Hi there. Thank you for that.
In our report that was released in May 2019—again, that's almost two years ago—there were a number of recommendations that were made. We went back to the Correctional Service of Canada and tried to have very serious discussions about them. However, to date, very little has changed, and it still remains a very large concern for our union and particularly our members.
One of the first things we talked about is how our workloads are not divided or given out amongst the staff based on the complexity of the cases. Rather it's simply based on the number of cases that you have. For example, if you have a very high-risk, high-needs offender who comes into the institution at the front end of the sentence, you don't get additional time to work with potentially more complex, high-needs offenders. In fact, it would be the same amount of time that you would get for everybody else. One of the things that we're really saying is that workload needs to be more than the numbers; it also needs to be the amount of actual time it takes to do proper risk assessment and proper interventions with the offenders.
The other thing that we have been calling for is in relation to the mental health needs of our offenders. Institutional parole officers repeatedly told us that the mental health of the offender should be a determining factor for a caseload size. As you can imagine, those individuals who come into our system and who require more assistance with their mental health needs require more time. Ultimately, what a lot of parole officers have been telling us is that more time means that we need to have more parole officers available to do the work. In fact, that has not changed, and I know that the Correctional Service has been under a lot of pressure for many years to reduce its budgets. That goes back to the deficit reduction action plan and then also in recent years to making sure that we're trimming everywhere we can to make sure that the budgets are not exceeded. It's very difficult to do that.
Other policy changes as well, such as working with indigenous offenders, have been extremely challenging. There have been some additional positions created over the years, but as it relates to parole officer work and even in terms of programs, we need to make sure that we're giving the time to those offenders and meeting with them to understand who they are, their backgrounds, what brought them into their criminal activities and what it's going to take to ensure that they stay out of crime. It's very crucial.
Quickly, I want to summarize and say that for parole officers to do their work properly, they need to be able to have the time to have meaningful interactions with everybody on their caseload. When we're talking about highly complex cases, that means we need to have the time for those meaningful conversations to understand their worlds and to understand, if they are to be released back into the community, what those conditions are that they're going to be released back into. What are those relationships that are going to be important to them and their reintegration back into society? What supports are they going to have?
I'll leave my comments there, and maybe there will be more questions.