Public Safety committee  It's definitely a combination of a couple of things. One is the issue that there are no jobs at home. In some cases, it's the issue of education levels. That's the first thing that we need to work at, to help bring up their education levels. Another challenge for us is that unfor

Public Safety committee  I'll let Ms. Garrow talk a bit about some of the connections that we're doing there.

Public Safety committee  Just to add to that, the correctional intervention board is made up of a group of different staff members, including CORCAN staff. They're involved in the review and the assessment of the offender's needs and the opportunities that are available. Although we talk about CSC and CO

Public Safety committee  I'll let Ms. Garrow talk about some of the specific activities in a moment. One of the challenges that we have with the women offenders is the fact that we have small regional institutions across the country. This makes it hard to get large-scale activities going, as we do in ma

Public Safety committee  No. We have done nothing since the farms were shut down in 2011. Our budgets were adjusted. We modified our approaches to procurement of food. We've gone to national tenders for certain types of products. Since 2011, we haven't pursued that at all.

Public Safety committee  Thanks. It's a really good question. I think a couple of points are worth noting. There are sort of three types of individuals we need to deal with. There are those individuals who come into the system and have literally no employment history or employment skills at all. In s

Public Safety committee  Yes, that's one of the challenges we have right now. We were speaking just the other day about what work we can do, for example, with community colleges and vocational schools that have a lot of experience in terms of bringing people in and assessing them and training them. We

Public Safety committee  We obviously encourage the offenders to be active in identifying the kinds of things they'll pursue in relation to their correctional plan. We're also careful because we know that certain work opportunities in the institutions also provide opportunities for inmates to establish

Public Safety committee  In discussions with various groups, particularly at the forums we've held out west, employers are reluctant to take anybody who has a criminal record in relation to fraud, robbery, those kinds of things. That seems obvious. There is still some reluctance in terms of hiring sex of

Public Safety committee  The report in 2012 pointed to areas that clearly we knew that we had to improve on, and over the last two years that's exactly what we've been focusing our attention towards—to ensure that we have good, viable opportunities for offenders in our facilities. Part of that has requir

Public Safety committee  What we've been doing, and Ms. Garrow can expand a bit, is expanding certain activities, certain opportunities. For example, some of the construction work that we've been doing for CBSA, the Canada Border Services Agency, creates more opportunities. We are not in a position to c

Public Safety committee  Overall, the combined work that we do—the combined effort around both employment and correctional interventions, correctional programs—is what produces the public safety results that we have today. We know, as was pointed out earlier, that offenders who are involved in CORCAN o

Public Safety committee  Yes, that's one of the biggest challenges we have right now. Again, this is one of the things that this committee can help us do. We have traditionally talked a lot about job support while individuals are under our care, but we need to talk about that going beyond their warrant

Public Safety committee  Thank you for allowing that. I have a couple of quick comments. All the trades activities in the institutions are open to all offenders. We encourage all offenders—aboriginal and non-aboriginal— to participate, and we can share some statistics with you shortly in terms of those

Public Safety committee  I have a couple of quick comments and then I'll get to the very specific questions that you raise. At the beginning of February it was 37 years ago that I first put on a uniform and walked into my first penitentiary. At that time, what was happening in what we would call prison i