Public Safety committee  I'm happy to speak about the equality of prisoners. For a grievance process to be effective, there are risks to a grievance process if it is abused. The challenge is determining what is abuse and what is fair use. In a prison system that can be a very challenging thing to do, be

Public Safety committee  I have a few comments to make.

Public Safety committee  I didn't have anything to distribute to the translators.

Public Safety committee  I would like to reiterate that the John Howard Society of Canada, on whose behalf I'm pleased to be here today, echoes many of the concerns that Kim has raised about the need to have an effective, timely grievance process. We also give quite a bit of credit to Correctional Servi

Public Safety committee  I just want to mention that if the grounds for detention are that the person is a flight risk and you could compensate for that risk with the bracelet, that might be one of the cases in which you'd want to have an evaluated project. You're not using it as part of the corrections

Public Safety committee  I think you'd need to watch the widening of the net. I mean, you're talking about a very narrow subset of people who are detained in custody. It might be very interesting to see if that actually does reduce your pre-trial detention numbers. I'm a strong advocate of trying to re

Public Safety committee  I would think it's worth testing. I don't know whether it would work or not, but it isn't burdened with the corrections problems that we see with an overreliance on electronic monitoring in the corrections area. You're trying to get people to a deportation hearing and you don't w

Public Safety committee  Are you saying it's a chicken and egg sort of thing?

Public Safety committee  I can, but you might want to hear from John, who actually works in the field.

Public Safety committee  Many people who have been in conflict with the law have a myriad of problems, whether it's addiction, whether it's mental health, whether it's family issues. There are all kinds of problems. What we would consider to be a more humane approach is to actually have person-to-person

Public Safety committee  It would alleviate some of my concerns. But going back to John's point, does human contact alone have equal or better results than electronic monitoring plus human contact? If so, you could save a lot of money if you just went with human contact monitoring. If you need to buttre

Public Safety committee  We're not an abolitionist organization. We agree that at certain points custodial sentences are necessary for certain offenders. If your objective is protecting the public over the long run, you're better off with more community-based sentences as a way of holding people accounta

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. It's great to be back before the committee. As you know, the John Howard Society of Canada is a community-based charity whose mission it is to support effective, just, and humane responses to the causes and consequences of crime. The society is celebrating i

Human Resources committee  I think you raise a very interesting point. We are talking about availability for work, but what this legislation is doing is removing an exemption, under which the clock would stop ticking on that period of availability until the person was available for work, until he would no

Human Resources committee  I beg your pardon? They didn't choose to stop work. They are incapacitated by the state. They've been subjected to a penalty, which precludes them from having access to their place of employment. But these people and their employers have both paid into an insurance scheme. So w