Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about Bill C-293, which intends to create a category of vexatious complainants in the correctional system's complaints and grievance procedure. This bill amends section 91 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
I would like to quote section 91, which has to do with access to the grievance procedure: “Every offender shall have complete access to the offender grievance procedure without negative consequences.” This section ensures that all inmates in the correctional system have free and equal access to the grievance procedure in the event of problems or threats to their health or safety, for example.
The section is not there by accident. The complaints and grievance procedure in prisons was instituted by a parliamentary subcommittee in the 1970s. At that time, numerous revolts and violent incidents were tainting prisons and making the environment dangerous for everyone—inmates and employees alike. The complaints and grievance procedure was a way to let inmates use something other than violence to express their concerns and resolve their problems.
Today, we are being asked to amend this section that provides inmates with the opportunity to express themselves and to try to deal with a problem or frustrations by a means other than violence. The proposed amendments are as follows:
If the Commissioner is satisfied that an offender has persistently submitted complaints or grievances that are frivolous, vexatious or not made in good faith, the Commissioner may, in accordance with the prescribed procedures, prohibit an offender from submitting any further complaint or grievance except by leave of the Commissioner.
The general idea is to give the commissioner the discretion to prevent certain complainants from filing grievances. Naturally, not every complainant, but only those who the commissioner deems to be vexatious, in other words those whose complaints are frivolous and not made in good faith.
I would like to re-examine the idea of a frivolous complaint. The member for Scarborough Centre, who introduced this bill, gave an example of a complaint that she considered to be frivolous involving a radio. I will cite the example she mentioned in a previous speech.
...an inmate who had an issue regarding a radio that he owned which, after his transfer to a new institution, no longer worked...He then filed another complaint on the same issue while his first grievance was still being evaluated in conjunction with the institution that he had been transferred from.
For someone unfamiliar with prison life, filing a complaint about a radio may seem frivolous. However, my colleague has overlooked some considerations. First, it is very important to remember that, in a correctional facility, what may seem insignificant, frivolous or vexatious to us may, on the contrary, be very important to the inmates. Some things in life that are not important to us, can be important to inmates.
To overlook this difference in perspective is to oversimplify things in this discussion on grievances and complaints. This type of complaint can also very often conceal other frustrations or problems that the inmates are unable to articulate such as conflicts between inmates, long-standing stress, harassment or problems with depression. In this case, the radio was simply the last straw.
In reality, deeming this example futile or not legitimate is in fact a very simplistic solution. It ignores another latent and perhaps more serious problem or one that urgently needs to be resolved. In this case, an inmate with a more serious latent problem who makes repeated complaints would now have his problem deemed not legitimate and he would be prohibited from filing more complaints. The situation would be unresolved and would worsen, without any escape route for that inmate. This is obviously not the right solution.
In this case, this type of complaint is not necessarily about settling a dispute over a radio, but instead provides information on the more general situation in the institution and with the inmates, about the tensions inside the prison walls or with the staff. If we consider this perspective, it is important to keep the line of communication between institutional management and the inmates open and free.
Actually, according to the 2010-11 annual report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator: “The offenders complaints and grievance system is an important barometer for gauging the experience of the inmate population.”
We also must bear in mind that 48% of complaints have an extended response time. The time taken to deal with a complaint varies according to its code and coding complaints is a problem as well.
According to the document entitled “Audit of Offender Complaint and Grievance Process, Internal Audit” published by Correctional Service Canada in 2009, 67% of priority complaints were classified as such and only 13% of urgent cases were classified as urgent. What is more, only 64% of harassment complaints were correctly coded.
Making a second complaint, or repeated complaints, about the same subject may be an attempt to attract attention to a problem that is more urgent than it appears, or to a complaint that might have been improperly coded and not handled in a timely fashion. As a result, I stress again that the examples of repeated complaints, or complaints considered to be frivolous, that the hon. member for Scarborough Centre gave in order to justify this bill, do not seem very relevant to me, given all the limitations and different perspectives that it completely ignores.
The hon. member for Scarborough Centre acknowledges that the burden of complaints is very onerous for the prison system and that it is a problem that needs to be solved. I agree with that. But she feels that the bulk of the complaints and grievances comes from a small number of inmates who see writing frivolous complaints as a way to pass the time and that, by forbidding them to file complaints, the problem will be solved.
I am going to quote some examples from the Office of the Correctional Investigator's report for 2010-11:
Correctional Service Canada has reported a noticeable rise in the volume of offender complaints and grievances for the top five subject categories.
Indeed, many of the top grieved subjects correspond to topics and priorities that the Office has reported upon in recent years: general 'hardening' of the conditions of confinement; declining quality of dynamic security and staff-offender interactions; inconsistent quality of and accessibility to health care services; access to programming; restrictions on group privileges and individual rights.
So what I gather from this report is that, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the increase in complaints is not a result of frivolous complaints. No, the increase in complaints is rather the result of the inability of recent governments to consider the true priorities in the prison system, priorities that the office has been mentioning in recent years.
The New Democrat members who were on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security when this bill was studied were in favour of creating mediator and grievance coordinator positions in the correctional institutions, a proposal that the Conservatives felt was irrelevant.
I would like to quote another section of the same report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator:
Institutions with mediators appear to reflect an improved percentage of complaints and grievances resolved at the lowest level.
Institutions that retain a Grievance Coordinator for more than one year appear to process complaints and grievances more efficiently and at a higher rate.
Institutional Heads who place a high importance on the Offender Complaint and Grievance Process appear to reflect a higher percentage of resolved complaints/grievances and a lower percentage of overdue complaints.
I would like to mention that the report is available online. Therefore, I would like to advise the member for Scarborough Centre to read it. I would like to close by saying that I will not be supporting this bill because I think it will lead to more violence in the correctional systems and it in no way addresses the true problems underlying the fact that people file repeated complaints.