Public Safety Committee on Nov. 22nd, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Heath MacDonald]

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 84 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format pursuant to the Standing Orders. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking.

Feedback events can occur. These can be extremely harmful to interpreters and cause serious injuries. The most common cause of sound feedback is an earpiece worn too close to a microphone. We therefore ask all participants to exercise a high degree of caution when handling the earpieces, especially when your microphone or your neighbour's microphone is turned on.

I will remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, October 23, 2023, the committee is commencing its study of the rights of victims and the reclassification and transfer of federal offenders.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses today. We have, from the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, Jeff Wilkins, national president; and from the Union of Safety and Justice Employees, Patrick Ménard, regional vice-president, Québec, and Jeff Sandelli, regional vice-president, CSC Community, PBC West. All are appearing by video conference.

Welcome to all of you.

Up to five minutes will be given for opening remarks, after which we will proceed with rounds of questions.

I now invite Mr. Wilkins to make an opening statement.

[Jeff Wilkins, National President, Union of Canadian Correctional Officers]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, members of the committee, colleagues and witnesses here today.

My name is Jeff Wilkins. I am the national president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. I appreciate the invitation to speak with you today and, hopefully, help answer some very important questions you may have regarding the rights of victims of crime, security reclassification, and the transfer of offenders under the mandate of Correctional Service Canada.

I am going to keep my introductory statements as brief as I can, because time is probably better served for questions. That being said, there are a few things I'd like to say, which may perhaps frame any questions you may have.

When reviewing the motion that was made to task this committee to investigate the rights of victims, security reclassifications and the transfer of inmates, it was very clear that this committee had been struck in relation to the highly publicized transfer of Paul Bernardo. I should therefore advise you in this introductory statement that I may not be able to answer all of your questions surrounding this particular transfer. Though correctional officers perform a very important role in documenting the daily routines and behaviours of inmates, we are, unfortunately, a very small part of an inmate's case management team. Quite often, decisions made by CSC are made without any knowledge from our members, which was most certainly the case for this particular transfer.

The role of a correctional officer, as part of the case management team, would be to report on things like institutional behaviour, attendance in either programming or school, participation in institutional visits, or handling general requests for private family visits. These reports, which are often compiled in the casework records by a CX-2, are then used by parole officers and other members of the inmate's case management team to have a more direct understanding of the inmate's behaviour against the correctional plan.

It is certainly our hope that these reports also make it to the parole officer when analyzing things like security classification reviews or other assessments for a decision. However, we sometimes question why we're not more involved in the assessments for decisions, as our members are with the inmates 24-7 and have a better understanding of their particular caseload of inmates than most members of the case management team.

As I am sure all here understand, CSC uses what's called a custody rating scale to determine penitentiary placements, as well as transfers to lower levels of security. The scale looks at three main elements: the level of institutional adjustment, the inmate's risk to the public and the risk of escape. Ultimately, the scale is used to determine the inmate's security classification as either maximum, medium or minimum.

Whether this scale needs to be amended is certainly up for debate, and I am not a statistical professional who is going to weigh in on the validity of the scale. However, as it stands now, the union certainly has issues when the scale is overridden, as was the case with this particular inmate.

According to the report released by Correctional Service Canada, his custody rating scale was overridden to maintain a maximum security status since 1999. The issue we have, which I believe is more detrimental to the safety of our communities, is when a custody rating scale is overridden to place an inmate in a lower level of security than the scale determines. This is where our members, correctional officers, lose faith in the scale itself.

There have been situations in which inmates have been overridden to minimum security when the custody rating scale determined that they were medium. In one particular instance, this ultimately led to an escape and the murder of a member of the public. This is a dangerous practice. Though I don't have the latest current statistics for all inmates in minimum security, there are many inmates who are incarcerated in a minimum facility who do not meet the criteria for minimum under the custody rating scale.

As for any discussion around the rights of victims, you're going to hear from the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers only that more should be done to promote victims' rights. We have a duty in our service mandate to protect the public, and victims, as members of the public, should be of paramount consideration.

It is encouraging that CSC has accepted the recommendation, which originated from the latest review, that it will form a multidisciplinary working group to look at enhancing the policies and practices around victim notification and engagement. We welcome the opportunity to put forward some ideas in that working group. However, to date we have not yet received an invitation as a union.

With that, I am going to end my introductory comments and welcome any questions you may have.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Heath MacDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Wilkins.

I now invite Mr. Ménard and Mr. Sandelli to make an opening statement, and I understand you will share your time.

[Patrick Ménard, Regional Vice-President, Québec, Correctional Service of Canada, Union of Safety and Justice Employees]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll start us off.

First, I want to say hello to the members of the committee and to thank them for this invitation to speak on behalf of the Union of Safety and Justice Employees. USJE has approximately 18,000 members, a large percentage of whom work for the Correctional Service of Canada.

I am the regional vice-president for Quebec, and I represent members who work at federal penitentiaries. Before being elected to USJE, I was employed as a parole officer in penitentiaries for 22 years, working at a multi-level security psychiatric institution and in the intake assessment unit of a medium-security institution.

I also had an opportunity to be a local trainer for new employees and an internship supervisor for future parole officers, and I represented the Correctional Service of Canada in training sessions offered to other organizations, such as the Canada Border Services Agency and Quebec's Commission d'examen des troubles mentaux.

Our membership includes many employees who perform a first responder role. Our members work in the correctional sector and have peace officer status. They work with offenders on a daily basis and provide services to victims and the public.

Our members are professionals who intervene at many levels. For example, they provide skills and employability training to inmates and help with risk reduction by offering programs and performing various interventions. They also determine the causes of offenders' criminality and intervene with, follow up and assess those individuals. In addition, our members make recommendations to decision-makers, particularly regarding transfers, absences and releases. They also provide victim services and ensure that any harm done is taken into consideration when decisions are made. Lastly, in performing their work, our members rely on police reports, court decisions, victim concerns and medical and other professional reports, as well as progress that offenders have made.

USJE members thus help to ensure respect for victims' rights and to reduce the risk of recidivism in the community.

Thank you. I will now turn the floor over to Jeff Sandelli.

[Jeff Sandelli, Regional Vice-President, CSC Community—PBC (West), Union of Safety and Justice Employees]

Good afternoon. My name is Jeff Sandelli, and I began my career with the Correctional Service of Canada in 2008 as an institutional parole officer at the Stony Mountain medium-security institution, which is located north of Winnipeg.

I spent two years gathering critical experience to garner an understanding of the mechanisms related to an offender’s entry into and journey through the federal sentence. In a nutshell, this entry commences with intake assessments of offenders who have been federally sentenced, continues with opportunities for federal offenders to engage in various interventions to address their needs and capacity for rehabilitation, and is then followed by an assessment of the offender’s rehabilitation efforts and planning for potential community reintegration.

I subsequently transferred to the Winnipeg parole office in 2010, where I assumed the role of community parole officer. In this capacity, I continued to assist federal offenders on release in the community with their reintegration, connecting them with interventions and medical professionals, and bridging relationships with community partners to support their basic needs, housing and employment. At the same time, we were actively balancing the need to ensure public safety through ongoing engagement with their professional and personal supports, utilizing supervision tools to confirm compliance with conditions imposed and victim considerations, including consultation through the CSC victim services unit.

Sometimes this ongoing assessment resulted in federal offenders on parole returning to prison because their risk was too high to remain in the community. In other cases, federal offenders were able to establish sufficient supports to begin a more productive life, avoid recidivism and reach the expiry of their sentence under supervision.

I remained in the role of community parole officer until 2021, when I was elected as a regional vice-president for the Union of Safety and Justice Employees. As a regional vice-president, I represent hundreds of federal public safety personnel from northwestern Ontario to British Columbia and the north, in both urban and rural locations, working for the Correctional Service of Canada and the Parole Board of Canada.

As a national union representing over 18,000 federal public service employees across 18 departments and agencies, we are immensely proud of the work that Canada's federal public safety personnel undertake day and night, 365 days a year, to keep Canadians safe in every province and territory.

Within federal corrections specifically, USJE represents thousands of employees who serve in federal parole programs and support offenders with education, employment, indigenous-specific interventions and food services, as well as undertaking maintenance and administrative work.

Overwhelmingly, USJE's members are highly dedicated public safety personnel who largely work behind the scenes, often without recognition, to keep Canadians safe day in and day out, sometimes sacrificing their own mental health in the process.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Heath MacDonald]

Thank you so much.

We're going to get right into questions. The first round will be for six minutes each.

We'll start off with Mr. Shipley, please.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

My first question will be for Mr. Wilkins.

Mr. Wilkins, when the shocking Bernardo transfer was finally made public, representatives of your Ontario and Quebec locals stated that they were “baffled” by the decision to transfer Bernardo from a maximum- to a medium-security prison.

Mike Bolduc, the Quebec regional president, said they didn't even know, and that it was “like it was hidden”. He said, “We had no idea. Neither the regional president of Ontario...or me knew this guy was getting transferred.”

I have been informed that only three officers at Millhaven Institution were told of Bernardo's transfer the night before it happened, and they were instructed to keep the transfer a secret. No one else knew. Why do you feel this transfer was hidden from your members and the public?

[Jeff Wilkins]

The statements that were made are absolutely correct. As I highlighted in my opening comments, correctional officers are often not engaged in the case management team in making these decisions.

As is a normal practice when you're transferring a high-profile inmate, there is a level of keeping your mouth shut that needs to happen. Those three officers who were informed the night before were the escorting officers for the next day. As far as I'm aware, they're the only correctional officers who knew about the transfer. Once again, I verified it with the local president. He wasn't informed until morning, when he showed up for work.

The question is, why? That's a very good question. I think that when it comes to the case management of that offender, there would have been a CX-2 assigned to his file who should have been in the know as to what was happening to their inmate, but as far as I'm aware, they weren't even aware.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Have you seen this in the past, where someone was not aware of a transfer of this magnitude?

[Jeff Wilkins]

I have seen this in the past, actually. We have several high-profile inmates who sometimes are moved not just with our members but with members of our institutional emergency response team through the middle of the night. Things are kept quiet, and nobody seems to know.

What has been told to me is that this secrecy is for the inmate's safety and for public safety, because if these types of things were to get out into the media there could be risks involved, and there very well could be.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you. I'd like to move on. You briefly mentioned a case. I'm going to get into it in a bit more detail.

In 2019, two inmates who had been convicted of violent crimes escaped from the William Head minimum-security prison in B.C and murdered a local man in his home. After the incident, we learned that corrections officials had overruled their security assessment, which stated that they should not be in a minimum-security prison, and placed them in a cozy minimum-security facility anyway, which is sometimes referred to as “Club Fed” because of its relaxed conditions.

Do you consider this case emblematic of the wider systemic issues you've described surrounding the reclassification and transfer of federal offenders in Canada?

[Jeff Wilkins]

Absolutely, I do. This is one of the biggest problems we face when it comes to the custody rating scale, as I mentioned in my opening statement. When the decision is made to ignore the empirical data—and I say “empirical” with quotation marks—in using that custody rating scale, and to override inmates who would normally be in a maximum- or a medium-security institution to go to a lower level of security, that overriding could have potential consequences for the public, just as it did in this case.

I know that in the case of Mr. Bernardo he was overridden, but overridden to stay in a maximum-security institution. You typically don't have a whole lot of problems when they're keeping somebody at a higher level, but when the transfer is being made to a lower level, this is where we have problems. If you ask the right questions, you'll see that there are many inmates across the country who are in a lower level than what they are classified as in the custody rating scale.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you. That's a nice lead-in to my next question, because we learned recently that this year there are a total of 736 dangerous offenders in federal custody, with 99 of those in maximum security, 580 in medium security and 57 in minimum-security prisons. Have members of your union raised concerns about their personal safety regarding the number of dangerous offenders currently in medium- and minimum-security prisons across Canada?

[Jeff Wilkins]

The quick answer is yes, absolutely. We hear that. Typically we are dealing with those types of things at the labour management tables, at the local level, the regional level or the national level. Mostly these types of moves are discussed at the regional level. We've asked for a review, in some cases, of the transfer, because our members have come forward with genuine security concerns.

[Doug Shipley, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

I have only a few seconds left, but maybe we can get this in.

You mentioned that an offender's custody rating scale is determined by an actuarial score that is often overridden by corrections—we're learning a lot about that today—to give offenders a security downgrade. You are saying that you feel this practice is dangerous for your members and the Canadian public.

[Jeff Wilkins]

Yes, it absolutely is. In some cases, there are reasons and rationale that's put behind that, but when we have inmates who are assaulting staff in a medium-security institution one week and then a few weeks later are being transferred to minimum, we have questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Heath MacDonald]

Thank you, Mr. Wilkins. Thank you, Mr. Shipley.

Now we'll go to Mr. Schiefke.

[Peter Schiefke, Liberal, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank our witnesses for being here today and allowing us the opportunity to clarify a few things and get some transparency on behalf of Canadians who are looking for answers to some questions with regard to how the process works.

I want to begin my line of questioning with Mr. Wilkins.

Following up on the line of questioning that Mr. Shipley put forward, can you explain and tell us a little more about how the custody rating scale and the security reclassification scale work? Who makes those decisions exactly?

[Jeff Wilkins]

Judging by the credentials of my colleagues on the witness panel, they might have a better understanding of the custody rating scale, as parole officers or former parole officers.

It's my understanding that the custody rating scale is done by the parole officer. The parole officer weighs several different factors. There are many factors. They are each given a point value, whether it's institutional charges or that they have community contacts, or their crime to begin with and the brutality of their crime. All of these things weigh into a score, and that score is going to determine whether you are classified as a minimum, medium or maximum-security offender.

[Peter Schiefke, Liberal, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Wilkins.

I'll pass it along to Mr. Ménard and Mr. Sandelli.

Can you expand on that and perhaps provide your feedback as well?

[Patrick Ménard]

Recently sentenced offenders are transferred from court to a Correctional Service of Canada assessment unit, where they undergo the intake assessment process. At that stage, CSC officers gather all available information on the offender and use the tool you just referred to, the custody rating scale. As Mr. Wilkins said, that tool involves many factors, including the type of offence for which the offender is being incarcerated and the offender's inmate history, that is, his previous incarcerations. The inmate's incarceration history, at both the federal and provincial levels, is thus taken into consideration in the assessment using this tool, which is then used to suggest a security level.

We have to use the tool together with all available documents, such as police and court reports, and take into consideration victim concerns and harm done to victims, among other factors.

Security levels are reviewed during an offender's incarceration. These reviews are conducted using another tool, the security reclassification scale, which is completely different from the first tool used at intake when the offender's sentence begins.

The three main criteria used to assess an offender's security level are the risk within the walls, or level of institutional adjustment, the risk to the public and the risk of escape.

[Peter Schiefke, Liberal, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Ménard.

I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Sandelli.

What role, if any, do parole officers play in working with the CSC to help determine the security classifications of an offender?

[The Chair, Liberal, Heath MacDonald]

Mr. Sandelli, can you hear us?

[Peter Schiefke, Liberal, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Perhaps, Mr. Chair, it's a question I can pose to Mr. Ménard.

Mr. Ménard, can you answer that question?

[Patrick Ménard]

Would you please repeat the question? I honestly thought you had put it to Mr. Sandelli, so I may have missed a few details.