Public Accounts committee  No. What I said was that in terms of our legislative mandate, which is to investigate and resolve offender complaints and to bring systemic issues in corrections to Parliament's attention, it was working well. During the audit period, for example, the office completed over 40,000

Public Accounts committee  I found there were many systems that needed to be improved. At the same time, there were some minor comptrollership issues that were going government-wide and that we were a part of. We set about working on those issues. There have been several improvements in terms of financial

Public Accounts committee  Yes, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Members of the committee, good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity to appear before the public accounts committee and, through you, to report to Canadians on the actions the agency I lead has taken to implement the recommendations of the Audit

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'm sorry, but clearly part of your question is really so far outside of my mandate and my competence that I really would hesitate to answer. I am aware of programs that do deal with victim needs, but specifically, when we look at some of the initiatives that are available under

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Again, let me preface this by saying “if everything stays the same”. So if we see an increased population of aboriginal offenders going into federal penitentiaries, and those offenders continue to be, in my opinion, over-classified and held at higher security levels than they nee

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  To the best of my knowledge, drawing on my experience, if everything else stays the same, but we create laws that necessarily incarcerate more people, I would predict that at least the same proportion of aboriginal offenders will be caught in that growth in incarceration. So if e

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  --yes--because of course we don't know the final form of the law.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think we need to continue to explore them, and I think we need to be as rigorous as possible in finding the elements of success. Clearly, more work needs to be done there.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Many of these initiatives have been evaluated, and in a way that some of the other core correctional programs haven't. They were also reviewed a couple of years ago under what was known as the effective corrections initiative. You can get a measure of their impact by looking at a

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If I got to be king? Do I have only 30 seconds for this as well, Mr. Chairman? The strategic plan that has been developed by Correctional Service Canada for aboriginal offenders is a pretty good one. I guess if I were king for a day, I'd make sure that it was resourced as a pr

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Systemic discrimination is often an unintended outcome of a series of decisions, procedures, or policies that are in place. We have found evidence year after year that there is an identifiable group of Canadian serving offenders who seem to be disadvantaged. We measure that disad

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  There's a tremendous need for capacity-building within aboriginal and first nation communities. There are not necessarily deficits in those communities, but there are deficits in the way the system interacts with those communities. The need is there to strengthen the relationship

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The best example I can give is the one I referred to in my remarks about the classification tools. We believe they are culturally inappropriate and over-classified because of the way the questions are asked and scored.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It was just for women. The Canada Correctional Service language has changed over recent years in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with the issues of systemic barriers and differential outcomes for aboriginal offenders. Their most recent response to the report—even though the str