Thank you very much.
It's a very important question, because we have a duty of care to people who are in federal custody. As you've noted, in the first wave of the pandemic, the infection went into five different institutions, including in your riding via the federal training centre there.
Correctional Services Canada took very proactive steps. They worked first of all with the Public Health Agency of Canada, but also with the provincial and regional health authorities. They took a number of very significant steps.
First of all, they made changes in limiting the number of people coming and going from the prisons, and that had an impact on the prison population as well, which they worked very hard to accommodate. They actually brought in health experts to do infection control measures and workplace health and safety audits. They were one of the very first institutions in the federal government to make the personal protective equipment available both to inmates and to workers in the prisons.
They implemented a very robust testing regime, in the first place, in all of the federal institutions. Unfortunately, we haven't seen that in all of the provincial institutions, but they did it federally. As a result of their excellent work, in a very short period of time—by mid-June—they had eliminated all ongoing infections in the correctional institutions. They have remained a vigilant regime of protecting the inmates and the people who work in those institutions to keep the illness out.
When, for example, a corrections worker contracts the disease in his own community—not in the institution—because of the rigorous regime and the testing regime they've put in place, we've been able to very effectively keep that illness out. It's not a guarantee. We know that's a vulnerable population, but I think Correctional Services Canada did some extraordinary work, which, quite frankly, we have shared with others. There were lessons learned in that work of infection prevention and control, the workplace health and safety audits and the measures that took place in personal protection and in testing and tracing, which were extremely effective in keeping that population safe.