SCRA Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CORRECTIONS AND CONDITIONAL RELEASE ACT OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

SOUS-COMITÉ SUR LA LOI SUR LE SYSTÈME CORRECTIONNEL ET LA MISE EN LIBERTÉ SOUS CONDITION DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DE LA JUSTICE ET DES DROITS DE LA PERSONNE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, June 2, 1999

• 1531

[English]

The Chairman (Mr. Paul DeVillers (Simcoe North, Lib.)): I'm going to call this meeting to order of the Sub-Committee on Corrections and Conditional Release Act of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights.

We have with us Mr. Ron Stewart, the correctional investigator. I understand, Mr. Stewart, you have a short opening statement to make, and then we'll go to questioning from the members.

Mr. Ron Stewart (Correctional Investigator, Office of the Correctional Investigator): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

As you are aware, I didn't prepare any opening remarks. I'm sure members are familiar with the mandate of the correctional investigator.

As you can see, I brought some members of my staff here today, and I'd like to introduce them. They are Mr. Ed McIsaac, my executive director; Mr. George Poirier and Mr. Jim Hayes, directors of investigations; Mr. Todd Sloan, our legal counsel; Jo-Ann Connolly, who is our resource person for female corrections; and Mr. Bruno Meilleur, who is our resource person for aboriginal corrections. We're a small office, but we're a team, so we brought the whole group.

I'd like to congratulate the subcommittee on their work to date. I look forward to your report.

We basically support the CCRA and are not advocating any major amendments today, but we remain open to suggestions and recommendations from the committee. I'd like to emphasize that many of the respondents during the public consultations process accurately indicated that the Office of the Correctional Investigator is understaffed and underfunded. We are presently attempting to remedy that problem and hopefully we will be successful.

We would be pleased to respond to any questions from the members of the committee.

The Chairman: Mr. Gouk.

Mr. Jim Gouk (Kootenay—Boundary—Okanagan, Ref.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for coming, Mr. Stewart.

The main thing we're looking at is your perception of how this is working. We've had a lot of interviews with different inmates at different institutes who suggested that what happens is they pose a concern to one of your staff and they go to Corrections Canada officials, who say, here's the answer, and they accept that. That's the way we hear it, of course, from that side.

From your perspective, how well is the system working? How do you respond to these types of allegations? Notwithstanding that you just said you didn't come with any recommendations, are you telling us everything is perfectly fine except for your budget constraints, which we all have, or is there something that could make it work better?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, I was talking about recommendations to amend the act. I think the act is fine; it's probably the way it's exercised that has caused some of the problems.

Towards the end of the fiscal year, because of our problem with understaffing, we do have a tendency not to be able to travel to the institutions as readily as we would like to. What we have to do is improve our ability to get our recommendations attended to.

What we've done is strike a committee—Mr. Sloan is on it as counsel—to come up with a memorandum of understanding of what we do with these intractable problems that can't be resolved. We have a process that's just about completed now.

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We of course welcome the committee's recommendations on that process. I should say that it's not a magic wand. I don't think it's going to solve all of the problems, but it's a step in a direction that we've decided to take with corrections. Hopefully it will be productive; if not, we'll go back to our original proposition of looking to some outside body to determine a resolution of some of the problems that we aren't able to solve.

Mr. Jim Gouk: On the whole idea of basically having an ombudsman, and the complaint... and I don't want you to misunderstand. I'm not siding with the inmates' case. I'm just trying to see how you would respond, how I would respond, to them in a situation where they brought forward a complaint and they asked for an explanation from Corrections Canada and then accepted that explanation. If Corrections Canada were to come and say, “Gee, maybe we goofed up”, then fine, we're on our way to getting something better. But their attitude is that basically they're under the gun with the system and the correctional investigator basically takes the word of Corrections Canada. Notwithstanding that often this might be the correct solution, it also might not be and it might not be what in fact is even happening. But how does one respond to those who would make this accusation?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, as you know, there is an internal grievance procedure and we ask the inmates to take advantage of that, to go through the system and try to have it resolved at the institution, or at the region or at the national headquarters level. Sometimes they get a little over-anxious and they want it dealt with immediately, in which case we drop the grievance direction and take the complaint at source.

Our grievances were down a little bit this past fiscal year, but we're still dealing with 4,500 complaints, which is, for a small staff, a pretty heavy workload. I think the inmates get frustrated when they go to Corrections Canada, but they're welcome to come to us at any time during a complaint problem. We'll deal with it; and depending on the level of the authority on it, we'll either go to the warden or, if it's a transfer matter, we'll go to the region. Other matters can only be decided at national headquarters and we would pursue it up there. Our policy is of course to get back to the inmate with the results of our investigation into their complaint.

Mr. Jim Gouk: How far do you take a complaint if you're not satisfied with the answer from Corrections Canada at the institute level?

If an inmate brings up a problem, you go to the appropriate authorities within that institution. If they give you a response and you're not satisfied with it, you think, wait a minute, that didn't ring quite true or I don't think that's right. What is the next step for you? Is there a next step? Who do you make a recommendation to or what further action do you take?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We would go to the regional director and put the complaint before him. If we're not successful there, we would go to national headquarters. I would personally take it to the Commissioner of Corrections, Mr. Ingstrup. If we're not successful there... As you know, they don't have to accept our recommendations. All we have is the power of persuasion, so to speak. If we're still strongly prepared to take it on, we can go to the minister with a special letter—

Mr. Jim Gouk: It would have to be pretty extenuating—

Mr. Ron Stewart: —and then we can go to Parliament with a special report. So there are ways and means of doing things. It depends on the complaint and the nature of the response we get.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Gouk.

[Translation]

Mr. Marceau, are you ready to ask your questions?

Mr. Richard Marceau (Charlesbourg, BQ): Yes.

The Chairman: He just came in.

Mr. Richard Marceau: You'd be surprised Mr. Chairman, to see what one can do in the nick of time.

Welcome, Mr. Stewart. I thank you for coming to meet us. Excuse me for being late. I had a few things to settle.

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Mr. Stewart, I don't know if my colleague Gouk told you that several people said that your office does not have teeth, does not have the required authority to correctly implement its mandate. Do you agree with them?

[English]

Mr. Ron Stewart: Do you want me to respond to that in French?

The Chairman: Sure.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Sloan will respond to that one

[Translation]

in French.

Mr. Todd Sloan (Legal Counsel, Office of the Correctional Investigator): In some way, we have teeth, but persuasion teeth which, if they are correctly used, enable us to solve problems when the organization we are investigating is receptive to the recommendations we make. For all intents and purposes, the two agencies should therefore be ready to take seriously the role of our organization.

Mr. Richard Marceau: And if they don't?

Mr. Todd Sloan: Mr. Stewart just mentioned different steps where we can make recommendations pursuant to the Act which governs us at the present time. However, for the last three years, we've been recommending in our annual report the establishment of an administrative tribunal which would be able to hold hearings to try and solve the very difficult problems raised by the complex and important matters that arise in the relations between our organization and Corrections.

Mr. Richard Marceau: Are you telling me that if tomorrow morning, you were elected in Charlesbourg—of course, you would have to become a member of the Bloc Québécois, but that is another matter—, you were sitting on this side of the table and you had to do the work this committee has to accomplish, your only recommendation regarding the Office of the Correctional Investigator would be the creation of an administrative tribunal? Would this be the only amendment you would make to the legislation?

Mr. Todd Sloan: The only recommendation we made in our annual report had to do with the establishment of an administrative tribunal. But as the committee probably knows very well, there were all kinds of recommendations on the various ways of settling disputes and of forwarding reports, and on some other remedies for dispute settlements by other organizations. We even heard about the possibility of having a general investigator that would know exactly what that means.

In the correctional environment, contrary to what we find in the other environments with which the other ombudsman agencies in the country have to deal with, there are important matters of interests and rights that we should be able to submit to an organization that would have the authority to decide and to solve the problems the inmates have and on which we are investigating.

Mr. Richard Marceau: Don't you think your office could do that work?

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Mr. Todd Sloan: As an ombudsman, as soon as we become the decision-making agency, we would in some way be part of the system we are investigating. We have the authority to make recommendations. We would be ready to try and get away from that authority in order to be able to ask questions to an arm's length decision-making body, but if we were the person or the agency making the decision, this would go against the principle of the ombudsman as it has existed for a number of years.

Mr. Richard Marceau: Is that recommendation regarding the establishment of a tribunal due to the fact that the recommendations you made for some time have not been acted upon by Corrections? What percentage of your recommendations are being acted upon?

Mr. Todd Sloan: At what level?

Mr. Richard Marceau: Generally speaking. You make investigations. You make recommendations on all kinds of things. What percentage of your recommendations have been roughly implemented by Corrections?

Mr. Todd Sloan: I would say that at the level of the regional institutions, some 50% of our recommendations were accepted, partially or totally. At the national level, I could not give you the exact numbers, but I think that that percentage is a little lower.

Mr. Richard Marceau: Therefore, approximately 50% at the regional level and less than 50% at the national level.

Mr. Todd Sloan: It's only an impression. Maybe our executive director could elaborate on this.

Mr. Richard Marceau: I imagine that if you make the recommendation, you think it makes sense. Is it not frustrating? I think that if I were in your shoes, I would be frustrated to see that I work so much and that only 50% of my recommendations or less are being implemented.

Mr. Todd Sloan: All ombudsman organizations make recommendations, and those recommendations are accepted or not. But there is something that personally frustrates me sometimes. When Corrections do not accept our recommendations, there does not seem to be much interest in trying to solve those matters at the other levels.

Mr. Richard Marceau: I guess that my time is up. With your usual kindness, would you allow me a last question, Mr. Chairman?

Would the administrative tribunal, the establishment of which you are recommending, have the authority to decide and force on Corrections its decision? That's what I understand. Would that decision bind...

Mr. Todd Sloan: That's what we are considering.

Mr. Richard Marceau: Very well. Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Marceau.

[English]

Next is Mr. MacKay, for seven minutes.

Mr. Peter MacKay (Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough, PC): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Of the majority of the complaints you deal with, how many would arise out of transfers or from an individual who is protesting or upset with the fact that they may be transferred from one institution to another? Can you give me an approximate breakdown of that?

Mr. Ed McIsaac (Executive Director, Office of the Correctional Investigator): The complaints in the transfer area have traditionally topped the list. That includes the denial of the transfer, involuntary transfer, or the time it has taken to process a transfer application. It's a major concern. Every inmate within the system at some time is impacted by a transfer, so it's not overly surprising.

Mr. Peter MacKay: When that occurs, can you just walk us through the process of the appeal or the ability the prisoner has to have this re-examined by your office?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: We'll use the example of the denial of a transfer to a lower security or a lateral transfer.

Under the legislation and the regulations, the service is required to provide the inmate with written reasons as to why the transfer is being denied. They can then file an internal grievance on the matter. In the case of a transfer, it would go to the deputy commissioner of the region. If it is denied there or if it is an urgent matter that needs attention perhaps beyond the 30 to 40 days it may take the service to respond, we will review the documentation. If we find there has been an error in the processing, that there has not been adequate provision of information to the inmate, or if we just feel the decision taken was in fact unreasonable, we would then make a direct recommendation to the deputy commissioner of the region for reconsideration of that.

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Mr. Peter MacKay: Would this ultimately go to Mr. Stewart's office? Is this the final say the correctional investigator would have at the end of the day if all avenues of appeal had been exhausted, or does it ultimately go to the Solicitor General himself?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: In the case of the individual transfer decision, if the recommendation from our office was not accepted at the region, the matter would then be referred to national headquarters. Generally, there is an assistant commissioner who liaises with our office, so it would probably end up on my desk. I would review the matter with that individual. If we could not come to an agreement on it, then yes, it would go to Mr. Stewart, and then a recommendation would be made to the commissioner.

Mr. Ron Stewart: If I could just interject, 10% of our total complaints last year were with regard to transfers, either denial of the decision or involuntary transfers. That's 450 of the 4,500.

Mr. Peter MacKay: So 10% stemmed from transfers a prisoner took umbrage with. Of that 10%, what percentage arose out of concerns the prisoner had for their own safety or concerns about a conflict they felt existed within the institution either between themselves or with a guard, a personality conflict?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: There are certainly a number of transfer complaints that come as a result of the inmate wishing to get out of an institution because of protective custody concerns, or they are being involuntarily transferred because the service believes there is a difficulty, and they will approach us with a complaint in that area. So it is not an uncommon occurrence.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Mr. Stewart, I'd like to address a question to you, but I should have begun my remarks by also expressing my appreciation for your attendance.

With regard to the individual complaint mechanism itself and the work that's carried out by your office and your officials, how much information is exchanged between your office and the National Parole Board and members of CSC when it comes to decision-making on matters of parole and parole eligibility? Would they consult you to see if there had been difficulties and if the prisoner had made frivolous requests of your office?

Mr. Ron Stewart: No, Mr. Chairman, they wouldn't necessarily approach us on that. We would approach them.

On the parole decisions, we don't have a mandate to question the decision. But if, for instance, an inmate approached us and said, “They had some misinformation on my file and that's why I didn't get my release”, we'd go back and look at that. If in fact it was incorrect, we would send it over to the chairman of the parole board and say “You may want to consider this.” That might be enough to turn it around, but we can't question the actual decision.

Mr. Peter MacKay: So you wouldn't ever receive a request for information. It would more likely flow from your initial—

Mr. Ron Stewart: The other way, that's right.

Mr. Peter MacKay: This may be a little outside of your actual duties, but with regard to your office and the provision of services to inmates, I would like to ask how you personally would feel toward the suggestion that a similar office should be in place for victims, that is, an office that would do much of what your mandate sets forth with regard to the provision of information, the taking of complaints, and the investigation of complaints for victims as well.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, with regard to our office doing that, right away it would set up a conflict of interest—

Mr. Peter MacKay: Certainly.

Mr. Ron Stewart: —between inmates' repartee with us and the victims, which would be exactly the opposite in most cases. But as far as setting up an ombudsman for victims is concerned, I don't see anything wrong with that. It certainly isn't part of the criminal justice area that we would want to take on or could take on as an ombudsman.

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Mr. Peter MacKay: No, and I realize it is outside of your purview.

Along that line of questioning, do you occasionally interface, and I assume you would, with members of the public, I suppose most commonly family members of inmates serving time in your institutions? On occasion, perhaps through misinformation or misdirection, would you have inquiries from family members of victims who are inquiring about the whereabouts or the behaviour of a person who would be affected by your mandate?

Mr. Ron Stewart: I think in 20 years I've had one or two complaints of that nature.

Mr. Peter MacKay: You would simply point them in the right direction? If I could just get an answer to that last question, Mr. Chair...

The Chairman: I thought we did.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, we would ask them to approach Corrections or Parole; maybe they would give them the information. I certainly, even if I had the information, wouldn't give it to them.

Mr. Peter MacKay: I see. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Chairman: Mr. Myers.

Mr. Lynn Myers (Waterloo—Wellington, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank Mr. Stewart and his colleagues for being here today and testifying. I recall with some interest that Mr. Stewart of course used to play for the Ottawa Rough Riders, and he's a great hall of famer, and I think it's a great honour that he would be in our midst today, and not maybe to answer football questions so much as these other kinds of questions.

Mr. Ron Stewart: I could maybe field them better.

Mr. Lynn Myers: I'm sure you use some of that skill you learned over the years to do the job you're now doing, so I think that's appropriate.

Mr. Ron Stewart: One trait, I think, that you have to have in this job is toughness, and that maybe is a throwback to my former profession.

Mr. Lynn Myers: Mr. Stewart, I wanted to get a little bit of a sense of the kinds of complaints you deal with. More to the point, I wanted to ask you whether or not the Corrections managers at all times cooperate fully with you in a way that's meaningful and lets you get on with your job.

I also wanted, along that same line, to try to understand when it comes to inmates whether or not they're frank and open in all cases, or whether you need to probe and get into areas that perhaps they're not as upfront with in terms of presenting their complaint in the first instance.

Then I also wanted to carry on a little bit that question with respect to victims. I wondered if in fact you ever did get complaints from victims and, if you do, what you do with them. You know, we heard you talk in response to the question of an ombudsman position, but perhaps you could initially answer those three, and then I have a list of others I'd like to pursue as well.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, by and large, cooperation has got better over the years with the managers of Corrections. They have a tough job to do, we appreciate that. We also have a tough job to do. Sometimes it's difficult, and that's why we have this memorandum of understanding, trying to find a solution to these areas where we have differing points of view.

As for inmates being frank and open, I think by and large they are, but somewhere between what the guard on the range tells you and what the inmate tells you is the truth, and you have to find that. They're not 100%... it depends on the nature of the situation. When there are serious complaints there's usually some other evidence to back up an inmate's story, for instance, so again, it depends on the situation. Basically they're fairly frank. Sometimes they, like anybody else, will colour, or only give you the parts that support their side of the argument.

Victims' complaints we seldom get. We get complaints from the families of inmates about how they're being treated, etc. I think over the years I've had two complaints with regard to somebody wanting to know if So-and-so was still in jail, or if they'd been released, or things like that. I just refer them to Corrections or to the parole board. We don't have a mandate to deal with complaints from victims. Our mandate is to deal with complaints from inmates or on behalf of inmates.

Mr. Lynn Myers: You raised the point, and I wanted to ask the question, actually—I'm glad you did—about the families. I think the subcommittee, in its hearings, heard testimony from inmates saying families often are in fact treated with disrespect. I wondered how you dealt with that, if in fact you do at all. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that.

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Mr. Ron Stewart: The families are treated with disrespect in the institutions, do you mean, or by CSC officials, or from our office?

Mr. Lynn Myers: No, no, not from your office.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Okay, I wasn't sure.

Mr. Lynn Myers: No, no, I want to make it very clear, that there's some sense of being treated in a disrespectful fashion. I wondered if, first of all, those complaints came to you, and I thought I heard you say yes, they do. And what do you do, if anything?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Again, as part of the mandate, we can entertain complaints on behalf of an inmate. If it's a wife coming in for a visit and she thinks she's being treated rudely... oftentimes people have to get body-frisked or strip-searched or things like that, and sometimes the family member doesn't know the rules, so you have to explain them to them. Usually when you do that, you can settle it. But as in everyday life, there are people who are in the wrong jobs, they're not people people, and you do get some problems with families, especially when they're trying to visit or trying to deal with a problem their son or their daughter is having.

Corrections don't make a habit of giving out too much information, so that's frustrating for a family trying to find out whether their son has had his proper medication or what not. There are lots of problems in the system. We do get a fair number of family members, spouses and mothers and fathers, writing or calling us with regard to their sons and daughters.

Mr. Lynn Myers: Mr. Chairman, I have just two quick questions. Mr. Grose and I, for example, sit on the public accounts committee with the Auditor General, and when there are recommendations coming out of that, of course there are timeframes in place within which departments have to reply and such, formally, to those recommendations. I was sort of thinking about what you do and whether or not, in terms of the recommendations you make, Correctional Service Canada should also be required, in a formal way, to reply within a set period of time. And perhaps you could carry that even further—should your recommendations be binding on Correctional Service Canada in some form? I wondered if you had any thoughts on that issue.

Mr. Todd Sloan: Mr. Chairman, I'm the person who has been negotiating our memorandum of understanding with the Correctional Service, and one of the principal objectives of that is to clarify the question of time limits of response and to establish clear delays for when responses will take place. There has been agreement quite readily on that, in principle, and I think the memorandum of understanding will address that.

With respect to the issue of our having the authority to, in effect, enforce our recommendations, once again, as I was saying to the other member, to get into that circumstance would be akin to becoming part of the organization we investigate—something that is pretty much anathema to people who subscribe to the ombudsman concept.

Mr. Lynn Myers: I have a final question, Mr. Chairman, if I might.

The Chairman: Briefly.

Mr. Lynn Myers: Very briefly. In this kind of circumstance there often is thinking surrounding the requirement, for example, of binding conflict resolution or a process along those lines. I wonder if you could respond to that, whether or not that might be useful and helpful.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Well, in fact, in our last two reports—at least two—we have suggested some kind of arbitration, that type of solution, and that recommendation hasn't been acted upon or accepted. Anyway, what Corrections did do was come up with the idea of this memorandum of understanding, and we should be signing that document shortly.

Perhaps the next time we're here we can let you know how it's working. We haven't dropped the other idea of the binding arbitration or whatever form it might take, but we're going to take a look at this memorandum of understanding and see if we can make that work. That may solve the problem, but we won't know until we've used it for a while.

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Mr. Lynn Myers: Thanks very much, Mr. Stewart.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Myers.

Mr. Gouk, you have three minutes. You pass? Okay.

Mr. Grose, you have three minutes.

Mr. Ivan Grose (Oshawa, Lib.): So far your pass catching has been good. You haven't even had to exhibit your bobbing and weaving abilities. It's an honour to have you here.

Your budget is part of the correctional system's budget, is it?

Mr. Ron Stewart: No, it's not, sir.

Mr. Ivan Grose: It's a completely separate budget. The reason I ask is that we've interviewed a lot of inmates and some of your correctional investigators, and it seems you have an image problem. The inmates perceive you to be a different branch of the Correctional Service, one that joins the main stem at some far-off place, probably back in Ottawa, and they perceive that you're not really on their side.

I'm wondering if there's any way we could somehow get the message across that you're not in the least bit interested in substantiating the stories of correctional officers. I realize that for inmates, a minor irritation becomes a major problem when you've nothing else to think about. But I think this image thing would... if you could somehow impress on them that you're not part of the Correctional Service. Even I didn't know that you're on a separate budget. They certainly don't know.

Have you any ideas on that, on how you could get your message across? You smile. Have you already tried—

Mr. Ron Stewart: I'll take the ball and hand it over to...

[Editor's Note: Inaudible]

We're not on the inmates' side, you're right, and we're not on Corrections' side. I would like to tell the people we come into contact with that we're on the side of fairness. That's what we try to do every time. There are probably more complaints that come to us that are resolved in favour of CSC, because we can't validate the complaint.

Mr. Ivan Grose: Maybe so.

Mr. Ron Stewart: But the inmates see everybody out there as being against them, whether you're a police officer, juror, judge, correctional investigator, the CSC, or parole people. You know, it's the “everybody's against them” type of thing.

What we have started on, prompted by the Auditor General's visit to our shop, is an information package that we're in the midst of preparing. It will point out some of the thoughts or fallacies they have and perhaps will educate them as to what it is we are doing. We haven't done a good job in that. We didn't have the resources to do it, and so we didn't do it. But it says in the act we should have been doing it all along. We are doing it as well as we can, because every time we go to an institution, we talk to the lifers group, we talk to the aboriginals, we talk to the inmate committee, etc., and we try to get the message through that way. The Auditor General was quick to point out that perhaps we could do a little better, and we're working on that right now.

Ed, do you have something to add?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: I've very little to add, but you're right, we have an image problem. I've never liked the name of the office, the word “correctional” in it. We're not part of the Correctional Service.

As Ron has pointed out, we are done with our information packages. Bell Telephone and CSC have caused us some delay, because we want to include the toll-free 1-800 number where the offenders can get hold of us, and that all keeps falling apart on us.

But you're very right, we need to the get the message out much more than we do. We are taking additional steps to make sure all active inmate groups and committees of the institutions are met by our investigators when they're there.

Mr. Ivan Grose: I'm glad to hear that you're already... Incidentally, you mentioned resources. We're well known for telling you to do something and then not giving you any money to do it, so we understand that too.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Grose.

Mr. MacKay, you have three minutes.

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Mr. Peter MacKay: Mr. Stewart, with respect to disciplinary sanctions or repercussions that you can hand out at the end of the day when you find there has been something done, a prisoner wronged or an individual who has been treated unfairly, what is available? What is at your disposal when it comes to intervention between, for example, a guard and a prisoner? What sort of progressive discipline do you have available to you?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, the members would be familiar with Madam Justice Arbour's report after the problems they had at the Prison for Women. One of the recommendations from that was that there be a look at problems that inmates had to face and that there be a system whereby they could apply to have their sentence shortened if they had been abused or physically harmed, etc. That recommendation has been with justice since Madam Justice's report came out. That was in 1996. We are informed that they will be coming out with a response to that. But that is basically, at the present time, the only thing that would be helpful to an inmate in that regard.

I can write to the commissioner of corrections and tell him what our information is, but whether he would act on that... I think he probably would have an inquiry into it, and then they would have some disciplinary action they might take if in fact they found there were problems of the nature you described.

Mr. Peter MacKay: So in terms of any job action for a CSC official, you might have input into that, but you would have no actual say in the final outcome.

Mr. Ron Stewart: No, we wouldn't.

Mr. Peter MacKay: All right.

This question may already have been asked. With respect to the number of complaints you would receive annually, is there an approximate figure?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, we've just done them for this fiscal year, and we are at 4,529 complaints.

Mr. Peter MacKay: How does that compare with previous years?

Mr. Ron Stewart: It's down from last year's number of—

Ms. Ed McIsaac: It's down about 800 or 900 from last year.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, it's down from about 5,200 or something like that.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Does that correlate with there being a decline in the prison population as a result of a policy that's in place?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Well, it's interesting. When the complaints go up, we look at Corrections and say maybe they're not doing their job, but when they go down, they're quick to let us know that they are doing their job well, and that's why we have fewer complaints.

We don't have a research department or anything like that. I don't know.

Mr. Peter MacKay: That's probably not a fair question.

Mr. Ron Stewart: I don't know what the answer is.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Again, I appreciate your presence. I don't envy you your job, but we're thankful that you're there.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Thank you, sir.

The Chairman: Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel (Scarborough Southwest, Lib.): I have lots of questions and I've three minutes to start.

Thanks for coming, Mr. Stewart.

You mentioned the Arbour report. In the Arbour report there was a task force set up on segregation. This is totally by the by, but, Mr. Sloan, I think you had something to do with that, didn't you?

Mr. Todd Sloan: That's correct, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Tom Wappel: That commission or task force recommended that an experiment take place at at least two institutions using independent adjudicators for administrative segregation procedures, or at least that's what the CBA tells us. You were, I take it, one of the two people who made that recommendation.

Mr. Todd Sloan: May I answer that?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, go ahead.

Mr. Todd Sloan: The task force was composed primarily of Correctional Service personnel since it was a Correctional Service task force. There were two people from the community who were members. One was Professor Michael Jackson and the other was Professor Patricia Monture-Angus, both experts in their particular areas. Then there was me from our organization. The recommendation with respect to a pilot project was a recommendation of the task force as a whole.

• 1615

Mr. Tom Wappel: Was it a unanimous recommendation?

Mr. Todd Sloan: As far as I can recall, it was unanimous. There was a difference of opinion as to the validity of independent review of administrative segregation versus an enhanced internal system of reviewing it. There was unanimity that the system had to be improved. By way of a compromise, this idea of establishing the pilot project was recommended.

Mr. Tom Wappel: That recommendation by way of a compromise was outright rejected by the commissioner, wasn't it?

Mr. Todd Sloan: In essence, that's correct.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Bottom line.

Mr. Todd Sloan: Bottom line.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Professor Jackson told us his views of that. I invite you to tell us your views of that.

Mr. Todd Sloan: The letter Professor Jackson wrote to the commissioner on this issue was in fact my letter as well. We both signed it.

My view is that there is something of a systemic nature about the correctional system, which is not to attribute blame or any sense of malfeasance to anybody, that will sometimes prevent it from making decisions purely on the basis of compliance with legislation or with rights in the face of other competing interests within the organization. Indeed, this was nothing new to the people on the task force. It was almost word for word what Madam Justice Arbour had said. As such, especially in areas involving urgent impact on life interests, such as segregation, it would be advisable to have somebody from the outside, somebody skilled and knowledgeable, to make that kind of decision. So I guess one could say that Professor Jackson and I are Tweedledum and Tweedledee on that issue.

Mr. Tom Wappel: So you obviously would be pleased if this committee were to run with that idea and make some suggestions to the commissioner.

Mr. Todd Sloan: Personally, I would be overjoyed.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Is that my three minutes?

The Chairman: Yes. We'll get back to you.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Mr. Saada.

Mr. Jacques Saada (Brossard—La Prairie, Lib.): I would like to ask two or three quick questions.

First of all, I would like to understand how things work concretely for an inmate who makes a complaint. Mr. Stewart just said that approximately 10% of the complaints that were dealt with by his office were transfer cases and particularly involuntary or mandatory transfers. So somebody is transferred. A date for the transfer is set. The inmate makes a complaint with your office. You did not have time to deal with the complaint before the transfer date arrives. Does the transfer still happen and is the complaint dealt with later on or is the transfer differed until such time as the complaint has been heard?

Mr. Georges Poirier (Director of Investigations, Office of the Correctional Investigator): Mr. Saada, when an inmate is complaining about a transfer, he does not necessarily remain in the institution while his complaint is being dealt with. After receiving his notice of involuntary transfer, the inmate has 48 hours to give a rebuttal of the reasons given by the administration. The administration must take into consideration this rebuttal before making a decision. If the decision to transfer the inmate in another institution is upheld, the inmate is transferred and he can thereafter make a grievance at the second level, that is with the regional deputy commissioner of the Correctional Service of the region he is in. It can then go to the third level if his request has been negated at the second level.

We hear about the complaint. The inmate can contact us and tell us about his complaint. We can meet him at the institution. We review the file and analyze the grounds given for his transfer. Once this is done, we recommend either that his transfer be reconsidered because the grounds given are not valid or reasonable according to our analysis, or that we advise the complainant that the grounds given were justifiable under the legislation or regulations of the correctional service.

• 1620

Mr. Jacques Saada: So, for all intents and purposes, the decision is made and, whether there are appeals or whatever happens next, once the decision has been made, the transfer happens. Therefore, if you want to reverse that transfer decision, you have to go backwards. It's far more complicated.

Mr. Georges Poirier: Yes, and if the complaint is upheld, the inmate goes back to the institution he left or goes to an institution...

Mr. Jacques Saada: Provided his cell is still empty.

Mr. Georges Poirier: Indeed.

[English]

Mr. Jacques Saada: You mentioned, Mr. Stewart, the memorandum of understanding that is being negotiated between you and CSC. If the MOU were to be signed, would that cause you to withdraw the recommendations you have made for the last three years to have an administrative tribunal set up? Could that be a replacement?

Mr. Ron Stewart: It could be, but it won't be unless it works. We haven't dropped our administrative tribunal idea. But this was suggested by Corrections, so we're going to give it a whirl and see if we can resolve those really tough problems.

Mr. Jacques Saada: In other words, if I understand correctly, if signed, this MOU would be a kind of pilot project to test whether or not the recommendation is still going to hold. Am I correct?

Mr. Ron Stewart: But we can always end the MOU. There's a procedure. If either party isn't satisfied with it, we'll just scrap it.

Mr. Jacques Saada: I'm pleased to hear about this possibility, because I think it's more flexible than a tribunal, which is very costly and much more complicated to set up.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Saada.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Already?

The Chairman: We'll get back to you. We are having three minutes rounds.

[English]

Do Mr. Gouk or Mr. MacKay have another question?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Very briefly, just as a follow-up to Mr. Saada's question on jurisdiction, do you receive or have you received or taken complaints from prisoners on parole about a parole officer? Similarly, do you have jurisdiction over federal inmates in provincial facilities?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, we do take complaints from people who are on some kind of release program. It's not a big part of our complaint numbers, but occasionally we do have parolees complain to our office.

I'm sorry, what was the other half of your question?

Mr. Peter MacKay: It was with regard to whether your mandate covers federal inmates who are serving their time in a provincial facility if there's a conflict with a provincial guard.

Mr. Ron Stewart: No. We have problems with that. What I have done in that type of situation is I have gone to the provincial ombudsman and asked them to go in and look at the situation.

The Chairman: There's the situation in B.C. where women are, I think, in a provincial institution. Does your office have any work there?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Is this an anomaly we should be turning our attention to? That's the next question that flows from that.

Ms. Jo-Ann Connolly (Investigator; Coordinator, Federally Sentenced Women's Issues, Office of the Correctional Investigator): With regard to your question, I think it should be made clear that we really don't have jurisdiction—which I think is what you asked—for federal inmates who are serving sentences in provincial institutions. The same would be true for Burnaby in British Columbia.

But the other side of that coin is provincial women who may be serving sentences in federal institutions. We would meet with those inmates, take their complaints, and deal with them accordingly.

Mr. Peter MacKay: So there's a bit of a reciprocal agreement.

Ms. Jo-Ann Connolly: Yes.

Mr. Peter MacKay: You deal with provincial inmates in federal penitentiaries—

Ms. Jo-Ann Connolly: That's correct.

Mr. Peter MacKay: —but you don't deal with your inmates in their penitentiaries.

Ms. Jo-Ann Connolly: That's correct.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Is this something you feel should be expanded in this regard, or is this something that perhaps the legislation should be looking at? Are there sufficient numbers to warrant some sort of legislative change?

• 1625

Mr. Ed McIsaac: It's probably more directed towards the mandate of our office as opposed to the mandate of the provincial ombudsman. If a federal inmate is serving time in a provincial institution and they have a complaint, it is a complaint against a provincial employee. We have no jurisdiction in that matter. As Mr. Stewart indicated, we have a healthy working relationship with all the provincial ombudsmen in those provinces that have them. We refer cases to them. We get together on a fairly regular basis. As well, if a provincial inmate who happens to be housed in a federal institution writes to them, the same would apply. They would contact us and we would go and visit that individual. Confusing, yes.

Mr. Peter MacKay: No, I think that's fairly clear.

For those numbers you've referred to, do we have that documentation? Is that something we could receive from your office?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Which?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Documentation with the breakdown of the types of complaints and the figures on it. Could we receive that as a committee?

Mr. Ron Stewart: It'll be in the report I'll be giving to the minister this month. He'll table it in the House and then it'll be available.

Mr. Peter MacKay: I see. Terrific.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: The figures are contained in our annual report. So if you get hold of last year's report, you'll be able to see that the areas of complaint have not altered. The numbers have dropped a bit, but we're still dealing with the same core set of complaint areas.

Mr. Peter MacKay: All right.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. MacKay, would you like a copy of last year's annual report?

Mr. Peter MacKay: I would appreciate that very much.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Then the other one will be available when it's tabled in the House.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. MacKay.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

Mr. Stewart, I'm going to jump around but I'll try to be clear. Section 19 of the act says that where an inmate dies or suffers serious bodily injury, the service must investigate itself and then provide you with a report. Section 170 says that you may investigate certain things, but you are not mandated to investigate the death or serious bodily harm, or required—perhaps a better word—to investigate the serious bodily harm or death of an inmate.

Do you do that? Do you investigate the death or serious bodily harm of inmates?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We have in the past. But there's usually a CSC investigation. There's a coroner's investigation. The police usually come in, depending on the circumstances around the death. So it depends.

Mr. Tom Wappel: It depends on what? What are your criteria for deciding whether to investigate?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We get copies of those reports. But as you said, with section 19 we get them automatically.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Yes.

Mr. Ron Stewart: We review every one of them, and if we have some questions with them we'll contact national headquarters and ask them about it, asking about recommendations, etc.

Mr. Tom Wappel: But do you have any procedures in place that you would use to determine whether or not you yourself would investigate the death or serious bodily harm of an inmate?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Certainly if we got a complaint, say from the parent or from the cellmate or somebody on the range, that somebody had died under unnatural circumstances, yes, we'd go down and investigate that. We don't have a set of criteria, again depending on the situation.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Would you happen to know how many times you've done that, investigated the death or serious bodily harm of an inmate, independently?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Do you have any idea?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: Are you looking at me?

Mr. Tom Wappel: Just looking for an answer.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: No, I do not.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Very few.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: That's good enough.

Mr. Tom Wappel: It's an answer. the Barreau du Québec was one of the few... In all of the hearings I investigated, very few people mentioned the correctional investigator, and I found this interesting even though it's a fairly hefty piece of the legislation. But the Barreau du Québec made a few comments, and I was interested because I see you said you had 4,529 complaints, down between 800 or 900 from last year. And yet the Barreau du Québec alleges that in practice you cannot meet your demand. What is your comment to that?

Mr. Ron Stewart: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. My demand for what?

Mr. Tom Wappel: For service. You're getting more complaints than you can deal with, based on your current staffing and your current money. That's what they say. I'm just asking if you disagree.

• 1630

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, I agree with them that we're underfunded. As I said earlier, towards the end of the year our budget dollars are pretty well depleted and we have trouble—

Mr. Tom Wappel: What are your budget dollars?

Mr. Ron Stewart: The budget for my office is $1.5 million, $1.568 million, I think.

Mr. Tom Wappel: And have you asked for more?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We're going through a process right now where we're—

Mr. Tom Wappel: What do you think it would take to be able to respond in a timely fashion to 4,529 complaints?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, depending on how many people you wanted to hire, we could do with some more investigators. But as soon as you hire one, there's his salary and his benefits. He has to have an office, a computer. So we'd be looking at, what, $400,000?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: At $400,000—

Mr. Tom Wappel: More. So roughly around $2 million?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: Yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Which is peanuts in comparison to the justice budget of this country, isn't it?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: I would say yes.

Mr. Ron Stewart: I think so.

Mr. Tom Wappel: It's a snowflake in a snowstorm.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes. You go to Treasury Board and, if you need $12 million, they'll look at it. When you say you need $300,000 or $400,000, they go “Huh?”

Mr. Tom Wappel: Go in and ask for $12 million and settle for $400,000.

What is your staffing?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We have 18 on staff.

Mr. Tom Wappel: For the entire country.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: And for 4,529 complaints.

Mr. Ron Stewart: That's right.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Not enough. And how about support staff, or is that all—

Mr. Ron Stewart: That's inclusive.

Mr. Tom Wappel: That's all in. How many investigators do you have, or whatever you call them?

Mr. Ron Stewart: We have eight.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Eight. For 4,529 complaints.

Mr. Ron Stewart: So everybody has a pretty heavy caseload.

Mr. Tom Wappel: I would say so. My goodness.

Okay. How am I doing?

The Chairman: You're doing overtime right now.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Shall I stop and come back?

Mr. Peter MacKay: I'd like to donate my time.

The Chairman: Then go ahead, Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

On of the things that the Barreau du Québec said was—and this was possibly in translation—that you lack command. I guess what he meant was that you lack power, i.e., your ideas or your recommendations are just that, recommendations, and they would like to see you have, as they put it, more teeth. What do you say to that?

Mr. Ron Stewart: I would go back to the ombudsman's concept, which is not being a decision-maker. If we had the power to make the decision, in other words, if Corrections rejected something and we came along and said, “No, we're going to change this”, then we would become another level of bureaucracy. Who's going to check our decision? Maybe our decision isn't very good.

So you don't want get into that, where you're part of the process, part of the decision-making. I think you have to be a third party. And again, every true ombudsman doesn't have decision-making powers at all. They just have the power of persuasion, if there is such a thing.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Okay. And that leads me right into some of the inmate complaints, which were that you have no teeth to enforce your recommendations. So I guess that's true, you don't other than the power of persuasion.

Mr. Ron Stewart: We tell them this, that we can't. If an inmate says “It's obvious that here's a problem, why can't you change it?”, it's because we don't have the power to make decisions.

Mr. Tom Wappel: And you don't want it; otherwise, it would change the nature of the office, in your opinion.

Mr. Ron Stewart: That's correct, and that's why there's a section in the act that says, on top of this, that the CSC doesn't have to accept our recommendations.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Who cares about that?

Mr. Ron Stewart: No.

Mr. Tom Wappel: We can recommend that we change this. Maybe it could even happen, but if you don't want it, if you as correctional investigator don't want that change... That's what we're asking for. We're here to review the act—

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: —and determine whether or not we should make certain recommendations to the minister. And one of those recommendations might very well be that your recommendations should be binding unless the commissioner specifically states in writing why it shouldn't and the minister overrules your recommendation—I'm just throwing out an idea—in favour of the commissioner's response. That's something we could recommend. I'm not saying it would ever pass, but if—speaking of passing—you don't want to catch the ball, then what's the point of making the recommendations? Everybody else is using football analogies, so forgive me, I thought I'd throw one in there too.

Mr. Ron Stewart: I think my counsel would like to comment on something you said.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Please.

Mr. Todd Sloan: I'm not speaking as counsel but just in terms of this whole issue. We've mentioned the possibility of some type of independent adjudicative mechanism, and that itself is a bit of a departure from the ombuds system, but at least it wouldn't place us in the circumstance of being the decision-maker. It would allow for somebody we could refer it to.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Okay.

• 1635

But there's another thing we haven't mentioned, and I don't know quite how proper it is to raise it, but in other ombuds organizations, provincially for the most part, there are mechanisms—and I'm not talking about reporting relationships—in place where there are specific subcommittees of the legislatures that concentrate or specialize in ombudsmen issues—and there are, as you know, four federal ombudsmen. There's a sense, which varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that although the legislators are to a greater or lesser extent able to review what the ombudsmen present to them and to themselves provide some consideration to it... So in terms of authority, to a certain extent our authority might be “enhanced” if this committee had some time to look at some of the specific issues that we bring and to study them.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Mr. Sloan, this subcommittee is going to die once it gives its report, but the justice committee is always there.

Mr. Todd Sloan: I'm sorry. That's what I meant.

Mr. Tom Wappel: This brings us right into what Mr. John Conroy was talking about when we met with him in British Columbia. He said it was his view, and I think it has been echoed by others, that the correctional investigator should report to Parliament. That's one of the major things we heard about the correctional investigator. I think you report to the minister now, or is it the commissioner?

Mr. Ron Stewart: No, we report to the minister, who's obliged to table in the both Houses of Parliament within a certain time period.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Right.

If the correctional investigator were obliged to report to Parliament, as let's say, the Auditor General is obliged to report to Parliament as opposed to a specific minister who then has to do certain things, the feeling of Mr. Conroy and others was that, along the lines of what Mr. Sloan was just saying, a committee of Parliament could then be seized of the issue. As Mr. Myers was mentioning, the public accounts committee is seized of the Auditor General's reports, the justice committee could be seized of the reports of the correctional investigator, for example. I think we're seized to some degree with the privacy commissioner's report and with the information commissioner's report.

So the same thing could occur with respect to your reports, and if you think it's a good idea and you'd like to put it on the record that you think it's a good idea, we could consider including it as part of our report to the minister, that you should report directly to Parliament. What do you say to that?

Mr. Ron Stewart: That proposition has been raised several times over the years in annual reports to ministers, to previous Solicitors General, and to this committee, I believe, and there never seemed to be the political will to proceed with that.

Mr. Tom Wappel: That's another issue. Would you like us to recommend that you report directly to Parliament? That's my question.

Mr. Ron Stewart: It certainly could solve a lot of problems.

Mr. Tom Wappel: I guess that's yes.

Mr. Ron Stewart: That's yes.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Okay. Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Wappel. If you want to catch your breath for a minute...

Mr. Tom Wappel: Okay, I'll get a coffee.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Mr. Saada, do you have other questions?

Mr. Jacques Saada: Only two or three.

[English]

I'm going to make a number of affirmations, and please correct me if I'm wrong. At the beginning of your intervention, Mr. Stewart, you mentioned that as far as you're concerned, there are no fundamental problems with the CCRA as it stands now. Did I understand you correctly?

Mr. Ron Stewart: I believe what I said was that we weren't prepared today to make any recommendations for amendments to the act.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Okay. Would I be right to understand, therefore, that there is nothing really flagrant, nothing that is fundamentally flawed in the act as you see it today?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Basically, yes.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Okay. But then you still have some 4,500 complaints coming along.

What I'm trying to drive at is this: Is it possible that some of the complaints you have would reveal a pattern of flaws in the policies or even the application of the act? In other words, instead of being individual complaints, being one and one and one and one, in fact you might have 50 or 100 or 1,000 of these complaints leading to the same flaw in policy. Is that possible? Are they 4,500 different complaints for each individual, which happen to be in the same domain but different complaints, or could it be that out of the 4,500 and some complaints you have, you can establish a pattern of flaws within the policies or the regulations within the institutions, generally speaking, that are in fact creating situations for this complaint to arise?

• 1640

Mr. Ron Stewart: I would think, rather than there being flaws in the policy, the policy is sometimes quite a good policy; it's just that it's not followed. It's one thing to tell your staff to do A; they do B and that causes the problem. It's not a problem with the policy. It's a problem with either the interpretation or the disregard for the policy.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Okay.

I have no hidden agenda whatsoever, because I don't know the situation as it pertains to what you're dealing with in the field. So excuse my question, but is there any geographic concentration of complaints? In other words, do you receive more complaints from one region of the country than from others, do you receive more complaints from one sector of institutions than from another, or is it pretty spread out, without any pattern?

Mr. Ron Stewart: As you know, the country is divided up into five regions for the sake of Corrections. So obviously the two biggest ones, Quebec and Ontario, have more inmates and we get more complaints.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Is it in relatively direct proportion?

Mr. Ron Stewart: I think it would be fair to say that we have a few more complaints in Quebec per capita than—

Mr. Ed McIsaac: It depends on the year, maybe the way the wind is blowing.

Mr. Ron Stewart: It's not—

Mr. Ed McIsaac: It's not overly disproportionate, and it is relatively consistent across. The regional number of complaints is directly tied to the number of inmates in the regions.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Thank you.

Do I have time for one more quick question?

The Chairman: Ask one more.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chairman, let me add something to that, and that is the plight of our aboriginals.

I think on Monday the minister made reference to it in his opening remarks, where the representation of aboriginal inmates in federal institutions was six times more than non-aboriginals. So from that point of view, I think the aboriginal community suffers.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Yes, I understand, Mr. Stewart.

If I understood properly from your statement of a moment ago on this, you mentioned—or maybe you did not—that the number of complaints is roughly more or less proportionate to the number of inmates.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, and you did say geographically. But I did want to make that point.

Mr. Jacques Saada: I understand.

Mr. Ron Stewart: It's a little special case. In the number of complaints, say, in the prairie region, if you look at who is making the complaints, there would be more aboriginal complaints perhaps than—

Mr. Jacques Saada: Fair enough. I understand.

For some quick information here, how long on average does it take you to process a complaint?

Mr. Ron Stewart: It depends on the complaint.

Mr. Jacques Saada: On average.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Most of our solution work is done within the institutions. We get phone calls and letters from inmates who have a complaint and want to be seen. So we go to Kingston Penitentiary and we have 20 inmates to see.

We may be able to solve a lot of those complaints right on the spot just because of the nature of the complaint. So some of them we can solve that same day. Others get drawn out because they're much more complicated and more people are involved with them. They might take months. So there is no time period, really.

Mr. Jacques Saada: When it takes some time for you to assess a complaint, would you say, as in the cases we were talking about in terms of transfers, that the inmate is placed almost systematically in the position of de facto decision and whatever time you take makes it more difficult for the administration to reverse its decision?

Mr. Ron Stewart: The facts are still the same. We take the complaint to Corrections, and if they happen to take more time than we think is necessary, we correspond with them again and say “By the way, we wrote to you last month and we haven't heard anything” and try to hurry them up that way.

• 1645

Mr. Jacques Saada: In all fairness, I'm trying to follow up on my colleague's question in terms of resources and so on. If you had more resources, more people to work on the cases and, as a consequence of that, less time to finalize your work on each complaint, what concrete impact would that have on the inmate?

Mr. Jim Hayes (Director of Investigations, Office of the Correctional Investigator): The way we have the country divided up with respect to our investigative staff, the investigators usually work alone in the institutions. We're trying to do some team investigations, but of course that depletes our staff very quickly. The basic approach we have is to deal with the individual complaint, and if one is in a particular area of the country long enough to get to know the systemic issues within that particular part of the country, we bring it to the attention of the senior staff with Correctional Service Canada.

As one of the directors of an investigation, I can safely say I beat up on the investigative staff and I have done it for years. They are an extremely dedicated group of people who work basically alone in a very difficult area. Going into an institution, sometimes the staff are very responsive to us. Other times they don't like to see us coming because we probably will not them bring them very good news.

Sometimes, as Mr. Stewart has alluded, the inmates are not terribly happy with us and say “What good are you guys? You're not doing anything for us.” Once we get through explaining our mandate, they say “What the hell's the point of talking to you?” We certainly try to make efforts on their behalf, but usually the horse is out of the barn by the time we get to make the recommendation.

With additional resources, we could certainly take on far more with respect to doing more and critical in-depth investigations. We could, as the legislation allows, do more on our own initiative. Correctional investigators, as part of their mandate, can review matters on their own initiative, but we just don't have the staff to pull it off. Consequently, we are very often fingers in the dike. The travel alone, running across the country, as the investigative staff would certainly tell you, is certainly exhausting, to say the very least.

I don't paint a very good picture with respect to the investigative process from that perspective. I certainly appreciate the staff we have. Why they stay with us so long is far beyond me. I encourage them to become plumbers or electricians.

Mr. Jacques Saada: It's because they like you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the whole report.

The Chairman: Mr. Sloan, do you have another comment?

Mr. Todd Sloan: Just one small comment. Since I am partly an investigator, I just want to make sure we can all get a copy of the transcript with Mr. Hayes' remark about how hard he leans on us.

The Chairman: That's right. It will be available.

Merci, Monsieur Saada.

On this side, are there any questions before we release the Rottweiler again?

Mr. Peter MacKay: With respect to investigations that would involve allegations of violence, drug use or other criminal activity within an institution, how often and how well do you interface with outside agencies like the RCMP or municipal police?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Not that often. Ed, help me.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: We have a couple of problems here. In those instances, the primary responsibility and accountability for the investigation falls with either Correctional Service or, if there been a crime, obviously the police. We are not getting complaints from inmates, as you can well imagine, on their activities—

Mr. Peter MacKay: Someone stole my drugs.

Mr. Ed McIsaac: Exactly. We receive all the investigations that are done pursuant to section 19, death and serious bodily injury. We follow up on those, as was indicated earlier, if we find there are gaps or problems or if no follow-up was undertaken by the service. There is no contact with outside agencies that are conducting investigations.

Mr. Peter MacKay: So there isn't a great deal of contact?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: No.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. MacKay.

Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Mr. Chairman, I'm surprised. When you said Rottweiler, I thought you were going to go to Mr. Grose.

The Chairman: No.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Mr. Stewart, under section 170, you can commence an investigation if you receive a complaint. We heard that apparently you require the complaints to be in writing. Is that true?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: No.

• 1650

Mr. Tom Wappel: Good. That ends that.

We received a very detailed recommendation, which I'm not going to read, from the Canadian Criminal Justice Association. They have given us a very comprehensive... what they call special procedure for certain cases that merit specific consideration, in the view of the investigator. Are you aware of this special procedure they've put to us? If you are, do you have any comments about whether you like it or not?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Ed, are you still a member of the CCJA?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: Yes, I am. I'm not going to be able to duck out here.

I am aware of the proposal that was put forth. It has a lot of merit. I know they were attempting to respond to those issues that have been repeated year after year in the annual report, where there appears no resolution had been taken. In part, I think it is consistent with this office's recommendation concerning an administrative tribunal, where we could refer a matter we had not been able to come to resolution on for a binding decision.

Mr. Tom Wappel: That's more along the John Howard Society's recommendation. It's sort of an arbitration mechanism. That's one thing, but this is a very comprehensive thing. Their opinion is that it would be designed to give a little more weight—remember when we were talking about recommendations and the power of persuasion—to the recommendation made by the CI, by requiring the CI, the commissioner and the minister to report on their actions within a reasonable time.

I wonder if it would be possible to provide you with a copy of that. That's near the end of our considerations; who knows when we'll get to it? If you could give us an idea whether you, as the correctional investigator, like the idea or have any suggested changes or anything like that, we could at least take your views into consideration when we're considering this issue, which is very near the end, assuming we continue page by page. But at least we'd have your views on it. It's too specific to go into now, but perhaps you could take a few minutes to look at it.

Could you do that for us?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Yes, if the clerk can send us a copy of that, we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

The Chairman: We'll certainly arrange that.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Wonderful.

Thank you so much, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Mr. Grose.

Mr. Ivan Grose: What are the job qualifications for a corrections investigator?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Good common sense.

Mr. Ivan Grose: That's a good start. That will get you almost any job.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Most of the investigators are university trained and tend to be from the law or criminology side, but not all. There isn't a strict job description. We bring people in and have a look at them—how they'd work in a prison setting. Not everyone wants to travel a lot of the time and sit in a cell with a violent offender. They may have all of the academic qualifications, but they need other ones as well.

We deal with people one on one. We usually hire on a contract basis for just six months, so we can assess what kind of stuff they have. After that we either take them on full-time or say “I don't think you're going to fit into our job area here.”

Mr. Ivan Grose: I realize how difficult it is; that's why I asked the question. It's virtually impossible for anyone on the outside to know just how difficult it can be. It's bad enough to travel, but then, as you say, to possibly sit in a cell... It's not a happy job.

Mr. Ron Stewart: For some reason, we have attracted a number of female applicants over the last few years. It used to be basically a male position, but now we have as many women in the office as men. Perhaps Mrs. Connolly could let you know what attracted her to the job.

• 1655

Ms. Jo-Ann Connolly: That seems to be lost in the midst of antiquity, and I've only been with the office for about a year and a half.

I could certainly elucidate with regard to the challenges of the job. As an investigator I work long hours. I'm often in institutions from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., sometimes for two and a half weeks in a row, just to take the complaints and deal with what we can on the spot. Then there's all the work we have to do when we come back with regard to reviewing the issues, reviewing CSC reports, and making recommendations. I think a sense of humour is absolutely essential because of the nature of the work we do, together with a strong knowledge of law and policy and the ability to work well with CSC management and front-line staff, whom we deal with on a daily basis when we're in institutions.

What exactly attracts us to this office? I'm not quite sure, but the people who work there, my colleagues, certainly are dedicated.

Mr. Ivan Grose: Thank you. You've discouraged me. I'm always looking for another job in case I lose this one.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Grose.

Mr. Stewart, in answer to Mr. Wappel's question about your office reporting directly to Parliament, you indicated that would solve a lot of problems. What specific problems would you be referring to there?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Mr. Chair, I always refer to the Solicitor General of the day as the old woman who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do. Here you have CSC, CSIS, parole, the Mounties, correctional investigators, external review, all these agencies, and there's the minister. Now, usually CSC and the correctional investigator are on either side of the table on something, and to leave it up to the minister to have to adjudicate between Corrections' version of something and my version of something in an annual report really puts them on the spot, whereas if you reported directly to Parliament, you would bypass that. I think that would relieve problems with regard to the minister.

The Chairman: Okay.

Do your comments have to do with that point?

Mr. Jacques Saada: Yes, on that point.

The Chairman: I have a couple of other questions.

Mr. Jacques Saada: I'm sorry. When the Auditor General reports, he reports on a variety of departments and governmental organizations. You report on issues pertaining to only one department.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Right.

Mr. Jacques Saada: So whether you report to Parliament or to the minister, isn't the minister going to have to do the same work on that at the end of the day?

Mr. Ron Stewart: If we were completely independent he wouldn't be dealing with us. We'd be in a separate area, and he would be dealing with Corrections. I don't think he would get as involved as he is now. I give him my annual report. He looks at it and says to Corrections, “What do you say about this? We have a difference of opinion.” So I think it would just take him or her off the hook, whomever it might be.

Mr. Jacques Saada: On the examples Mr. Wappel gave, maybe I'm wrong, but I think they were always affecting more than one department, so therefore more than one minister, and you had to split the thing among various organizations. I respect what you said and I understand what you're saying, but I'm not really sure I'm convinced that at the end of the day it's going to be a simpler process.

Mr. Todd Sloan: We have a lot of liaison with other ombudsman organizations. In fact, I personally and other members of our staff have worked for provincial organizations, and we realize that they're generalists.

That being said, I think the important aspect of the reporting relationship they have—and, more to the point, the response of the legislative committees—is the impact, the timeliness, and the directness of that relationship, as opposed to the breadth of the subject matter. If you're investigating more than one department, I suppose that has some type of bearing on it. But the beauty and the impact of that system that exists in other jurisdictions is the directness, the perceived attention the legislature gives to the ombudsman organization.

• 1700

Mr. Jim Hayes: If I could comment as well, Mr. Chair, I'd like to go back to the original comment that was made with regard to our being not very good at announcing ourselves and that the inmates believe we work somehow for Correctional Service Canada. I think by reporting directly to Parliament we could strongly suggest that we don't work for a minister but for Parliament, and we make a report to them. People perceive us as having the same boss, so therefore we must “be in bed together”. So perception can very often become reality. I think perhaps that might assist you in your deliberations on that matter.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Stewart, this administrative tribunal, arbitration board, or whatever is being proposed, what would this creature look like? Have you given that any thought?

Mr. Ron Stewart: Do you mean in our original submission after the Arbour report?

The Chairman: No, not on the administration. In your recommendations with regard to CSC, I understood you were recommending that there be an administrative tribunal.

Mr. Ron Stewart: We were recommending that, and Corrections came back and said why don't we do a memorandum of understanding, and that's where we're at now.

The Chairman: But I understood that you haven't necessarily abandoned that recommendation.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Not necessarily. We hadn't proceeded with it when they intervened with this. We're going to see if this works.

The Chairman: But have you got to the planning stage of what this creature would look like?

Mr. Todd Sloan: Mr. Stewart asked me if it came up in the context of the MOU. No. The MOU is an effort to deal with things bilaterally with the organizations.

But I did consider some of the permutations in drafting things with regard to the administrative tribunal way back when, at the time of Mr. Stewart's recommendations. Essentially, it would be a tribunal along the lines of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In fact, there may be existing infrastructures out there that would allow us to make use of some of the administrative resources of these tribunals without adding a great deal to their workload—

Mr. Ron Stewart: Or our budget.

Mr. Todd Sloan: —or our budget. The idea would be that you would have persons from the community with knowledge of corrections who would sit and hear arguments from both parties and come to a conclusion.

There are facilities at all institutions for parole board hearings, for example. There are all kinds of precedents in terms of how people can be applied to that, and that would be available as well. But essentially it would be a small tribunal with great discretion in terms of procedure and the issue they could concentrate on, and with a mandate to try to arrive at as timely a conclusion as possible and, for the most part, to have the effect of motivating the two parties to effect settlements. The portative aspect of the tribunal would be very important.

The Chairman: Thank you.

With regard to the community advisory committees, do they have dealings with your office? Can they come and ask for comments on inmates and on their complaints and those investigations?

Mr. Ed McIsaac: Yes, we have contact with a number of members of citizen advisory committees. We are not in a position to share with them information on individual inmates. The inmates' communications with our office are of a confidential nature, and we are governed by all the federal laws that cover the disclosure of that information.

We will often be approached by citizen advisory committee members on systemic issues. We have recommended at many institutions that the citizen advisory committee meet with the administration and the inmate committee and attempt to address some of those matters. We are consulted at times or the committee member will bring a specific complaint from an individual to our attention, and then we will follow up on that.

The Chairman: Fine. Thank you.

Mr. Wappel, did you have another question?

• 1705

Mr. Tom Wappel: I was just interested in... how will I phrase this? Without any specifics, it would seem to me that in terms of your investigators and things like that, sometimes it might be helpful if you had, let's say, a former inmate or a former corrections guard working for you. Do you have those people or have you had those people, or would you consider that? They would have been on the inside in one capacity or another and have a unique perspective that perhaps I, let's say, wouldn't if you hired me.

Mr. Ivan Grose: Are you trying to help me in my job search?

Mr. Ron Stewart: As far as a former inmate is concerned, I think we would have problems with Correctional Service getting security clearance to get in.

Mr. Tom Wappel: But once he's done his time...

Mr. Ron Stewart: Well, we both know there is still some—

Mr. Tom Wappel: What about a former guard?

Mr. Ron Stewart: A former guard? We used to have an ex-police officer working for us, but there's something about the demeanour of police officers, and I think once inside, as they say, the inmates can smell them. I don't think it does you a whole lot of good to have a police officer whom they don't respect working for an office like ours. I think it would be a detriment.

Jim, you had a comment.

Mr. Jim Hayes: Presently we have a former guard who is working in the Atlantic institution and has recently been seconded to our office. Mr. McIsaac started in the field and so did I. I was at Collins Bay many years ago, as was Ed, and I went to Millhaven and he graduated to Ottawa and I eventually graduated. So I think we have institution experience. Mr. Poirier was in the parole business 15 years ago or thereabouts.

So what we try to do when we hire staff is have a healthy mix of youth and experience, somebody who has some good common sense, as Mr. Stewart said, and is able to apply that in very difficult circumstances and so on, and once in a while we'll have a football player in.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

The Chairman: Are there any final questions from the members?

Thank you very much, Mr. Stewart.

[Translation]

We thank all your staff for being with us today to answer our questions.

[English]

I think it was a blessing in a way that we didn't have to carry on Monday night. I think we had a much better session starting fresh today. So I think that worked out rather well, and I thank you for your time.

Mr. Ron Stewart: Thank you very much.

The Chairman: Before we adjourn, Mr. MacKay, did you have an issue you wanted to raise?

Mr. Peter MacKay: I did. Unfortunately I wasn't able to be here at the earlier meeting yesterday. I had a House leaders' meeting scheduled at the same time. I wondered if the motion I had put to the subcommittee had been dealt with yesterday in my absence.

The Chairman: No, it was not. In your absence, it wasn't dealt with. Do you wish to deal with that now?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Well, I'm at your discretion, Mr. Chair. We could deal with it at the next meeting.

The Chairman: Maybe then we could excuse our witnesses and deal with that at this time.

• 1708

• 1711

The Chairman: For the information of the committee, Mr. MacKay has sent us a notice of motion requesting that the standing committee call Mr. Brendan Reynolds, an official of CSC, to appear before the committee to answer questions regarding the Canadian penal system.

Now, I've given a chair's ruling to Mr. MacKay that the subcommittee did hear from Mr. Reynolds when we were in Kingston Penitentiary, and we did have a lengthy session with the commissioner. The commissioner is subject to recall, so that in those circumstances I didn't think it was required, but Mr. MacKay wanted to bring the motion to the committee.

So go ahead, Mr. MacKay.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chair.

Much of the reason for calling or hearing from Mr. Reynolds—and I'm particularly glad to see that Mr. Wappel is here—is that there is a document we now have in our possession that was filed by Mr. Newark, and I think some of us were aware of it even prior to that. I have questions for Mr. Reynolds, and I think other members of this committee might as well, that seem to contradict some of what we heard, from Mr. Ingstrup in particular.

Now, I know the committee heard from Mr. Reynolds, I believe when you were at Kingston Penitentiary. But I suspect—and I'm subject to correction on this—that this particular issue was not raised with him at that time, or certainly wouldn't have been canvassed in any detail. From that memo I see some very, very troubling remarks made by a person in his position, particularly with respect to ramifications for wardens if certain agenda... well, “quotas” is not a word that anybody wants to use, but if certain targets, certain reintegration numbers aren't achieved. I personally would like to see Mr. Reynolds come before the committee and answer some questions about that.

As well, I just feel it's incumbent upon us now that we've opened this particular issue up, and you're right, Mr. Ingstrup appeared on two occasions now to answer questions on this, but Mr. Reynolds I think has more information that we should, at the very least, explore and give him the opportunity to clarify.

The Chairman: We had the Rottweiler with us in Kingston. Mr. Wappel.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Mr. Chairman, I understand the spirit of Mr. MacKay's motion. I'm opposed to it. I'm opposed to it for this reason. This memorandum was faxed to me at the hotel in Vancouver. It was very disturbing to me when I read it, and ever since that time I have asked each and every regional commissioner whether or not there were quotas; my colleagues who were there know this. I very specifically asked, having read and having been infuriated by the memo from Mr. Reynolds.

So I asked the B.C. commissioner in... wherever we were—Ferndale, I think it was. I asked in Edmonton when we were doing the regional. I asked specifically at Kent Institution, as I recall it. I wasn't in the Atlantic. And I definitely asked Mr. Reynolds in Kingston Pen. He definitely responded, he responded with exactly the same—if I could put it this way—pat line with which the commissioner responded. But he responded. He denied flatly that there was a 50-50. So we've canvassed the issue.

• 1715

I think the net result is that there was a lot of... Frankly, I honestly believe there was a quota discussed. I believe it was discussed by the commissioner. He got caught. He realized there was a mistake, he used sloppy language. Both the previous and the current Solicitor General slapped him down in the House of Commons, saying there was no such thing, and now they're looking for face-saving.

So I don't see that we need to call Mr. Reynolds. This is my opinion, of course. We don't need to call Mr. Reynolds back. But I do say this. If the committee feels that we need, in consensus, to call Mr. Ingstrup back, then I would suggest that when Mr. Ingstrup comes, we ask him to bring Mr. Reynolds with him. But I don't feel that we need to call Mr. Reynolds specifically, and I feel the issue was sufficiently canvassed with Mr. Ingstrup that I have a good inkling that there was, but there is no longer, simply because of the inquiries—

The Chairman: There are only so many ways of saying no.

Mr. Saada.

Mr. Jacques Saada: I would like to say seriously something that to me is troubling. I would tend to concur with Mr. Wappel's analysis of what happened, and it's more a matter of interpretion than anything else. But if you look at the facts by the end of the day, everybody who was in charge has denied any such thing as either quotas or intent to have quotas.

My concern is the following, and I'm saying that with all due respect, because Peter and I have fought over this thing a number of times. I would be afraid if this thing were to pick up some momentum in the media, this questioning, this doubt about the quota, it would spread undue fear in the population. I just don't see the merit of it.

If there was any doubt as to the potential of quotas, let's go all the way. I have stated time and again in this committee and in the justice committee that I am deadly opposed to any concept of quotas. But by insisting on that, and basing ourselves on interpretations that we know have been corrected by anybody who is in charge of something in this respect, I think the backlash and the price to pay would be to maybe spread some fear among the population that is not founded.

The reason—I'm saying that very openly here—I would really refrain from having any attempt at pursuing the matter any further is that I am satisfied at this time that all people who had something to do with that, in terms of decision-making powers, have done what it took to make sure to alleviate the perceptions.

The Chairman: Is there any further discussion?

Mr. Peter MacKay: I'd like to respond to that, and I say this with all respect too. What you have just said is fine, I acknowledge that. I think there is a danger in fear-mongering. But you've just had another member of this committee, a respected member who has a lot of experience in this area, say something that I think rings very true, and that I've said before, and that is that there was something going on here and some people got caught.

So to say this has never happened, to completely deny that this was in place—I'm sorry, just saying that doesn't make it so. As to whether there is a need to go further, I still have some doubts. If this attitude on the part of the commissioner exists, that he's not even willing to acknowledge that it was going on in the first place, I'm a little concerned that it may still be going on to a small extent, or it may go on again. I do draw some comfort hearing from Mr. Wappel that he posed direct questions to Mr. Reynolds—I unfortunately wasn't able to be there for that—and I'm certainly willing to amend the motion to have Mr. Reynolds appear with Mr. Ingstrup.

The Chairman: The committee hasn't, I think, taken the decision that we need Mr. Ingstrup back, so it would be sort of hypothetical... So we can, I think, deal with it at that time.

Mr. Gouk, you had a comment.

Mr. Jim Gouk: Much as Tom has said, I think there was a quota, or I think there was an intended quota. I don't have much doubt, based on the paperwork I've seen. I also don't think there's a quota now, and they have all denied it. Frankly, to put it bluntly, in camera or otherwise—

• 1720

The Chairman: We are not in camera here this week.

Mr. Jim Gouk: Well, I don't care. I think some people are lying, because you're getting two stories. Somebody has to be lying. But I am totally convinced now that there is not at this time a quota, and I think they would be hard-pressed to try to slip it back in, given the notoriety it's got.

So unless we're prepared to bring someone like Reynolds in and put him under oath and really pursue this and spend time on it, then I don't think we're going to accomplish anything other than to say “See, I told you so”. Maybe there would be some value in that if we thought there was real danger that they would slip it back in on June 11, right after we rise, but I don't think that's the case.

The Chairman: Have you any further discussion?

Mr. Tom Wappel: On that final point, Mr. Chairman, we of course are free to recommend anything we want, and if this committee wanted to recommend quite clearly that at no time should there ever be consideration of quotas in the CCRA, and if Mr. MacKay wished to put that forward, he'd certainly have my support for it. We could make that public, and that would be our statement of our conclusions based on what we heard.

(Motion negatived)

The Chairman: Before we adjourn, Mr. Gouk, you had another issue?

Mr. Jim Gouk: I thought we were going to do something... but, yes, I do in any case. I have a comment with regards to the schedule.

We discussed yesterday the fact that you can't wait until everybody's present, and I accept that, and we worked out an accommodation for when someone has to miss something, so they can get brought up to speed. Particularly in the case of someone like me or Richard, who has been primarily the sole person involved in this, you can't substitute somebody. But at the same time, we have to recognize that... I wasn't aware that we were going to meet every day for the last two weeks of our session, and not too many MPs sit around with open calendars for the next two weeks in advance. There are a couple of meetings I can't meet, but as I say, we reached an accommodation on that.

One that I can't meet that does bother me is the 3.30 p.m. meeting on June 10, because that's the day we're likely rising.

The Chairman: Well, I think we can take that as a tentative meeting, depending on the House schedule.

Mr. Jim Gouk: In any case, I can't meet that, and what concerns me is missing the last meeting, because no matter what information is fed back to me from the committee for the ones that I've missed or anything, that's when we do the final input for the researchers before we leave. I think that is the most awkward one in terms of us as MPs, with our schedule, given that we might rise that day—in fact, we pretty well presume we're going to—wrapping up the offices, particularly for people who have distances. Richard said to me earlier this afternoon before he left that he cannot be at that meeting. He can be at the morning one, but not the afternoon one. I would therefore ask that we cancel—

Mr. Tom Wappel: Can you be at the morning one?

Mr. Jim Gouk: I can be at the morning one, but I would ask that we cancel the afternoon meeting on June 10.

Mr. Jacques Saada: In this case I think Jim's point is very well taken. We start at 9 o'clock in the morning?

The Chairman: Yes.

Mr. Jacques Saada: We have a 9 o'clock session. I suppose we are counting on two hours, and then stopping it and coming back in the afternoon. Can't we simply proceed unless there's a compelling reason not do to so?

Mr. Tom Wappel: And have lunch.

Mr. Jacques Saada: And finish it at noon or 1 o'clock and make sure we have it all dealt with. That way, we'll be free—

The Chairman: All right. I just hope we're making enough progress, that's all.

Mr. Jacques Saada: It will compel us to do it.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Well, if we have four hours...

Mr. Jim Gouk: That's right. We've agreed that we are coming back.

The Chairman: Now, Mr. MacKay wasn't—

Mr. Tom Wappel: What if we don't rise, Mr. Chair?

The Chairman: If we don't rise, I suppose if there's a vote on Friday or something we'll have to hang around, so we could play that by ear.

But Mr. MacKay wasn't here yesterday, and what was agreed, subject to everyone agreeing of course, was that we get as much done as we can on the drafting of the report before we leave, and then the researchers could be preparing the draft report as far as we got, and then we come back—I think we had agreed tentatively on August 3 or August 4—for a two-day session, no interruptions—

Mr. Tm Wappel: Short.

The Chairman: Short, yes, and we'll try to complete it at that time.

It is going to work out here. We're having difficulty meeting a tentative schedule like this, so... Are you in agreement?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Did you say early August?

The Chairman: August 3 or August 4 were the dates we were kicking around, as long as they fit with everyone's schedule.

Mr. Peter MacKay: Could I request the materials from yesterday as well?

• 1725

The Chairman: The transcript? It's not ready yet.

Mr. Peter MacKay: No, no, were there materials given out yesterday? Richard had some material that I hadn't seen.

The Chairman: Yes, it was sent to your office. It's just the working document that we have?

Mr. Peter MacKay: Yes, the working document.

The Chairman: Also, the researcher will be preparing summaries of our discussions and sending them to members.

I guess we might as well adjourn. Everyone's leaving.

Mr. Tom Wappel: We're waiting for the hammer.

Mr. Jacques Saada: Can I make a suggestion, Mr. Chairman, that we adjourn?

The Chairman: Yes, please. We are adjourned.