A LOST RESOURCE?

Most prison inmates who have community support, people ‘at home’ they can call, people who make them feel missed, and loved, are women.  Wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters.  Speaking to these women on the phone, despite the occasional moment of domestic tension, or seeing them in on-line and in-person visits are bright spots in an inmate’s otherwise grey day, something that lifts them, a plus to counter the drudging monotony and suffocating and often hostile bureaucracy that is life for offenders in the prison industry.

This lines up with Correctional Service of Canada’s mandate to rehabilitate and safely return offenders to the community, doesn’t it.  The connections make reintegration more likely to succeed, won’t they.    Constructive influences make for positive outcomes, right?  All to the good.  However, there’s an uneasy reality at play here that can undo the apparent positive influences of familial intimacies.  Most of these inmates don’t want to intentionally say anything to upset or worry the women in their lives and with few exceptions they are left out of the real world of prison life and the negative impact it has.

A few years ago, this writer spoke with an inmate’s sister who lived in New Brunswick.  She was his only contact, they didn’t speak often, and he didn’t know how to be honest with her about his life behind bars and to tell her how much he appreciated her support.  He had lost the ability to be open to another person but wanted her to know the truth of his circumstances, not something many prisoners want to do.  He asked me to speak for him.  I was a stranger, but as I talked with her, she understood why he wanted her to know what life was like for him and why he had difficulty speaking for himself.

A Black mother in Ontario kept in close touch with her son who, after his conviction, was sent to Renous, a maximum-security prison in the Maritimes.  The man spent five years there before a transfer back to an Ontario institution.  He kept a positive slant to their conversations and the mother didn’t know he would have spent far less time there if he was white.  The prison industry’s own statistics underscore that non-white inmates spend more time in higher classification confinement.  The mother didn’t know until we told her.

Only two examples, but they represent how people who could play a role in bringing prison conditions to the public’s attention are purposely kept in the dark ‘for their own good.’  Are prisoners who don’t want to upset their wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, etc., helping themselves and their families?  Or, would the raised voices of hundreds of angry women bouncing off the walls of Correctional Service of Canada’s head office on Laurier Avenue in Ottawa do more?

More postings on Brennan Guigue’s challenge to prison practices (see July 20) are in the works…lots to wade through.

EXACTLY!
What does it take for a politician elected to public office, a federal cabinet minister no less, to stand up and do the right thing?  And what would we call one who wouldn’t?

How many times has this space featured the revision to Correctional Service of Canada’s Commissioner’s Directive (CD) 022 – Media Relations?  How many letters were posted to how many Ottawa addresses?  Is this a search for a panacea for Canada’s ills?  No, this is an uncomplicated rewrite of a prison agency policy to fully comply with the law and the Charter.

What began as a letter from Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger in December of 2019 prompting CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly to update its policy around inmate contacts with the media became a conundrum demanding the attention of pundits from across a brain-storming spectrum.  Why?  And here in June of 2023, this update is still under study.

A letter arrived recently.  Dated May 4, it was from Kirstan Gagnon, Assistant Commissioner in the Communications and Engagement Sector of Correctional Service of Canada.  Apparently, Public Safety Minister Marc Mendicino and CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly delegated Ms. Gagnon to respond to three of our letters to the Minister and two to the Commissioner, dating from October of last year to mid-March of 2023.

The essence of her message:-
“Important work to update the current CD 022 has been ongoing and many internal and external subject matter experts have been consulted throughout the process, providing valuable feedback, and proposing important changes to the directive.  CSC also worked diligently with stakeholders, such as the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada, to ensure that changes and updates to CD 022 respect the privacy and security of offenders, institutions, victims, and the public.  It is important to note that while we await the new version of CD 022, the current directive remains in effect and continues to provide offenders access to media outlets and representatives, as per their rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
..and…
“CSC appreciates the essential role performed by journalists and the media, and as such, we remain committed to being open, transparent and respectful of all media.  Since 2020, CSC has approved and facilitated more than 200 request from media outlets across the country to speak with offenders under its care.”
…and…
“We are now doing consultation on the CD with our executive committee, which is one of the last steps in the process.  Once we have incorporated any final input, the new CD will be approved by CSC’s Commissioner and promulgated.”

We responded by writing to the Minister:-

June 6, 2023

The Honourable Marco Mendicino, Minister of Public Safety,
Ottawa, ON  K1A 0A6

Re:      Minister missing in action

Dear Minister Mendicino:

If Correctional Service of Canada had substantively justified the prolonged delays in promulgating the revised Commissioner’s Directive (CD) 022 – Media Relations, I would not have written your office last October 17, and January 30 and March 15 of this year.

There was no need to bring this to your attention if you and your staff were on top of the CSC file.  But rather than question the Agency, you simply consigned my queries to their Communication and Engagement Sector (“control the message office”).  Assistant Commissioner Kirstan Gagnon’s May 4 letter’s core paragraph is an exercise in obfuscation.

The Correctional Investigator prompted the revision to a defective Commissioner’s Directive in December of 2019, a straightforward assignment.  Commissioner Kelly readily agreed.  Since then, CSC has twisted itself into a pretzel as it engineers a rewrite to preserve an unsound status quo, referencing numerous resources as an explanation for the wait.

CSC has good reason.  Canada pays lip service to the Mandela Rules.  Canada ratified the Convention against Torture in 1987.  But Canada won’t sign the UN’s 2006 Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT).  Why?  Canada will talk the talk.  Canada won’t walk the walk.

Correctional Service of Canada wants it that way.

Kirstan Gagnon and Ivan Zinger were copied, as was Senator Kim Pate who asked to be kept informed.

Yes Minister, what does it take to stand up?

….IS OFFENSIVE!

Try this:  Google “prison criticisms of Canada’s federal system.”

The Office of the Correctional Investigator releases an Annual Report as a review of Correctional Service of Canada’s operation during its previous twelve months.  There are few laurels, many barbs, numerous recommendations, and a lengthy section of charted statistics.  What is notable throughout these dozens of pages is the year after year repetitiveness of some of the report’s judgements, and the prison agency’s evasions and rejections of the OCI’s counsel for improved outcomes.

The correctional investigator heads a multi-million-dollar-a-year exercise, backed by investigators and support staff, to scrutinize a cocooned government bureau.  The OCI can access people, places, papers where conversation, observation, and examination flows to the summaries, deliberations, and suggestions that are the meat of its work.  That yearly report justifies the effort.  It represents millions of spent dollars and thousands of public service hours in preparation.  Parliament expresses its gratitude, moves on to other business, the report is carefully filed, and another groundhog-year begins.

At what point do honest, straight-shooting, stand-up men and women cry “enough”?  At what point is there the demand that their hard work has meaning, that the annual thanks-very-much-and-now-go-back-and-start-over doesn’t cut it, ignores the unsound status quo, and won’t make Canada safer?  Where is the screaming from the rooftops?

There are rooftops in Ottawa.  Why is it so quiet?  Why indeed.

)()(

The correctional investigator mirrors in a very public way the experience of hundreds of individuals and organizations who work for carceral change and reform in this country, turnoverarocktoday.com included.

In searching our files for data on another topic, an issue of Klassen Mailing List relevant to this posting stood out.  The precursor to turnoverarocktoday.com, Klassen Mailing List had the same purpose as its digital successor but was printed and distributed to a cross-country mailing list.

Issue #12 was published on November 6, 2007 with the title “Correctional Service of Canada….making me proud to be an ashamed Canadian!”  In part, it reported on an information picket we set up outside CSC’s Ontario District Office on Dundas Street West in Toronto on Thursday, October 11 of that year.

Issue #12 also set out a list of eleven ‘bones to pick’ with CSC:

• Limitations and delays in health care delivery,
• the scam the Millennium telephone system is,
• the inconsequential grievance and complaints process,
• lack of adequate accountability and transparency,
• the absence of due process in so many instances,
• some dubious professionalism,
• examples of inaccuracies and fabrications to the information in offenders’ files,
• limited educational opportunities,
• the inefficacy of cookie-cutter programs,
• a dearth of substantive job skills and trades training programs, and,
• in general, a pervasive failure to meet the burden of the CSC Mission Statement.

Only one item from this list has been resolved.  For the last many years, Bell Canada’s telephone system in federal prisons now reflects reasonable tariffs for prepaid and collect calls.  Bell still is securely in control of the telephone service contracts and continues to gather benefits from its monopoly.

That’s it.  That’s all.  And other sources have a longer list.  Then too, Klassen Mailing List was more polite than turnoverarocktoday.com.

Where is the minister in all this?  A good question.  We’ve contacted current Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino often.  He seems to be absent from the prison file.

Portage-free letters will reach him at the House of Commons, Ottawa, K1A 0A6.  His office phone is 613-992-6361, and there’s a fax number, 613-992-9791.

FORCING A PERSON INTO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT for more than a few days, or repeatedly putting that same man or woman into those barren bathroom-sized cells even for a few days at a time, is mentally corrosive, can cause permanent damage, and is torture, plain and simple.  This is as true today as it has been at any time in our history, and the United Nations Human Rights Council and its Committee Against Torture came to recognize it as such during the last half of twentieth century.

The Office of the Correctional Investigator, Canada’s prison watchdog, noted in its 2020-2021 Annual Report that its work during the previous year “has shown us just how vulnerable those in institutional settings are – from long-term care homes to prisons – and how we must ensure their protection to the highest extent possible.”

The report went on point out that, “Canada has been known as a world leader in protecting human rights and democratic values……Canada has also been a leader by joining many international human rights treaties and making a commitment to report to the United Nations on their implementation.”

As an example, Canada signed the Convention against Torture (CAT) in 1985 and ratified it in 1987.  “However,” the correctional investigator goes on, “merely reporting on how it meets its CAT obligations is not enough to ensure that the most vulnerable who are in places of detention are protected against mistreatment and torture behind closed doors.  There exists a gap in Canada’s human rights system in protecting those in detention.”

The UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT) fills that gap.  Countries who ratify OPCAT must adhere to human rights obligations under international law for detention facilities, and replace the secrecy traditionally associated with prisons with openness, transparency, and accountability.

“The most effective way of preventing torture therefore is to expose all places of detention to public scrutiny,” says a conclusion adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on August 14, 2006.

Canada has not signed OPCAT.  Can you wonder why?

Administrative segregation is how Correctional Service of Canada labelled solitary confinement.  CSC is fully aware of its consequences to prisoners from the earliest days of the country’s prison system.  After all, it was the perpetrator, and outcomes were plainly visible.  And yet, even as late at 2012 Correctional Service of Canada refused to limit its use.  It would take another seven years before parliament adopted Bill C-83 to end solitary, or more correctly, to technically end solitary confinement.

In the meantime, Arlene Gallone had had enough.  She was a former federal inmate in Quebec who became the lead plaintiff in a class action against the government over the use of solitary confinement.  The suit was launched on February 24, 2013, and the Superior Court of Quebec authorized the class action on January 13, 2017.  In Ontario, two similar actions were underway with Christopher Brazeau and Jullian Reddock as the leads.  These were filed jointly with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on March 12, 2021.

Negotiations began.  There was no course where the government would allow this to be heard in open court, just as it is with any legal matter arising with Correctional Service of Canada.  In the end, the Brazeau, Reddock and Gallone (BRG) class actions were settled together, with $28 million in aggregate damages awarded to eligible claimants, and a further assumed undisclosed settlement for legal fees.  The judgement applied to all federal institutions across the country.  Canada was required by the court to turn over all relevant documentation and CSC was to assist inmates with the claims process.

That it did.  Lawyers began the interviews of class action members during 2022.  The claims administrator made disbursements in January of 2023.  All claimants received an equal share of the award, calculated at $5,469.85.  Class members whose solitary confinement experience was egregious were also able to proceed further on one of two different ‘tracks’ to claim up to $50,000 or more in addition to the base amount, dependant upon the severity of their confinements.  These payments are scheduled for later in the year, but participants have been told that the full value of the claims can’t be met with the funds available.  All the same, the amounts awarded will be relatively substantial.

These are your tax dollars going out the door.  And the BRG class actions represent only a portion of the outstanding lawsuits against our prison industry.

There’s one striking observation in what Correctional Service of Canada published on its website for assisting class members with their claims.  No doubt it is following the instructions agreed by the government, nothing more, nothing less.  It reads at one point, “Three separate class actions lawsuits have ended with the Courts finding that the rights of inmates were violated.”

Nowhere does CSC acknowledge wrongdoing.  Nowhere does it say, “I’m sorry.”

In Canada?  Why would anyone say that?  What’s going on?  Who is this?  What is happening?

It’s not likely the average Canadian would hear it face to face from another person.  You might pick it up in a radio or television newscast, or when paging through a newspaper in hand or on-line.  Or could it be overheard from the conversation of others in a busy mall food court?  “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This isn’t about a journalist’s reporting from countries where human rights are ignored.  This is here, in this country, in real time.  “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This could come from a seasonal agricultural worker, brought here to help grow and harvest our food.  We know there are complaints about the treatment of foreign workers by some corporate farmers.  Or it could be the kids in our child welfare system, housed in foster and group homes where abuses are not uncommon, and where the overdosing of controlling drugs is too frequently a catch-all alternative to therapies.  Are victims of domestic violence and schoolyard bullying whispering this under their breath?

Most of us won’t hear this and don’t hear this from prisoners.  It’s there but it doesn’t get past prison security barriers “designed to keep people in as much as they are to keep people out,” as Canada’s Senate said in a 2019 report about carceral human rights.  The management of the prison “population is largely conducted away from public scrutiny,” the report continued.  Prison inmates can become inured to the vagaries, hypocrisy, and dishonesty that pervades the institutional environment and the air they breathe.  It smothers hope, it chokes the screams.  The words are there though.  Can you hear them? “I just want to be treated like a human being.”

This space has frequently highlighted the proposed revision to a commissioner’s directive on media relations to bring inmate/media access into line with the law and the Charter.  It’s been over three years since Anne Kelly, the head of what we call Correctional Service of Canada, committed to make changes.  A draft is ready and available, but it isn’t in effect.  Why?

Despite all, word can escape the darkness.  Google Joey Toutsaint to read his 3-page complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Committee.  To see Joey Toutsaint in conversation, call up YouTube’s “APTN investigates – 2180 days inside corrections.”  Listen to Mary Wiens interview Nathanael Williams March 10 and March 23 of this year, broadcast on CBC’s Metro Morning.  As a by the way, Nathanael did not get parole.

“I just want to be treated like a human being.”

No, not if we continue to allow our police services and provincial government to erase Soleiman’s existence with a gag-order-settlement and a years-from-now nonconsequential inquest.

No, not if we don’t demand all three levels of government address the need for mental health initiatives and social programming in our neighbourhoods and change the way we treat people in distress who come into conflict with the law.

No, not if we don’t stop jail and prison guards from disregarding policy, the law, and just simple human decency.

Two events in early March presented another opportunity to keep Soleiman’s name in front of the men who would rather not hear it.   Two events that open this latest letter…….

April 5, 2023

Thomas Corrique, Commissioner,                  Mark Mitchell, Chief,
Ontario Provincial Police,                              Office of the Chief of Police,
Lincoln Alexander Building,                           Kawartha Lakes Police Service,
777 Memorial Avenue,                                    6 Victoria Avenue North,
Orillia, ON  L3V 7V3                                      Lindsay, ON  K9N 4E5

Commissioner Corrique & Chief Mitchell:

In the early hours of March 6, 2023, Jeffrey Munro was assaulted by four men and stabbed in downtown Toronto.  He died later in hospital.  Police in Toronto have named four men who have been or will be charged with second-degree murder.

Irvo Otieno died in custody at about the same date in a facility near Richmond, Virginia.  Seven sheriff’s deputies and three hospital employees have been charged with second-degree murder.

The outcome of the charges against these fourteen men and women will be determined by the courts, but police in both cases understood that Jeffrey Munro and Irvo Otieno did not die from an act of God, but rather was due to the deliberate actions of the people who have been charged.

And so it was that the Kawartha Lakes Police Service investigated the death of Soleiman Faqiri on December 15. 2016 at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ontario, but could not assign blame.  A second investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police came to the same conclusion.  The OPP was prompted to look again, but with the same result.

You have the names of every person who entered Soleiman Faqiri’s cell during the assault.  You know the only reason the jail guards were there was to “teach the inmate a lesson” for giving them a hard time earlier, a common practice in Canada’s jails and prisons.  You know that every one of those individuals was either actively or passively responsible for this man’s death. 

The family and supporters of the thus-far absent justice for Soleiman are now to be satisfied with a far-off inquest, years from now when the man’s name will be archival to the general public.  The inquest’s recommendations will focus on avoiding future such deaths, even though others will die similarly in the meantime.

No matter.  It will come to nothing.  Good on you.

Charles H. Klassen

cc:       Myron Demkiw, Chief, Toronto Police Services         Wendy Gillis, Toronto Star
Michael Kerzner, Solicitor General, Ontario             Yusuf Faqiri

Nothing will change the narrative around Soleiman’s death without the participation of people like you and like me.

Nothing will change the outcome of future deaths in custody without the participation of people like you and like me.

You can’t do nothing when you can do something.
Joyce Milgaard (1930-2020)

SEE “The House is back in session….” published on February 5 of this year.  That January 30 letter to Correctional Service of Canada Commissioner Anne Kelly about a long-delayed revision to a media relations policy was copied to a member of her staff, plus six politicians, two senators, two public servants working with the public safety ministry, the correctional investigator, and one of his deputies.  No partridge in a pear tree.

Three years in the making, so far, this revised Commissioner’s Directive first promised for June of 2020 is still not on the books.  The tardiness in updating a delinquent internal regulation should have been a straightforward exercise to comply with the law and the Charter.  Instead, it meandered through a bureaucratic labyrinth on its way to God knows where.

Could the shame of being called out for typical government excessive procrastination explain why not one of those elected, appointed, and employed civil servants even acknowledged a concern for the human rights of one group of Canadians?

What was more or less a footnote to that February 5 posting noted that an access to information request was sent to Correctional Service of Canada asking for a copy of the new directive.  It was meant to be cheeky.  Impudent as it was, an 18-page draft copy of the revised media relations policy showed up on email.  It’s a “controlled version 2023-02-98” and it’s still due to review according to the title page, but also indicates it’ll be in effect in 2023.

A letter to CSC Commissioner Kelly is self-explanatory:

March 15, 2023

Anne Kelly, Commissioner,
Correctional Service of Canada,
Ottawa, ON  K1A 0P9

Dear Commissioner Kelly:

By way of an information request to CSC, I received a copy of an otherwise undated 2022 revision to Commissioner’s Directive 022 – Media Relations.  The draft is dated February 8, 2023, and labelled “Controlled Version 2023-02-08.”  A notation on the title page suggests this will come into effect in 2023 although there’s no specific date.

I cannot offer an opinion on the degree to which the revisions to the media relations policy meet the recommendations in Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger’s December 19, 2019, letter to you.  I am not a lawyer and cannot make a judgement on the policy’s compliance with the word and spirit of the Acts and Regulations that govern CSC, and the relevant Charter provisions.  No doubt, Dr. Zinger was once encouraged when your February 24, 2020, letter to him expected the revised CD 22 to be available by the end of June 2020.  I can say that, like him, many in the community are relieved to finally see this project come to fruition.

Three years have passed since this process began.  An old cliché is appropriate here.  “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.”  You’ve got to publish sometime, don’t you?

Yours truly,

The other 15 named on February 5^th in “The House is back in session….” were copied.   A note was added for the six politicians and the two public safety ministry public servants as a reminder that doing the right thing is more important than playing politics.

The message to Marco Mendicino samples the body of that memo to the other seven:

March 15, 2023

The Honourable Marco Mendicino, Minister of Public Safety,
Ottawa, ON  K1A 0A2

Minister Mendicino:

This covers a copy of today’s letter to Correctional Service of Canada Commissioner Anne Kelly, a follow-up to my January 30 letter, also copied to you.  Through an access to information request, I did receive a draft copy of the revised Commissioner’s Directive 022 – Media Relations.

Noteworthy is that none of the six MPs and two public safety ministry civil servants who were copied on that January 30^th letter acknowledged the concern it raised about the human rights of inmates incarcerated in Canada’s federal prison industry.

Doing the right thing is eclipsed by politics, isn’t it.  It seems the Canadian government’s attitude to Correctional Service of Canada has a Victorian perspective.  You know, the one that says, “I don’t care what you do as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

It’s a pity covering one’s butt takes top billing.

Progress?  We’ll see.

This writer lived a year in Vancouver in the late 60s, and at one point spent a spring weekend visiting a friend in the town of Duncan on Vancouver Island, travelling by ferry to Nanaimo and then a bus south to Duncan, about half-way to Victoria.  The routing along Trans-Canada Highway 1 passed down the main street of picturesque and colourful Ladysmith where some of the town’s buildings appeared to have façades larger than the structures behind them, reminiscence of early Western settlements.

That begged the question of how and why those false fronts were an architectural feature in frontier towns.  Possibilities come easily, but more important for this purpose here and now is how Correctional Service of Canada is a constant reminder of those long-ago buildings in Ladysmith.  What one sees, what one hears, what one is expected to assume, accept, and believe about our prison agency and its operations is too often a false front masking a reality that is purposely and aggressively shrouded to protect the status quo.

There have been frequent references in this space, including the lead-in for the last posting, to a relevant quote from the Senate of Canada’s 2019 interim report on prison human rights, references such as, “The security features inherent to federal correctional facilities are designed to keep people in as much as they are to keep people out.”  Why is that?  What is it that Canada’s prison industry so intent on keeping from the public eye?

Why that is has been on turnoverarocktoday’s front burner since the site’s inception in the fall of 2014, and before that with Klassen’s Mailing List and earlier with Klassen’s Korner.  More importantly, so it is too with the Office of the Correctional Investigator, established in 1973 as an ombudsman for prisoners and which has recently published its 49^th Annual Report.

The OCI is government funded, with several investigators and support staff.  Copied from its site:- “In any given year, the Office receives and responds to 5,000-6000 offender complaints….the Office meets regularly with inmate committees and other offender organizations and makes regularly scheduled announced visits at each institution….will meet with any inmate, or group of inmates, upon request….over the course of reporting year 2021-2022, in excess of three hundred meetings with various offender organizations, including inmate committees, lifer groups, black inmate associations, native brotherhoods and sisterhoods.”

The correctional investigator and his staff annually make several recommendations to accompany its annual reports (there were 18 in 2021-2022).  Many are repeated from previous years, and some have been on the list for up to a decade or more.  To the discredit of the Ministry of Public Safety which oversees Correction Service of Canada and, in an earlier incarnation, created the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the ombudsman was made a paper tiger, unable to do more than consult, recommend, and advise.

Why did CSC wait through years of OCI recommendations to agree to establish an office of an assistant commissioner for Indigenous affairs?  And as is the case when it announced last year an intent to do that, the order came from the boss, Minister Mendicino of Public Safety, and not because of OCI multiple requests.  Is there a timeline for getting the office up and running?  Why has turnovrarocktoday published numerous entries about an agreed-on revision between CSC and OCI for prison policy regarding inmate contact with the media when three years have passed since the commissioner of prisons undertook to have it on the books by June of 2020?  That has still to materialize.

Why is it that there are so many complaints from prisoners?  Why so many recommendations from the OCI?  Correctional Service of Canada has a mandate to rehabilitate and safely return inmates to the community, it operates with a considerable number of policy directives to meet those outcomes and has its own self-monitoring process.  What’s more, CSC says it’s doing what is should be doing, admitting to challenges along the way, but messaging that all’s well to the OCI, its political and bureaucratic masters, the public, and of course the offenders in its charge, and the families, supporters and organizations that advocate for their welfare.

Lawsuits are an option when complaints and grievances don’t get results.  (Grievances are a subject for another time.)  Lawyers employed by or under the direction of the Ministry of the Attorney General respond to actions against the government, and given the ministry’s workload, the process is grueling and drawn out.  Actions against the prison system are filed by inmates as individuals or in groups as class actions.  There are millions in costs, settlements and awards every year, all financed by tax dollars.

We submitted an access to information request to the Attorney General a year ago asking for the total amount paid to satisfy court awards and settlements during the latest fiscal year with respect to claims against CSC.   It took time to answer the ministry’s requests for clarification.  The response came in late summer.  Apparently, money is a matter of solicitor client privilege and exempt from disclosure.  We passed on an opportunity to appeal on the grounds that we wanted a single total amount, rather than a breakdown by case.

What was sent instead was thirty-two pages listing current cases involving our prison system.  Many entries involved the same complaint, but the total still numbered in the 100s.

Why wouldn’t we be asking “why”?