Hello,
The practice of keeping a prisoner in solitary confinement for weeks and months at a time has – hopefully – come to an end.
The federal government has discontinued its appeal of a Charter challenge that was currently at the Supreme Court. The government said legislation passed last year had essentially already ended the practice known as administrative segregation.
In recent years, prisoner rights advocates and journalists had raised disturbing cases of Canadians who had died in prison because they had gone weeks or months in cells no bigger than a parking space. For example, The Globe and Mail investigated the case of Edward Snowshoe, who had been in solitary confinement for 162 days before he died by suicide.
“At last federal prisoners can be assured that their rights to be protected from abusive solitary confinement will be protected,” Catherine Latimer, executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, said in a statement.
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TODAY’S HEADLINES
Today’s help from Ottawa is for postsecondary students who have lost summer jobs due to COVID-19. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a new benefit – the Canada Emergency Student Benefit – that will provide $1,250 a month from May to August, and more if the student has a disability or dependents.
The federal government is closely monitoring how worker shortages are affecting critical industries such as food production and transportation. A briefing note, prepared by Ottawa for provincial leaders, shows under what conditions the federal government might invoke the Emergencies Act.
And many small businesses say they are having to close down because government help is not coming soon enough. “If we had been told sooner – a number of weeks sooner – we would have happily sit tight, if we weren’t digging a big financial hole for ourselves,” bar owner Dan Good told The Globe.
Rob Carrick (The Globe and Mail) on why the government needs to focus more efforts on the youngest Canadians: “The COVID-19 outbreak has hurt a lot of us financially in one way or another – mass layoffs and decimated retirement savings are just a couple of examples. But this year’s crop of university and college grads are among the hardest hit. They’re graduating, many of them with considerable student debt, into an economy that will have almost no use for them.”
Campbell Clark (The Globe and Mail) on a glimmer of hope from Prince Edward Island: “PEI, [Premier Dennis] King said, is in a unique and fortunate position. According to official statistics, it is nearly free of COVID-19. Starting late next week, the province plans to start lifting restrictions on some outdoor activities and begin performing elective procedures in hospitals.”
Andrew Coyne (The Globe and Mail) on why virtual meetings of Parliament just aren’t the same: “It is not only necessary that these debates be open to the public. It is necessary also that they be dramatic – to focus people’s attention, draw them in, implicate them in the outcome. And that, as any theatregoer knows, requires the actors to be physically present: to emphasize that power is in the balance, not just abstract questions of principle, and that these are flesh-and-blood human beings contending with one another, with all their strengths and all their failings.”
Tim Powers (Hill Times) on Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s push for frequent House sittings: “In a world where technology is allowing legislatures in other parts of the world to function through distance, and when the public sees essential service as front-line medical workers, the opposition leader’s language was off base. And, ‘he gets more TV time than me’ screams bratty and self-interested.”
Angela Mondou and Colin Deacon (The Globe and Mail) on procurement as stimulus: “Procurement is one of the biggest and possibly most underrated levers of government, the largest purchaser of goods and services in Canada. Imagine a ‘new normal’ of agile government procurement that integrates cutting-edge innovations into the delivery of public services. That’s the big question: Can Canada use procurement to fuel innovation? Can we empower our most capable innovators to help public servants to find fast and reliable solutions to some of our most challenging problems?”
Kathryn May (Policy Options) on whether the current crisis will change the public service: “The COVID-19 pandemic has handed the public service a grand-scale opportunity to experiment with new ways of operating, including rethinking the need for massive office buildings in Ottawa-Gatineau and embracing digital government more fully. What public servants learn in the next few months by working remotely and in crisis could jolt the bureaucracy into a re-ordering of practices and culture that reformers haven’t been able to do in 25 years.”
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Chris Hannay