Public Safety committee  The hard cap is virtually impossible to implement. You have to remember that we have cases in which we may be successful, after 10 or 15 days, to release the inmate back into the population, but then we can have self-harming cases or cases where inmates are extremely violent, whe

Public Safety committee  If you're asking from a front-line perspective, the real need is to sit down and discuss the statistics currently out there. Let's share the information. Let's see what's happening. Are we having problems in certain institutions or certain units because something is triggering th

Public Safety committee  To be honest with you, I have to defend the service. We do a pretty good job of oversight on our own. We're not asking for an independent oversight. We think we have the tools and the policies in place and the people to do what we need to do. We're managing 15,000 offenders on a

Public Safety committee  That's what they've indicated, but at the same time it's very difficult to manage outside oversight given the operational needs, the population needs and the fact that we have routines going on. It's not that simple. Sometimes we have to put our trust in the organization and the

Public Safety committee  I should hope we would be. It's our understanding, based on the decisions, that there is an urgency to push the bill through. Again, we're going to be the first to tell you that we need to slow things down a little bit. If there is a plan B, we would really like to know about it,

Public Safety committee  We have multi-level institutions now. They can designate them as multi-level as it stands right now. The tricky part about multi-level is being able to manage the various populations. If you're managing a minimum-, medium- or maximum-security population all within one institution

Public Safety committee  Would you like me to answer the question?

Public Safety committee  Listen, for the prison needle exchange program, the current two institutions are up and running. We're already incurring some difficulties, and I'll give you an example for Atlantic Canada, where the inmates have needles. Our job is zero tolerance on drugs. We're supposed to conf

Public Safety committee  I don't know about an overdose specifically, I just know that drugs were intercepted. Heroin was intercepted, and if you talk to some of the veteran officers there, they were surprised. They haven't seen those types of interceptions before. Traditionally, in the Grand Valley Ins

Public Safety committee  It has the potential to be. The critics will say there have been no needle-stick injuries in Europe, but we can't say that. Our inmate population is different. The culture is very different here in North America. I can tell you, working at Kingston Penitentiary, I witnessed an

Public Safety committee  Again, certainly I was very clear in my brief to say that we have a role to play. As correctional officers, we have our ear to the ground 24 hours a day. We see a lot of inmate behaviour, and at the end of the day, it's very essential that right from the warden down we're engaged

Public Safety committee  Unfortunately, due to cabinet confidentiality, as our commissioner often tells us, we weren't really consulted. The bill was as much a surprise to us as it was to anybody. I don't see the bill before it comes onto the table, so we weren't officially consulted on Bill C-83.

Public Safety committee  It depends on how we capitalize on it. We have constantly advocated for more mental health services and support, because at the end of the day, the correctional officer is limited in his ability to manage that. It's a good thought. It's ambitious, but at the end of the day, how a

Public Safety committee  To be honest with you, our organization hasn't costed that out. We don't really have the access to those kinds of numbers. All I can tell you is that if you're managing 75 offenders and you want to take them out for four hours a day, excluding phone calls and showers, there's an

Public Safety committee  There are good intentions there, but I will go to the issue of resourcing. This is going to be a very costly venture if we are going to be successful. There is the idea that we are going to include health care on a very regular basis. As you know, I have been advocating for there