If all goes according to Sen. Kim Pate’s plan on Tuesday, Canada will be one step closer to an even looser justice system.
Her bill, S-230, is headed for its third-reading vote. If passed by the House, it would require yet-unknown numbers of federal prisoners to be transferred to hospitals that are already at capacity, and would allow “marginalized” inmates to be handed over to third-party healing-lodge-style facilities run by their identity group to serve out their sentence.
If it gets to the House of Commons, it’s easy to see how it could be passed into law. The Liberals under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have been pushing for light-on-crime changes since they took power, including identity-based policies aimed at reducing “overrepresentation” of minorities in prison.
Pate’s aim in all this is to reduce the number of people in “structured intervention units” (which is essentially solitary confinement with socialization breaks), which she considers cruel.
But the good intentions driving the bill don’t make up for its near-blind short-sightedness and utter lack of regard for community safety.
Bill S-230 would work by requiring any inmate found to have “disabling mental health issues” to be moved to a hospital — that is, a psych ward. As for inmates in segregated units, the bill would limit any stays there to 48 hours; for anything longer, corrections authorities would have to apply to a judge to receive a special exception.
To get more inmates of diverse characteristics out of prison and into healing-lodge-like alternative programs, the bill would also allow the government to tap “community group or organization that serves a disadvantaged or minority population” for services like taking custody of prisoners and reintegrating those who have been released.
Finally, the bill would allow a judge to reduce a person’s sentence if Corrections Services Canada is found to have done anything wrong during their stay (the criteria given for this were wide). Victims wouldn’t have to be consulted.
The idea would be to proactively get inmates out of prison before they end up being confined in a segregated unit due to their behaviour.
Only, there are many problems with the bill itself. The term “disabling mental health issues” is never defined, even though the label works as a literal get-out-of-jail card. Pate insists that a certain section of the existing law already defines the term, but it does not — her term is novel and would require a court’s interpretation to safely ascertain what it means.
Because it’s not clear who will be sent from jail cell to hospital bed if this bill were to pass, which means we don’t know how many federal prisoners are headed for already congested health facilities. Not even Pate, the lawyer-senator who engineered the bill has any idea: Sen. Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu grilled Pate on the matter in November 2023, and the only estimate she could provide was “We’re not talking about 1,000 or 1,500 off the bat.”
The Parliamentary Budget Officer, on the other hand, estimated that “about 5,000 incarcerated persons (38 per cent of the 13,000 total population in custody) would be eligible for psychiatric care.”
This brings about another problem: it’s not clear how many prisoners will take up room in outside mental health facilities under the new bill. And, as forensic psychologist Dr. Mathieu Dufour told the Senate committee studying the bill back in February, psychiatric units across the country already have capacity problems.
And a very similar capacity overload can be expected at the courts, which are the courts that will have to hear all the new motions and applications that Bill S-230 envisions. A new deluge of applications from prisoners hoping to have sentence reductions, healing lodge transfers and segregation reviews would compete with everything else that needs to be heard by a judge.
Finally, the bleeding-heart identity politics that sound straight out of the summer of 2020: the bill envisions Black healing lodges, LGBT healing lodges and healing lodges for any group considered “marginalized” under the law. It’s unjust — it gives some prisoners more ways out of prison based on their ethnic or otherwise immutable characteristics. Indeed, the John Howard Society even pointed out that the law’s wording risked discriminating against white people (their suggested remedy was never taken).
It’s also dangerous. The Indigenous healing lodges we already have are notorious for their appalling security standards: Edmonton’s facility had five escapes as of July 2024 alone, while another in Saskatchewan had some in August and September. Most federal prison breaks are from healing lodges, in fact.
Making matters even worse, S-230 would mandate that any inmate’s request to a healing lodge be approved unless a court decides that a transfer would “not to be in the interests of justice.” Which means that judges will have even more opportunities to send violent criminals into facilities from which they can easily escape and endanger the community.
Some senators, at least, can see these obvious problems. One, Sen. Claude Carignan, told the Senate last Thursday that the bill had “tunnel vision” and eviscerated its poor drafting.
“I’m convinced that Bill S-230 will cause many serious problems and is unworkable in practice,” he said last week. “It’s an illusion to think that the justice system can respond to the surge in demand that the bill will cause, or that the health-care system can cope with so many inmates being admitted to our provincial hospitals.”
All of this is slated to cost unthinkable amounts: anywhere from several million to $2-billion, by the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s read. The massive spread is another indicator of the bill’s problems: with vague definitions and wide aims come unpredictable budgets. The cost estimate actually approaches the existing budget of Corrections Services Canada. In 2023-24, quarterly expenditures were already in the several millions, while the year’s total budget was $3.2 billion.
If Pate believes that some prisoners are being unlawfully segregated, she should appeal to the minister responsible, Dominic LeBlanc. Instead, she would add to the pile of race-based rules in Canada while jeopardizing community safety and public health capacity. When the call to vote is made, senators should kill this bill before it ever sees the sunlight of the House.
National Post