test.” I said, “Well, it didn't surprise me, because you were pretty good in math to begin with from your other vocation.”

When everybody here says, “Oh, the programs, the programs”, if these programs were so great, CSC could be self-funding. They could have one to make fat people skinny and they'd be self-funding. We get broken people 19 and 20 years old, and we think that in four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, we're going to reverse years and years of....

It's all those legs of employment, education—and then out in the community....

We have backlogs. We have inmates approved at Bowden to go to minimum from medium—backlogged. Where do you go? Where do you put someone?

When you say to your kid who's 18, “I'm kicking you out of the house; go to Edmonton on Monday”, they have no jobs and no money, but they've known these other dysfunctions. Would you think they'd succeed? I think maybe not.

We have people who are at the far other spectrum and we wonder why they return. They come in and they see their relatives. They see their uncles. They see brothers, cousins. Going to prison is a family reunion, and that's horrible to think that's happened.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you.

Ms. Andrews, you indicated that the elders have paperwork issues, and that's not the environment they are there for and it's not what they're accustomed to.

As we know in our business, if you don't document it, it doesn't happen. We appreciate that there still needs to be paperwork, so there has to be that gap. Do you have a solution to that issue?

[Audra Andrews]

Right now some of the liaison officers in the institution—and we have a few in the community as well—work alongside the elders to provide that documentation. It doesn't necessarily need to be the liaison officer. You can have some specially trained parole officers or case management officers who have the expertise in that area—and it is important to have that expertise, by the way—who could be doing that documentation.

There are no clear guidelines in terms of how to translate that into what we need in CSC, but I think there certainly needs to be more work done on that aspect.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

I have about a minute or so left.

I appreciate that the key to success for anyone not returning, including our indigenous community, is community support. That is part of it.

Obviously there are some gaps there, and some of them are CSC-connected and some of them are community responsibilities. I get that. If I'm hearing both of your comments correctly, we do have a system breakdown. If this committee were to make recommendations on how to fix that, where would you start?