A police van brings inmates to Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, Ont.Saul Porto
The Harper government has rejected a push by the provinces to relieve the pressure on their overburdened corrections systems by having Ottawa assume responsibility for the longest-serving provincial prisoners.
A report commissioned by the provinces called the Changing Face of Corrections says the best way to deal with the explosion in the number of people on remand - those waiting to be sentenced - is to hand inmates serving more than six months behind bars over to federal control.
In return for offloading the prisoners who are serving longer sentences to federal penitentiaries, the report says provinces would assume responsibility for the entire parole system, including those prisoners who have been released from federal custody.
But Ottawa says it has no intention of changing the existing regime, which appears to date back to the 17th century and requires provincial and territorial correctional centres to handle everyone sentenced to less than two years behind bars.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Globe and Mail, surfaces as the Liberal opposition has begun to reject Conservative justice policies, touching off a political battle that could become a central issue in an election campaign if a vote is called this spring. The law-and-order file is not only controversial because of ideology and cost, but because the Conservatives refuse to provide information on how much it will cost to implement legislation to lengthen prison sentences and reduce parole.
Provincial discontent over jails also comes at a time when the two levels of government are negotiating two major financial policies - the health accord, which expires in 2014 and determines how much the federal government contributes to health care, and federal equalization payments to provinces.
The provinces and territories have been reluctant to discuss the corrections proposal publicly as they try to negotiate a rebalancing of the corrections system, which has grown with the enactment of tougher federal justice legislation they have largely supported.
They have refused to release the 2009 document through their freedom-of-information acts and warned people who have received a copy that it must not be shared with reporters. At the same time, they continue to push the federal government to bear more of the weight of the corrections system.
"The recommendation suggesting prisoners sentenced to six months or more should serve time in a federal institution is under review," Felix Collins, Newfoundland's Justice Minister, said in an e-mail on Tuesday.
In Ontario, Joe Kim, a spokesman for Jim Bradley, the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, said the province "will continue to participate in debate on this recommendation should it arise at the FPT level [a federal-provincial-territorial meeting]"
Written by Neil McCrank, the former chair of the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board and a former Alberta justice minister, as well as other corrections experts including Anthony Doob, who teaches at the University of Toronto, the report stems from a meeting of the federal, provincial and territorial justice ministers in 2007.
All parties at that meeting agreed that the situation in provincial and territorial systems was changing dramatically and needed to be studied. The remand population, which is historically smaller than the sentenced population, was climbing year after year and had surpassed the number of sentenced prisoners even as crime rates were falling.
Provincial facilities were creaking at the seams.
But, when the provinces said they wanted to take another look at getting rid of the "two-year rule," the federal government said it would not be part of the study. The provinces, which provided a steering committee made up of deputy ministers of corrections, decided to carry on without Ottawa's participation.
The remand population started to increase well before the Conservatives took office federally, said Prof. Doob, who was among those who refused to give the report to The Globe. But the slate of crime bills that have been passed by Parliament since 2006 have added prisoners. "Everything adds," he said.
In 1978, the average daily number of people being held by the provinces and territories in pre-sentence custody was 3,030. By 2005, 27 years later, it had tripled to 10,754. And, three years after that, in 2008, it had ballooned to 13,507.
That has created crowded conditions and necessitated triple-bunking in the provincial systems. More important, according to the report's authors, it means large numbers of prisoners are "sitting in limbo" because, with so many inmates serving short sentences, remedial programs become impractical at the provincial level.
Chris McCluskey, a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, said adjusting the corrections system to send inmates with sentences of six months or more to federal penitentiaries would require an amendment to the Canadian Constitution - something that is not being considered.
Mr. Toews said his government is, in fact, picking up some of the costs of remand prisoners because of its new law that ended the practice of giving prisoners double credit for the amount of time they served before sentencing.
"What we are seeing is people leaving the provincial institutions as they plead guilty and are then sentenced into federal time," he said. "So what we're seeing is a gradual shift onto the federal institutions and an alleviation of some of the pressure on the provinces."
But Prof. Doob said the federal government actually got that law wrong and the huge numbers of inmates who are sentenced to less than two years will actually be spending more time in provincial custody, not less.