Public Safety committee  Thank you, Minister. I'll address the issue you raised about the special handling unit, which is our most secure facility. We use that facility to hold the most dangerous individuals within the system, and we currently have a capacity for about 90 of those types of individuals.

Public Safety committee  I have just a couple of things to quickly add. Over the last couple of years we've received a significant infusion of money into the organization to advance the yard sticks for programming, specifically for offenders of aboriginal ancestry. We've been able to do several things. O

Public Safety committee  Most definitely. Over the last couple of years we've seen an infusion of money, as I mentioned briefly, to help us develop our capacity to deliver programs specifically for aboriginal offenders, both in the institutions and in the community, as well as to help to develop capacit

Public Safety committee  I think some of the long-term results are going to take five to ten years, but what we're seeing, as you pointed out correctly, is some incremental gains on the inside, and some on the outside. So, for example, one of the problems we had before is that, specifically in our prairi

Public Safety committee  It is one of the things that we're currently looking at as part of our transformation agenda. There were a series of recommendations in the independent panel review report that talked about the needs of victims. One of them had to do with providing victims with more information a

Public Safety committee  Mr. Dion can probably talk a bit about this as well, because we both have resources to provide services to victims. We received money a year or so ago to put in place 30 victim services unit officers. We have been working hand in hand with the National Parole Board in providing s

Public Safety committee  I think it's not an issue of whether the recommendations that have been brought forward by the correctional investigator in the past are good or bad. There's no question from our perspective. We recognize the thrust of the issue that has been brought forward. The problem we have

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to be able to respond to the Auditor General's report on economies and efficiencies as it relates to Correctional Service Canada. CSC, Correctional Service Canada, fully agrees with the recommendations inc

Public Accounts committee  With the infusion of moneys that we received over the last several years through Budget 2007 and Budget 2008, I think we're well positioned to produce the kinds of public safety results we have been producing for the last several years. One of the jobs we have as part of our tran

Public Accounts committee  It's come with various specific initiatives attached to it. That $122 million is an accrual number over a couple of years. The cash number is higher than that, because there is a capital component to it. We have made some significant inroads in moving the agenda along in many dif

Public Accounts committee  Our menus are based on Canada's food guide. We have dieticians who review, on a regular basis, the menus that are produced and sign off on those. In terms of junk food per se, there's the odd menu that has french fries on it or certain other foods that you may consider fast-food

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure, Mr. Chair, that I mentioned that at all, but in terms of the issues around water quality, we manage and monitor that on a regular basis. For example, in places where water is drawn from wells, we respect the normal protocols for having water tested on a regular basi

Public Accounts committee  At this point, I'm not aware of any of our institutions that are on boil—

Public Accounts committee  Most definitely.

Public Accounts committee  For our correctional officers, the latest statistic we have is that they use, on average, 17 days of sick leave per year. We've seen some changes over the last couple of years as a result of some of the new provisions that were in the collective agreement. As a result of some cha