Mr. Speaker, I am returning to a question I raised regarding CORCAN last week. CORCAN is the inmate skills development wing of Corrections Canada.
Last week, I asked why CORCAN employs 608 individuals, at a cost of $66 million in salaries alone, to train only 1,056 inmates in rudimentary tasks like farm chores, apple picking and sewing. The public safety minister responded to my question with a heartwarming story about a trip he took with the Governor General to a prison in Saskatchewan. That was a very unsatisfactory answer, so I am back again to point out that the per-prisoner cost of a CORCAN education per year is $62,000, which is half the tuition at Harvard University and is also more than the average Canadian earns in a year. At this price, one would assume that the investment is justified by astoundingly good public safety outcomes and a very low rate of recidivism for people who receive CORCAN training, but as it turns out, that is not the case.
The government has defended CORCAN by pointing over and over again, when I raise these questions in this place, to a research report by Corrections Canada published in 2014 that found that former inmates who find post-release employment are less likely to reoffend. Of course that is true, but I am not sure that the government read the rest of the research report, because it concludes, based on measurable data, that “Involvement in CORCAN employment [while incarcerated] was not found to have a significant impact on the length of time that offenders retained their first job post-release” and that “CORCAN participation was not directly linked to reductions in recidivism.”
In other words, CORCAN does not make a person any more likely to maintain employment after serving time in prison and therefore makes no difference to that person's employment status and does not reduce their likelihood of reoffending. In fact, the research in the same study found “no significant differences” whether prisoners worked for CORCAN, worked a non-CORCAN job in prison or did nothing at all.
Here is an interesting fact. Eight times as many prisoners, 7,944 to be exact, worked while incarcerated in non-CORCAN jobs last year compared to only 1,056 in CORCAN jobs, at a much lower cost. CORCAN is therefore as redundant as it is inefficient and expensive.
Why are we spending $66 million to add nothing at all to the skills prisoners receive? The minister asked us to look at what he calls the remarkable success of CORCAN. I see no success whatsoever. Why does this program exist at all?