SECU Committee Report

Bloc Québécois Supplementary Opinion

The Importance of Innovation

The report

The Bloc Québécois would like to begin by thanking all the individuals, groups and institutions in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere for sharing with the Committee their experiences in managing and treating addiction and mental health in a correctional setting.

While the Bloc Québécois in no way disagrees with this report, we believe that it does not always go as far as it should. We think that this is rooted in a reluctance to take an innovative approach to the problems presented.

Taking the next steps

In Norway and London, it was repeatedly said that small correctional facilities were able to establish a good working environment that fostered rehabilitation and a friendly atmosphere between inmates and guards. The report states that the “atmosphere in the correctional facilities visited in Norway differs from that in most of the facilities visited in Canada.” We believe it would be very useful to establish a pilot project involving the administration of a small correctional facility with a maximum of 70 inmates to test new methods for treating offenders.

On the subject of fostering innovation, we believe that Correctional Service Canada (CSC) should establish a structure for developing new methods, consistent with its mission, to deal with harm reduction related to substance abuse. Although recommendation 32 proposes that more resources be allocated for this purpose, we believe that in addition to spending more, it would be wise to look at ways to spend better.

The report also makes several recommendations concerning segregation, particularly recommendations 52, 53, 54 and 56, all of which suggest that administrative segregation be used in limited circumstances. However, none of the recommendations offer specifics on how CSC can achieve this goal. The Bloc Québécois proposes that the Corrections and Conditional Release Act (CCRA) be amended to provide for an independent adjudication process for all forms of long-term segregation. This proposal is based primarily on the testimony of Johanne Vallée, who told the Committee that “[w]e need to monitor segregation to avoid long-term segregation, and that’s why I was saying segregation is the last tool we have, but there shouldn’t be long-term segregation. In our region we have a regional segregation committee that meets on a regular basis and analyzes each case. Sometimes we are faced with a situation when the offenders for all sorts of reasons don’t want to leave segregation, whether they are afraid of others, whether they have some debt. We need to address that. We need to make sure the case management team will meet them on a regular basis, and we need to find alternatives to segregation."

Lastly, the Bloc Québécois would have liked the Committee to give further consideration to having the governments of Quebec and the provinces treat offenders with substance abuse and mental health problems. Recommendations 7 and 8 pave the way by proposing federal-provincial agreements on prisoner transfers and on care following release into the community. Unfortunately, the Committee did not take this proposal to its logical conclusion. The provincial level has the medical expertise, and such an approach would likely facilitate continued medical care between incarceration and the return to the community. This transfer should be accompanied by the necessary funding, of course.

While the Bloc Québécois undertook the Committee report and this supplementary report in good faith, it has few illusions that the current government will act on the recommendations. A government that does not hesitate to imprison innocent people and believes that punishment is the only answer cannot fully understand the importance of changing the approach to treating offenders with substance abuse and mental health problems.