 My name is Adelina Idene, I'm a law professor here at Schulitz School of Law and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Canadian Prison Law Conference on behalf of the Law School and the Canadian Prison Lawyers Association. The event tonight is both the opening of the conference with a wonderful keynote panel and it's also our school's required lecture that takes place every year. It's a public lecture on access to justice issues and this collaboration between the School of Law and the Nova Scotia work there is their society. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that the joint event tonight as well as the whole conference obviously this on issues related to criminal justice and prison justice is taking place on ancestral and non-seed in Mi'kmaq territory. I would like to let the same in for a second. I would like us to take it with us in a recession of the conference this weekend. The criminal and criminal systems are some of the systems that continue to do violence to Mi'kmaq people and to other indigenous groups in this country and yet we have Mi'kmaq with us today and throughout the conference in different capacity welcoming us on the their ancestral territory and engaging in sub-sensing conversation about reform and how to move forward with a better system. We are here to build to work together and to work towards building a better fairer system. As we do that, I would like us to all remember that this endeavor must start with working to ensure that this system succeeds to perpetuate post-colonial order. Over the last few decades progress has been made in prison law and prison justice. This progress was the result of the tremendous amount of work that lawyers, academics, community activists have done and many of whom are in this room today. But a lot of work still remains. It is fantastic to have all these skilled individuals dedicated to prison justice in one city in the same venue at the same time. At no point in time was there a community of legal, non-legal, governmental, non-governmental actors wanting to work in prison law and to improve the system that we have. But this also places a great responsibility on us. A responsibility not only to continue the work that we have done so far individually and in small groups but to actually get to know each other's work, to learn about the collaboration that we can do and to exponentially increase the collaborating work towards improving the access to justice for some of the most vulnerable people in our community. I am hoping that this conference is a step to a step. Before I pass the mic, I would like to take a moment and acknowledge the institutions and the individuals that have helped bring this conference together. I would like to thank Truth School of Law and Dean Cameron and one of the Canadian Prison Lawyers Association and its membership for sponsoring this event. I would also like to thank our other sponsors, the House Law Institute at the House Bank, the House President's Office, Mark Knott's Law, Purcell's Law, as well as the Linox Scotia Barricer Society for helping out with this evening, and the Office of the Correctional Investigator. In terms of organizing, I would like to have a shout out for I don't even see all of them. The small group of people that have been so mighty in putting together the conference, William D. Bird, Sheila Wildman, and Hannah Garcin, as well as our fantastic group of volunteers that have dedicated time and effort to be with us and to work tirelessly. They are indeed the people that make us think that we do have a better future ahead of us. And they are Megan, Alex, Fabian, Darcy, Matt, Andrew, Chris, and Desmond. Also, I would like to thank people who are not officially on the organizing committee, but who have been helping out with support, with advice, and with putting together panels. The President of the CPLA Mark Knott, the Vice President, Jenny Ferman-Capp, and Moro, Jocelyn Downey, and Al Jones, terrific people to be able to be a part of. And of course, our support staff, our admin staff, they have been working way beyond their tasks, a little bit of a time for Tiffany, Koolen, Jordan, D. Wellsbury, Michelle, Kirkwood, Crystal Gray. And of course, thank you to our guests here tonight who are helping us open this event. We are very pleased to have you, and we are all looking forward to the panel. There will be a couple, just a couple more people speaking for that. We will have, on behalf of the law school, Richard Downey will come to us in a couple of minutes, followed by Mr. Fran Demo, who's the President of the National Social Research Society, and then Mark Knott is going to take the program with history of the CPLA and introduce our people on the way back tonight. But before that, I would like to invite Al Jones. She has been Halifax poet laureate between 2013 and 2015. Everybody who knows her knows she's a force. She's a very strong community activist, very strong, and she's also the chair of the Women's Society for Mozambique. So I'm going to pass it on. Good evening, everybody. Peace, safety, satan. I'm going to have to juggle paper and a microphone. Before I start doing the poem, I want to bring readings from you. I was told to bring readings from the prison strikers. They said that they hope that you continue to do the work you do and carry forward their words and your work as well. So they just wanted to send readings to us. They are following with open ears, they said. This poem came from, I was talking to one of them, and I said, I have so many poems off, Princeton. I don't know if I have any more to say, but I'm going to turn on my poem. He said, have you written about jury? One white, two white, three white jurors. Four white, five white, six white jurors. Ten white, eleven white, twelve white jurors. It's an all white jury again. Shots fired through the window of an SUV. They said he was just defending his land, just a twitch of his hand. The life that was he doing was what they debated on TV. Shots to the head while he was lying there asleep. And so the Indigenous youth was the only one found guilty. Olden but she's mothered and she was drunk when they delivered the news. And the jury vote, the jury vote. It did not look like you. Or assured me. And they locked up for selecting one white, two white, all sexy poems. If you want a Halloween silver screen. Dean and my friend walked into court under a portion of the queen. We cultural reports used to be seen as human beings. And then me? Well they said couldn't feel. And one white, two white, three white jurors. We can't win. We can't win. Now when they save us in court, but then the institution's been on what they have to say and not my friends being there on lockdown, 23 hours a day. Weeks he had to crawl and a third of all, we claw our way. Don't child in those prairie starlight torches. And there's another woman, another woman, who set herself at ends when they take a child to jail. You don't expect to see a mess in heaven. And she's low who are shot by the police in 21 seconds. Freddie Bull and Ava executed when the police said they felt ready. Signing a team shot on it because there's one white, two white, three white jurors. Four white, 10 white, 11 white, 12 white jurors. It's an old white jury again. And it's not easy to follow such a course. For those who don't know me, my name is Richard Devlin. I'm the associate dean of research at the law school. And you got a jam-packed program this evening. I'm going to make three very brief comments and then get out of the way for the panel and Frank tomorrow. The first point that I want to share with you is that Dean Camille Cameron sends her apologies. She's very, she was very keen on attending this conference. I've been very supported from the first day that Adelina walked into her office and suggested that this should happen. We have a few issues happening in the law school in the last week and they've taken up the dean's attention and so she does send her apologies and really regrets not being here. The second key point I want to make is that for about the last 15 years, I along with Professor Donnie have been responsible for much of the organization of the teaching of ethics and professionalism at the law school. And central to that relationship has been our engagement with the Nova Scotia Barrist Society and in particular the development of the Whitwire Lecture program. This has been a great partnership for almost three decades, which is a remarkable amount of time. And it's not that the law school and the bar society get on well all the time, but this has been a great partnership between us and we're really appreciative of their support. And in particular it has put Dalhousie as one of the landmark institutions in Canada among law schools in promoting ethics and professionalism. So I really want to thank the Nova Scotia Barrist Society for their support. The third thing I want to do is to, on behalf of the university and in particular on behalf of the law school, to thank Professor Iftenny for organizing this conference. It's truly remarkable that someone who's only in their second year of law teaching could put the time and energy into organizing a conference off this nature and having it sold out of 200 people. And we at Dalhousie are delighted that Catalina has decided to join us and that we're able to call her one of her own. So before we start I'd like everyone to run to the floor and thank them on. President of the Scotia Barrist Society. Thank you Richard. I said to Richard I'm glad it's him going after El, not me. Honourable judges, distinguished panelists, ladies and gentlemen, friends. My role tonight is to remind those of you who knew Mr. Whitwire and to shed a bit of light for those of you who didn't about him and who he was and why we are here tonight in his honour and memory. This is the 28th FB Whitwire Memorial Lecture in Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics. I didn't know Ted Whitwire. I met him once briefly at his firm in 1990 but I knew of him. I met him in quotes on June 1st 1990 when I was given my copy of Legal Ethics and Professional Conduct, more affectionately known at the Barrister Society as The Handbook. What told I would be called upon to make these remarks, I pulled out my dog ear highlighted sticky noted copy of the handbook. It is well worn. It brings back many memories. I also reviewed a series of newspaper articles and transcribed speeches about Mr. Whitwire. From those materials, I think it fair to say he would have said, Frank, call me Ted, so I will take that liberty tonight. What I discovered was in keeping with what my impression had been all along, that he was an ethical person dedicated to the law, fair, decent and kind. He was a true leader. He was a true leader in good times and difficult times. His presidency took place at the time of the Marshall Inquiry report. The clippings allowed me to go a bit deeper into his character and legacy. Some of you may know that he was the quarterback of the Dalhousie Tigers football team for several years. He was named Dalhousie's male athlete of the year two years in a row. There was some debate about the success of the team in those years. Some were called the team playing to great success led by Teddy Whitwire. Others seemed to recall him being a leader around which a collapsing team tried to soldier on. The view of both groups held in common was Ted's extraordinary leadership. It was this leadership he brought to the law, leading in particular on access to legal services with his work in the formation and early years of the Nova Scotia Legal Aid Commission. And also in respect to legal ethics and professional responsibility, I mentioned the Handbook. He was the Handbook Project Committee Chair. He was also the Society's Legal Ethics Committee Chair. Today, as we would expect, the Handbook has been replaced with an online code of professional conduct. Many of the words and format have changed, but the underlying principles of professionalism remain integrity, competence, honesty and candor, resolute and honorable representation of clients and duties to other lawyers, duties to the public, duties to the profession and our duty to uphold and improve the administration of justice. My reading of Ted demonstrated that he lived those rules in his professional and personal life, including his duty to family and community. On the opening day of law school this year, I was honored to speak to the incoming class. The topic was how to develop a professional identity. Had I known more about Mr. Frederick B. Whitwire QC at the time, I would have simply read a few of the tributes to him as a leader in the profession, the community and his family. He was a model of professional identity. As president of the Society now and to those coming along behind me, I think reading about Ted gives one a sense that late in the game, Ted, the quarterback, is calling a play. From his perspective it might have been a Hail Mary class. Throw it deep, say a few Hail Marys and hope that someone will catch it. From my perspective, it looks like a well-executed long bond. He knew we would be open in the end zone, looking for the past. His past is that my generation and the next generations learn from his example as he learned from those before him. That we keep the rich and worthwhile traditions of the profession alive and honored. That we build and maintain high ethics. That we adapt and apply those traditions, principles and ethics as necessary and apply them to our modern problems. That we continue to strive to increase access to legal services. And that we pass on those traditions and ethics to those that will follow us. And finally that we solve a few problems along the way. To Ted and his generation, we owe this duty. For me, it was a privilege to learn about Mr. Wickwire. And for that, I thank you for this invitation. Thank you very much, Frank, and distinguished guests as well. I'm here to talk about the history of the CPLA, that's the Canadian Prison Law Association. And I've been part of this since 1997. And even though that goes back a fair amount, Adalina and I and Jennifer and others had to go back to the archives to learn about the group in order to share some of its history with you today. And in order to do that, we had to go to some seasoned long-time veterans of the group. Those founding persons include persons in attendance here today. I probably won't be able to spot them all, but John Conroy QC is here. Chip O'Connor, Council in the Surveys case in the Supreme Court of Canada concerning voting rights. And also, Council once again in Ottawa on Ipaly. Les Morley, a past CPLA president is here. And Michael Jackson QC, of course, is here. And he'll be honored tomorrow night with the Lifetime Achievement Award at our reception. Founding members that are not here include Steve Feinberg from Quebec. And this is a quote from Steve, one of the two creators, creators of prison law in Canada, Ms. Sasha Pollyup, also from BC. Hopefully you're asking, how did the conference come about and what is the CPLA? I'll answer the second question first. And I'll use Steve Feinberg's notes that he sent to Adelene and I regarding the history of the organization. Quote, the initial inspiration for this type of organization was in 1984, when Sasha and Quebec practitioner Nicole Dagnaux, unfortunately now deceased, first called upon their colleagues across the country to come together. And they wrote a seminal letter that read, quote, it is time for the disparate and isolated pockets of people working in the area of prison law to get together and discuss strategy. I'd like to add one more thing that Mr. Bebos Vase, who's here presenting this weekend, mentioned previously in a similar forum. And what he said was this, he said prison law practice can be a very lonely forum. And colleagues in the same arena can therefore be extremely helpful. Our mission statement for CPLA, I'll summarize it, but here's what it says. It's for lawyers who work on behalf of prisoners seek to protect and promote the constitutional rights interests and privileges of prisoners by advocating on their behalf within the community and in their dealings with prison and release authorities by generating and sharing legal information and by promoting adherence to the rule of law within the prison law environment in accordance with the highest standards of justice and fairness as required by inconsistent with the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The CPLA can be seen in three ways, and this is all Steve's work. If Steve was here, he'd be, he'd have you laugh and he's such a humorous guy. I can't do that, but I'll read what he wrote. It can be seen, number one, as a celebration of prison lawyers, activists and academics who built and inhabit the prisoner's rights movement. The early heroes, these are additional heroes. The early heroes and pioneers of the movement showed the federal court that there's more litigation than taxation, bankruptcy, banking and maritime legislation. That's Steve's quote. And Steve pointed out appropriately that law schools and in particular prison law clinics are part of this development and he mentioned that Professor Ron Price, a pioneer who created the Correctional Law Clinic at Queens, where the Honorable Justice Cromwell attended, are to be given kudos. And Paul Quick currently with the criminal law, pardon me, Correctional Law Clinic at Queens is here today and he echoed that. Secondly, the CPA is known for its 33 year history, including a tradition of periodic national conferences, teaching occasions, helping to organize and marshal the nation's progressive prison resources to strengthen their impact on large and well-funded adversaries. We've had conferences beginning in February of 85, chaired by Fergus, he goes by Chip, I didn't even know your first name, Chip, Fergus O'Connor. Secondly, May 91 in Kingston, July 94 in Montreal with the Quebec Provincial Prison Law Group, AAADCQ, June 97, Ottawa, October 03 Vancouver, in conjunction with the West Coast Prison Justice Society. Finally, May 05 in Kingston with the Ontario Prison Warriors Association. Thirdly, the CPLA has learned and benefited from many other groups, similar groups including the West Coast Prison Justice Society, BC's Prison Legal Services and the Ontario Prison Law Association, which merged with CPLA in 2009. Thanks to Sasha's contributions, the CPLA was able and active in distributing prison law cases to the country's practitioners. We have an important caveat to mention, a goal of our group. Part of our current discussion being a national group is we have to better recognize our Quebec friends and colleagues, such as the AAADCQ, which has been an extremely important part of prison law development. Quebec has a third of the federal inmates in Canada, and we have to do a better job to encourage association with our Quebec colleagues. The last point about CPLA is the first point that I brought up today, and that's how this come about. And Richard Devlin, I think, explained that. That's Adelina. Where did she go? She's here. So she's already got a huge round of commendation, but it's all about her. So we have to thank Adelina for making this such a success. Before I sit down, I want to introduce the moderator of the keynote panel. That's my left, Honorable Justice Michael McDonald. He'll moderate the panel. His assistant sent me some information about him, his bio, so I'll try to go through it quickly. Honorable Michael McDonald is the Chief Justice of our province, born and raised in Whitney Pier, Nova Scotia. Received as BA from Mount Allison in 76, LLB from Dow in 79. In practice as an associate and partner with Boudreau Beaton and Lafoss from 79 to 90, and a partner with Stuart McKelvie Sterling Scales from 90 to 1995. In April 1995, he was appointed a judge at the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in June 98, appointed associate Chief Justice, and in December of 04, became our 22nd Chief Justice in Nova Scotia. He's been a member of the Canadian Judicial Council for the past 19 years, chairing several of its committees, and presently chairing the Council's Judicial Conduct Committee. Most recently, he has assumed the chair was the Nova Scotian Minister of Justice of the newly created Provincial Access to Justice Coordinating Committee. We're very fortunate to have his lordship here, and as many of you know, Chief Justice McDonald will be retiring soon, and as you all know, he will be missed by barristers, academics, and the community. And so the CPLA, your lordship, would like to present you with a token of gratitude. This is a book by Ray Hinton, a death row inmate in Alabama for about 30 years, who was freed by a champion attorney, Brian Stevenson in the USA. So thank you very much. So much, Mark, and to get the gift before I performed is great. And I'm going to keep it so you don't try to get it back. No, thank you very much. I cherish that, and I very much, I'll read that with interest and very much appreciate your kind remarks. I am indeed honored and want to congratulate the organizers for this very important conference taking place over the next few days. It's an honor for me to participate in it, particularly since it's also in the memory of Ted Wickwire, as has been mentioned. We have, I think, an amazing opening panel to set the stage in a broader context so that we can appreciate and learn more about the challenges in our prison system. As a judge, it's particularly humbling for me to learn more about the real on-the-ground consequences of our decisions. And as I said, what a power panel we have to set the stage broadly under the title, past and future developments in imprisonment and access to justice for prisoners. And we are indeed fortunate to have such an amazing level of expertise on this panel. I'm going to keep introductions to a minimum so as to preserve as much time as possible for the respective presentations. There will be six of them. We expect each will be approximately 15 minutes, and that should leave, if my math is correct and I think we're relatively on time, that should leave approximately 30 minutes or so for questions, which please keep in mind as you hear the various speakers, because we will be hopefully calling for questions at the end. The first speaker will be my colleague in the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, Justice Ann Derrick, formerly of the provincial court of Nova Scotia. And before becoming a judge, she was a nationally recognized social justice lawyer. Perhaps Justice Derrick's most important legacy to date has been her work with the fatal inquiry into the death of Howard Hyde. Her report is arguably the most significant Canadian work on the intersection of mental illness in our prison system. Justice Derrick will speak broadly about the rule of law and the importance of the rule of law in the prison context. We will next hear from Dr. Ivan Zinger, lawyer who also holds a PhD in psychology on criminal conduct. He's presently the correctional investigator of Canada. Dr. Zinger will provide a profile of the federal prison system and highlight key trends and concerns. Third, we will have the Honorable Thomas Cromwell, my former colleague on the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, formally as you know from the Supreme Court of Canada. As chair of the Action Committee on Access to Justice and Civil and Family Matters, he is, I would say, Canada's most recognizable champion for access to justice for all Canadians, including prisoners. He is presently senior counsel at the law firm Gordon Ladner's Urbay. Mr. Cromwell will talk about setting up the Queen's Prison Law Clinic as the first of its kind in the country and the significance of such a model for access to justice and the experience it provided to law students. Next, we will have Dr. Pam Pometer, a McMall lawyer, author, social justice advocate from the Eel River Bar First Nation in New Brunswick. She also holds master's and doctorate degrees in specializing in Indigenous law. She is currently chair of the Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University and is often called as a legal expert before parliamentary and United Nations committees. Dr. Pometer will address issues related to the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prisons and the repercussions on individuals and communities. We are honored to have and welcome Ms. Debbie Kilroy next. She is the first and only prisoner to be admitted to as a legal practitioner in Australia. She is a powerful advocate for women prisoners. She founded and is presently chief executive officer of the advocacy organization Sisters Inside and teaches prison law at Griffith University. Ms. Kilroy will address issues related to women and incarceration. Finally, we will have Senator Kim Pate, known to many of you, was appointed to the Canadian Senate in 2016. She is nationally renowned as an advocate, dedicating most of her life advocating for those involved in Canada's legal and penal systems. Her passion is helping marginalized, victimized, criminalized, and institutionalized people. Senator Pate will address aspects of what prison lawyers should and need to know to promote and defend human rights, including lessons from recent cases. And that's just a smattering of the talent that's before us this evening. So now you know why I am excited and honored to be part of this panel. And as promised, I will call upon Justice Derek. I just want to thank the organizers very much for inviting me to participate in this auspicious conference. And I'd also like to thank Chief Justice McDonald for his very generous and kind introduction. I'm very honored to be here. There are some real heavyweights in the prison justice movement here and it's certainly very humbling to be in their company. I do want to say to borrow a term that's used in the writing trade that I've had to kill a lot of darlings to shoehorn the rule of law into 15 minutes. This is the rule of law on amphetamines. I was going to use a PowerPoint. I will provide it to Adelina for the website, but I'm actually not going to put it up. I'm just going to talk. The broad principles for the rule of law. It's a principle of governance. All persons, institutions, entities, public and private are accountable. So that's the principle that no one is above the law. Accountability under laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated and consistent with international norms of human rights and international human rights standards. Now, where do we find it? We find it in international instruments such as the international covenant on civil and political rights. We find it in the Mandela rules. That's the UN standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, which was adopted unanimously by the UN General Assembly in December 2015. There are 122 rules. Rule number one is all prisoners shall be treated with respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings. Domestic sources include the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, and interestingly, the Nova Scotia Corrections Act. And I want to thank Sebastian Ennis, who's one of the clerks with the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal, for ferreting that out for me. The rule of law is explicitly mentioned in the Nova Scotia Corrections Act, and that makes it unique in the country. There's no other province whose legislation explicitly references the rule of law. In 2018, the International Commission of Jurists described the rule of law as a principle that elevates democracy from mob rule, and is necessary to harness the energy of democracy and give it a direction and progression towards the promotion and protection of human rights. Justice Alvi Sacks, the iconic jurist formerly of the South African Constitutional Court, described the rule of law as occupying a distinctive hallowed space from which powerfully attractive energies radiate. He described the constituent elements as fairness, justice, participation, transparency, and openness. We must insist that the rule of law be robust, and it must prevail no matter what, and the Ontario Court of Appeal in the United States and Carter said the following in 2011, the rule of law must prevail even in the face of the dreadful threat of terrorism. We must adhere to our democratic and legal values, for if we do not, in the longer term the enemies of democracy and the rule of law will have succeeded. They will have demonstrated that our faith in our legal order is unable to withstand their threats. In the prison context, the McGuigan Report in 1976 spoke explicitly about the rule of law. That was an all-party House of Commons committee that was tasked with conducting a major inquiry into the federal penitentiary system, and it was highly critical of the federal penitentiary system, and identified that the rule of law and the constituent elements of justice must prevail in Canadian, inside Canadian prisons. In 1980, the Supreme Court of Canada in Martineau and Maxxley Institution, in the context of considering the issue of whether an internal discipline board was governed by duty of fairness, said the rule of law must run within penitentiary walls. The survey case that Mr. Knox mentioned, survey in Canada, which is the prisoner voting case, the Supreme Court of Canada said the right of the state to punish and the obligation of the criminal to accept punishment are tied to society's acceptance of the criminal as a person with rights and responsibilities. The court also said the charter rights are not a matter of privilege or merit. It was in survey that Chief Justice McLaughlin coined the phrase describing prisoners as citizen law breakers, which is a very robust term that expresses that prisoners are rights-bearing persons. She said the denial of prisoners' rights sends the unacceptable message that democratic values are less important than punitive measures ostensibly designed to promote law. In 2005, in May and Thurndale Institution, the Supreme Court of Canada linked the importance of access to justice to the rule of law. In discussing concurrent jurisdiction for habeas corpus, that being the jurisdiction of provincial Supreme Courts and the federal court to entertain habeas corpus applications, the court said that that concurrent jurisdiction affords prisoners meaningful and significant access to justice in order to protect their liberty rights. The court also said the timely judicial oversight is still necessary to safeguard the human rights and civil liberties of prisoners and to ensure that the rule of law applies within penitentiary walls. In 1996, Justice Arbor in the Arbor Inquiry had also talked about parliamentary and judicial oversight when she said that she had little hope that the rule of law would implant itself within the correctional culture without the assistance and control from Parliament and the courts. In 2010 and 2011, in the correctional investigators report, the correctional investigator said, and I'll read this passage, it bears reminding that offenders have identities and lives apart from their crimes. They are imprisoned as a consequence of their transgressions not to be deprived of their humanity. The law follows offenders into prison. It does not stop at the prison gate. He went on to talk about the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, recognizing that offenders retain the rights and privileges of all members of society, except those rights and privileges that are necessarily removed or restricted as a consequence of the sentence. He said this legal principle is a fundamental expression of Canadian values. It reflects the fact that no one among us, including those deprived of liberty, forfeits or forgoes the right to be treated equally, humanely and with dignity. So why should we care about the rule of law? Well, it's fundamental to our democracy. It's grounded in our constitutional commitment to the inherent dignity and worth of every individual. And again, quoting from the correctional investigator, nowhere is it more important or necessary than in the administration of justice, particularly when it includes the loss of liberty. I'm going to harken back now to the Marshall Inquiry as an example of where the rule of law has been compromised. And particularly, I'm simply going to mention the Royal Commission's examination of two cases involving provincial politicians that revealed a two-tier system of justice, that the system was found to have responded differently depending on the status of the person investigated, the two politicians versus Donald Marshall Jr. The Royal Commission found that unequal treatment makes the ideal of justice for all meaningless and renders the goal of complete public confidence in the system of administration of justice impossible. The Marshall commissioners went on to say, a properly functioning criminal justice system is the bedrock on which society's acceptance of our system of law and the maintenance of order is based. They spoke about, in essence, the rule of law being essential to the proper functioning of the criminal justice system and noted that public confidence in the justice system can only be accomplished through the unwavering and visible application of the principles of absolute fairness and independence. The Arbor Inquiry took a very robust examination of the rule of law in the prison context. Justice Arbor found that a guilty verdict followed by a custodial sentence is not a ground to authority for the state to disregard the very values that the law, particularly criminal law, seeks to uphold and vindicate. She said, the rule of law, speaking about prisons, is absent although rules are everywhere. She said prisoner's rights must not be trivialized or dismissed as undeserved and said when a right has been granted by law, it is no less important that such right be respected because the person entitled to it is a prisoner. Again, I thank Sebastian Ennis for finding this excerpt from the jail diary of Albie Sacks, which I think highlights the importance of the rule of law in prison. Justice Arbor having said that the correctional system is the least visible branch of the criminal justice system. Justice Sacks said, for most prisoners the time spent in court is only a small portion of their period in captivity. The law, as they know it, is not represented by the judge or magistrate defending counsel or prosecutor but by the policeman in the prison warder. The courtroom is an important part of the law, one of its vital organs, but the crucial part of the system is the police station in the prison. Whatever jurisprudential theorists might say, as far as the overwhelming majority of people directly affected by the law is concerned, law is an instrument of coercion and punishment. So a few final thoughts here. One being, what about the rule of law through the lens of the citizen law breaker? In survey, the court said, denying prisoners their fundamental rights to send an educated message, which is what the government of Canada had said, don't let them vote. That'll tell them that they must respect the law, that sends a message about the importance of respect for the law. The Supreme Court of Canada said, that's bad pedagogy. It misrepresents the nature of our rights and obligations under the law and it communicates a message more likely to harm than help respect for the law. I extracted from Professor Michael Jackson's seminal book Justice Behind the Walls, the following words from a prisoner who explained his larger reasons for pressing a lawsuit in which he sued for damages for, as he described it, the humiliating, degrading, illegal, and immoral treatment involved in a strip search. And this, that prisoner said the following, I have been encouraged to participate in a society governed by the rule of law. I have to win this by law. If I don't, there will be a tremendous feeling inside of me that this is all bullshit. I already have that feeling. I grew up with that feeling. I never did believe in the law, in the government, or in state sponsored sanctions. Someone in authority has to say that this was wrong. I'll accept that. Internally, I'll accept that. I'm paying the price for my breaches of the law. Somebody has to build up my confidence in the system because this is how it works in my world. You screw me like that, I put you in a trunk and sink the car. I don't want to live like that anymore, but believe me, that solved the problem before nobody ever screwed me around again. I have to assure myself that the law is at least as powerful that no one will ever screw with me in that manner again. That's why it's so important. And I do want to conclude, I'm going to give the final word to Professor Jackson and his colleague, Grant Stewart, who wrote a stinging critique of the Harper government prison policy at the time called the Floyd Compass. That was in 2009. And this is what they said in that report. Prison is the acid test of our commitment to human rights. If we can maintain our commitment in our prisons, we can do it anywhere. If not, then respect for our human dignity becomes conditional. Ultimately, the preservation of rights for all citizens depends on our preservation of the rights of those in our prisons. Thank you. Who can do the rule of law in the prison context in 15 minutes? I didn't think that was possible. Congratulations to the organizers and thank you, Lynn, so much for your powerful folks, but more importantly an amazing overview of capsule and soda. Thank you. And now we'll hear from Dr. Ivan Singer. Well, good afternoon. What a great, I guess, what a great turnout. And I think for me, this is quite encouraging and exciting. And for me, that means that Canadian prison law is alive and well. And that's something to celebrate, because that has not always been the case. I'm a little, there's a couple of challenges for me right now. One of the challenges is that there's an awful lot of expertise in this room, in the audience, and of course on the panel. So it's difficult for me to see how I'm going to be value-added in this set of circumstances. And it's yet another of those moments where, you know, I feel a bit like Forrest Gump or Homer Simpson. But I'll do my best, I promise. The other issue that I have is that brevity has never been my strength. So I will look carefully at Al Leena to stay on track. So I thought I would maybe do three things. I'll just talk a little bit about my office. I won't go at a great deal of length, because I think many of you know the work of my office. I will then look at the profile of the offender population. And we have a bit of time. I'd like to talk about this notion of returning back to basics to effective corrections. So let's start with my office. So the Office of Correction Investigator is basically a prison ombudsman office. It was established in 1973, following some tragic events in 1971, when there was a very deadly riot at Kingston Penitentiary. We are basically a true ombudsman office with all sorts of powers and authorities. So we can access Penitentiary, access any documentation. We can even subpoena, hold public hearings, although we've never done so. But a great, great deal of investigative powers. However, the bottom line is just like any ombudsman office, our powers and authorities are limited to making recommendations. So I don't have binding authorities over the agency subject to my oversight, which is Correctional Service of Canada. So in terms of just to show you a little bit about the operation, we are fairly busy. We have a budget now exceeding $5 million. The government was kind enough to increase our budget in this year. So we will be moving up to 41 employees. We spent a lot of time in Penitentiaries, anywhere between 350 to 400 days. We do and address a lot of complaints anywhere between six, typically around 6,000 a year. We also review all the use of force that corrections conduct. So there's a statutory requirement to document all these use of force and the service is when it does its own review. And all these reviews, which may include observation reports, but also range videos or handheld cameras, etc. videos, we review all that. We also review about close to or in excess sometime of 50 deaths a year and also a fair number of serious bodily injuries which is required by a lot of corrections actually investigate as well. We spent a lot of time on the phone as the statistics shows and I'm also quite happy to report that there's a great deal of interest for the work of our office. And we have now 25 million piz on our website, which I think is testimony to the great work of the people who work in my office. Just to give you a sense, these are brand new statistics that we pulled out. 17% of the total inmate population last fiscal year actually contacted our office and filed a complaint. So we have some under representation with respect to access to our services by indigenous men and women, actually more I would say men. And of course perhaps women tend to access our services more often as well as Canadians of African descent. The types of complaints that we deal with I would tell you number one has always been health care until the Harper government came in and then we saw conditions of confinement going to number one spot and then we're back to the health care being number one. So we also in addition to our investigation of individual complaints we look at issues systemically and we've conducted many systemic investigations and I think those are a valuable contribution to the work we do. The last two that we did this past fiscal year has been the missed opportunity report which dealt with an investigation into how offender age 18 to 21 are treated in federal corrections and we identify many many gaps on that one. This was quite unique because it was done and I think it was the first time certainly for our office but even I think among federal agencies that are applying to mine to do this in partnership with another provincial agency the Ontario youth advocate office. So we did this one in partnership. The other one we did was called fatal response which discussed the tragic death of Matthew Hines. I'm afraid that in terms of justice this is a continuing saga and it's not yet fully wrapped up. So let me try to now talk a little bit more about some of the views that my office are concerned about with respect to that profile of the offender population. I want to take you back to some of the you know if you are in Criminology 100 if it's the first time that you're exposed to crime in society. There's always this notion that by that you the degree of civilization in society can be judged by entering its prison and certainly Tostoyosky said it but it was repeated many times after by Winston Churchill by Nelson Mandela and so on and the focus has always been as pay attention to how people are treated and that gives you a good idea of some clues upon on societal values. I think we have to go beyond that and ask ourselves who are the men and women that are behind bars. I think that is also very telling and I would go even further sort of saying that we can use the profile of the offender population as a barometer to gauge the success and failures of broad public policies. So let's let's look at some of those those a profile when you enter the Canadian penitentiary who will you see who are the individuals in there and I can tell you they are not represented like a sample a representative sample of Canadian society at large. The first what is striking is the prevalence of mental health issues in federal corrections. Three quarters of men meet the criteria for a mental health disorder. A third are requiring identify in terms of men identified as requiring psychological or psychiatric services. For women we are looking at 50%. About a third are on psychotropic drugs. It's actually 50%. Almost 50% for women. The third women meet the criteria for PTSD. There's very high incidence of self-injury of suicide attempts that are off the chart. So that's for you know in terms of looking at who ends up in prison is quite telling I think. Of course with respect to indigenous people these statistics are now quite well known. A staggering 28% of the federal prison population is indigenous when they only represent about 5% much higher among women. So we're looking at 40%. Also issues around diversity we have a normal representation of Canadians of African descent. With respect to our ability to deal with issues of addiction and substance abuse in any society we also have some gaps here. Three quarters of the inmate population have some history of substance abuse and even more telling 60% were intoxicated at the time of their offense index offense. So when you talk about you know deterrence or whether it's gentle deterrence or specific deterrence we have to questions ourselves. With respect to education very low rates of education I think the best statistics here is that 65% who entered the system upon admission have grade eight or lower which I think is again not representative of what we'd like to see and what we benefit. Employment 62% of federally sentenced men were unemployed at the time of their arrest. There's issues around arm reduction we know that the rates are much higher. Corrections to to their credit has actually addressed hepatitis C and is continuing to do massive progress there. We look we we about three four years ago we were at 30% of the inmate population had hepatitis C but now with with cures being available that numbers have dropped dramatically. Women in Canadian society again the fastest growing segment of the inmate population is the our women and we have to remember that women one of the characteristics of women is that most of them have been victim before and there's an incredible high rate of psychological sexual and physical abuse among that segment of the inmate population and finally aging in Canadian society we are the inmate population is aging we're now one in four are age 50 and over and that trigger our office to initiate systemic investigation against in partnership this time with the Canadian Human Rights Commission and that report should be made public before Christmas so I'm going to leave it there it's a little too short because I want to tell you to go back to basics the present I there's some end-outs that that I've distributed and maybe look at those as well that is available on the website so I'll leave it for that thank you thank you so much Dr. Zinger it's so important I think to have the statistical framework and to realize what's happening on the ground and not none of it was too surprising but it's still very important to have next we'll have Tom Ronald pleasure to be here I feel like a bit of a fraud because I was very involved in prison law very early in my career it's been a couple of years doing clinical work in correctional law cleansed my law school and then did some litigation while practicing but I'll be forever grateful to that experience for many many things one of which is that it allowed me to claim without any fear of contradiction that of all of the 80 judges of the Supreme Court of Canada up until my appointment I had spent more time in jail than all of them I never had a colleague contest that claim I'm right there there'll be many opportunities I'm sure in the future to honor uh Chief Justice McDonald's contribution but I can't let this opportunity slip by just to say a word of how important Michael your leadership has been here in Nova Scotia and beyond and it was an honor to serve with you on the court it was an unpleasant duty to overturn you once or twice but as we always used to say when we got overturned by the Supreme Court we weren't wrong they were just more of us but I hope there'll be many other opportunities to say more but I do want to acknowledge your great contribution I also just want to say a very brief word about two people who aren't here the first of course being the late Ted Lecroyer and I had the privilege of knowing Ted and working with him on a couple of projects when I was a young law prof here at the law school at Delhousie Ted was a leading practitioner but also a person deeply dedicated to professional responsibility and when we at the law school or some of us were trying to put together a package to institute a mandatory course in professional responsibility Ted was a great ally and helped us organize a day-long seminar I was in that context that I got to know him a bit and he really was the epitome of generous service he had a very active practice but he also always found time to help strengthen the profession in many different ways and also to serve his community and it's wonderful that we have both the Wicklar Lecture and the Wicklar Field here at Delhousie that acknowledges his contributions I also want to say a brief word of appreciation about the very much alive we're on a price QC who set up a correctional law project at Queens and from which I and many others benefited tremendously Ron has now reinvented himself as a mediator which if you've known him in his sort of feisty prison litigation days you might wonder how that transitioned and I wondered if it involved medication in any event Ron is a tremendous mentor and gave us as young law students a tremendous opportunity to to do things that we would never have imagined doing in law school so I wanted to mention him I'd like to just set out you've got a few themes that I want to talk about involving clinical training particularly in prison law and so on but I guess I'd like to just set out one idea that's one idea more than are in most of my talks and that is let me leave you with a sentence that I hope you'll think is extremely profound that access to justice is mostly about the gap between what we know and what we do access to justice is mostly about the gap between what we know and what we do I think I read that on a fortune but seriously I've been sort of struggling with the access to justice while focusing on civil and family about justice for almost 10 years now many people claim it's worse than when I started it's I don't have any great privateness but if I've learned anything I think it's what I've just said that in many areas almost all areas we know what we should be doing and this really came through to me as justice Derek spoke about the rule of law because we all know and honor those principles the challenge though is in living optimum that the and I think that all of us who are concerned about access to justice need to think very hard about why that gap exists and when we're dealing with law students I think one of our prime responsibilities is to at least make sure they see the gap you know that they don't believe all the hype the hype is important those principles are important without those we don't have a compass but we can't be blind to the fact that I was going to call a friend myself the we can't be blind to the fact though I think that those principles are often more obvious in their recitation than in their implementation and if there's any lesson to be learned from prison law and many other areas of law is that our experience in these areas confronts with that reality in a pretty dramatic way I thought the quotation that justice Derek had from the prisoner sort of made that point quite beautifully in the sense that you know the weight and majesty of the law was somehow wasted or not apparent to that individual as one would understand let me say a brief word about the importance of clinical training in prison law obviously from a service point of view it's a major area of need and there are there are many areas where access to legal services is a big challenge but I think in the prison context it's a huge challenge from a training point of view I think it's difficult to imagine any area of law where you're likely to be exposed to such an array of challenging issues both substantive procedural and also human in terms of the depth of the human problems that one encounters in the area I think that in terms of real life experience especially you know many of us I won't speak for for you but certainly I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in a CMHC you know subsidized house always had meals on the table wasn't beaten by my parents or you know I had a pretty traditional life I also spent my time before law school being a church organist and quadric and that didn't seem to be the ideal training to go into the whole Kingston County I only can imagine what these poor fellows thought when they saw their you know 90 pound champion that was a long time ago but anyway I think that you know exposure to that kind of reality I mean I I grew up in Kingston Ontario the penitentiary capital of the war leg somebody mentioned that there were a third of federal inmates in Quebec the other third were in Kingston but I had no concept of what went on behind those walls and learning about the lives of some of the people there and learning about the legal challenges that face them is something that I think every law student should have and it really confronted us at a very early stage I think in our legal careers with that gap that we learned quickly that society do not look after its own very well and that there was a huge gap between what we claimed as a society and what we're actually doing inside some of those institutions so let me just say also that and this brings it back to the require lecture that we're also involved in this evening and that is that I think it's hard to imagine any area of law that engages more difficult ethical issues than prison law we I can remember differently going into Millhaven institution maximum security institution just outside Kingston and it was a little distressed to see in the interview room a sign that said conversations may be monitored which didn't seem to need to be the perfect solution for a solicitor client consultation we of course raised hell about this and of course the next time we went the sign was gone but what you know you're you're confronted every day with tough ethical issues we have the Salaski case that Rob Price was involved in and another aspect of the training I think is how not to become jade I don't know about you folks and many have a great deal more experience than I certainly did but in my years of working quite a bit in in prisons I didn't meet a whole lot of guilty people and how to not become hard sort of hardened to the reality that you know maybe this is the one who isn't without driving yourself insane in the process and I think that that I certainly found that challenging in my relatively brief experience and I think that that's a kind of training it's very good in our business to never let the skepticism that can be healthy in our work never let that skepticism get the better of us I would like to just say a couple words about what I see is the evolution of prison law because I think that in a lot of ways it's gone from a more procedural conception of the role of counsel to a much more substantive in 1974 and 5 and 6 when I was doing this as a law student I could say 1973 that our focus would be on a lot of administrative law principles. One of the big cases that went through during that time was a sentence calculation case involving retroactivity of how much remission you lost from roles revolved and so on it was very technical stuff and my sense of it is now that courtesy of the charter and general generally enhanced understanding of human rights norms that the preoccupations are becoming much more substantive in the sense of things like segregation health care and so on viewed through a substantive human rights perspective. All I could say is I sure wish we had the charter would be trying to roll some of these rocks uphill and I think the other great thing about doing prison law at least in those days was it taught you how to be pretty able to handle defeat because you lost a lot of cases and I don't think it was just us I think some of the cases were tough so to wrap up I just would like to say a quick word about the importance of what I hope will be opportunities for law students to work in a clinical setting in prison law. People in custody I don't have to tell anyone here are among the most marginalized in society and meeting their legal needs is obviously a pressing access to justice issue. Every facet of the inmates daily life is subject to the exercise of discretionary statutory authority you might think of it as the regulatory state on steroids and I think it was Justice Darren said there were lots of rules but maybe not so much law. Prison law is just also not just about trying to address the legal needs of the prison but to really to be a person who can shine a light on what's going on in places where many of our fellow citizens never go and want to go. That having that link to the outside having those advocates on the outside of course is very important to shine a light on the practical impact of penal policy and the practical impact of resource allocations and I think that for law students and the profession which they will become a part clinical training is invaluable not only is it substantially challenging but I think it leads to direct encounters with marginalized people and first-hand experience of the exercise of discretionary power experiences that will shape that person's outlook for the rest of their lives and I hope will provide I think what the Carnegie Foundation were for in the education called an important apprenticeship in law and it's the sort of apprenticeship that I hope would lead us to develop lawyers who had that sense of service to the community and to the profession that can require so power of ladies. All to action law schools and barrister societies that now I'd like to ask Dr. Palmer to address the audience. Wait, need the Luigi Pampometer? Is this on? Is this on now? Don't do well with handheld Let's take it. How about this? Okay, awesome. Quay and me and the Luigi Pampometer I am so happy to be back on unceded McMonkey territory and to be with all of you talking about prison law and prison justice and prison injustice because that's exactly what it is right now in our country it's prison injustice and my particular focus is going to be on not just Indigenous people but specifically Indigenous women and girls because they suffer a very unique kind of injustice in this country that's a form of racism, sexism and violence all put together in every institution that they have ever been in and I'm going to sacrifice some of my 15 minute race to really talk about the history because history matters it's the link to now it's the only way to understand what's happening and what we need to do to change it and and it's important to start not with the injustice but where Indigenous women are Indigenous women are incredibly strong and powerful people and that's how we have to see them first and foremost Indigenous women held important roles in our nation they were political strategists they were negotiators they were leaders they were in fact formidable warriors themselves and first and foremost they were survivors and that's the context from which we come and the context that you need to understand is that colonial governments saw that and particularly targeted Indigenous women and girls for that reason while they raped our lands they were also raping our women the very first police force in this country worked with Indian agents to use rations to extort sex from our Indigenous women and girls that's how the injustice system started in this country and it should be no surprise that we have murdered a missing Indigenous women today that police officers have not opened files that they have not investigated or that we have yet to see justice that gets translated into today in addition to the sexualized violence there was also a different kind of violence stealing our children from us and putting them in residential schools where they would be tortured and sexually abused and in effect murdered is the worst kind of violence a woman can go through there's a reason why women who lose their children to child and family services today have higher rates of heart attack suicide and stroke it is the worst violence you can commit it didn't stop there it continued with the 60s scoop it continues today we in fact have more Indigenous children in care today than ever in our history getting worse at phenomenal rates so it should be no surprise then that the prison rate for Indigenous women and girls is going up there is a critical link between those two but while all of this is happening and was happening Indigenous women and girls were being sterilized to stop us from rebuilding our nation for everyone they took away they tried to make sure we couldn't repopulate our nations at the same time the Indian Act created a system of inequality where Indigenous women would be removed from their communities along with their children not have a voice in their governing systems and that inequality remains in the Indian Act today and not just the Indian Act in fact it is has infected all federal laws policies and governing systems but when I say systems don't misunderstand me because paper doesn't rape a woman paper doesn't put someone in prison it's individual and the thing we have been most reluctant to address in this country is the racism sexism and violence committed by individuals against Indigenous people no law or paper can do that and that's why we're not seeing any changes and things getting worse how does that translate so you've got this historical context that's continued into modern days and now we have the worst socioeconomic conditions you could possibly imagine for a very wealthy so-called liberal democratic human rights loving multicultural loving country Indigenous women and girls are at the very very bottom across every socioeconomic condition and have been for a very long time you may sometimes see people in universities sitting alongside you or at work and say oh look things are getting better but not for the majority of people not for the people who are removed relocated and erased from society like people who are imprisoned like all of those who are incarcerated in addition to everything you hear in the media water crisis housing crisis what we don't see are all the invisible people that almost half of all homeless people in this country are Indigenous people and the majority are Indigenous women and guess where their children end up you don't have a house they end up in foster care and where did the majority of kids in foster care go two-thirds of them end up in prison they're less likely to get an education and they're the number one target for human traffickers and other people in society judges lawyers social workers teachers police officers and corrections officers they all know it's not just serial killers they're just not just a few random monsters in our society this is what Indigenous women are facing so while the justice system tries to look at the crime and analyze the alleged crime that's been committed they forget to look at the person and the many multiple overlapping crimes that have happened to Indigenous women and girls that have never been addressed that they have never gotten justice and never will yet they sit in prison for the crime of being female Indigenous and a horrible reminder of what the state has done to them that's really uncomfortable reconciliation in terms of prison justice is not going to be had by putting up artwork on the walls or bringing some sweet grass to prison we want our people out of prison so we've got history that translates into these socioeconomic conditions that translates into the overrepresentation of Indigenous women in prison and you might think and many people have asked well maybe it's culturally related maybe it's addictions related what we're talking about here are not vulnerable women we're talking about kick-ass warrior women who have been ripped from their communities and made vulnerable I'm a strong woman but if you throw me in a tank full of sharks I'm all of a sudden going to be very vulnerable and that's what we're talking about it's not any kind of defect with these women that are in prison it's the positions that they were forced into and the failure of the Canadian state to protect their core basic human rights their rights to be free from sexualized violence from their teachers their priests their social workers their corrections officers their lawyers that's a massive violation of the law but the problem is with the rule of law is that for Indigenous people it's been turned on its head and it's become the law of rulers and that law has been imposed on us especially in the prison system with an absolute vengeance it is hard enough at places even like the United Nations or even in society to get some kind of attention for people who are incarcerated but it's even harder to get attention for Indigenous people and harder again for Indigenous women and so the fact that you're all here helps me in my 15 minute race to try to convince you that we need in fact a radical shift because the injustice to Indigenous women doesn't stop in court it doesn't stop once they're imprisoned we can talk about prison law and we can talk about prison justice but in fact the assaults against Indigenous women in prison have doubled use of force against Indigenous women have tripled 17 times higher for Indigenous women's self-injury and that's not even including things like suicide the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry societies have long called for a review of the many claims by Indigenous women and girls and other women of sexual assaults sexual extortion and sexual abuse by corrections officers themselves you need only read any article in the media to hear that these things are starting to be exposed slowly but surely but not in a way that we are yet outraged by it we have police officers in Valdor who still wear bands in solidarity with their poor colleagues who are outed for sexually abusing Indigenous women and girls stand proud police officers stand together why on earth would we support that in a society like this we should be saying no we don't accept this on the streets and we certainly don't accept it in prison so we have this escalating crisis we've had numerous justice inquiries that have talked about this issue of racism there's clearly racism in the justice system at all levels Donald Marshall Inquiry told us that Ipper Wash told us that the Ontario Provincial Police were infected with racism that the myth of one bad apple is just that myth and that Indigenous peoples face this on a regular basis but we haven't yet been able to come around to deal with dealing with racism and sexism and sexualized violence in all of these institutions and how it creates these situations why are Indigenous women in prison to begin with because they mortally stabbed the person who had been beating and abusing them for years in all the ways in which Indigenous women and girls try to navigate life and protect themselves from ongoing violence these are the reasons why they end up in prison and what is prison to an Indigenous woman and girl it's a death sentence it's an absolute death sentence and if you manage to survive it's a life sentence you're far less likely to get work afterwards you're far more likely to be homeless you're far more likely to lose your children to CFS and we all know what that does to a woman on the inside you can do just about anything to an Indigenous woman but take her kids away think about something that's incredibly incredibly important but it's something that we haven't quite put our minds around yet it's still too easy for inquiries and commissions and recommendations to say well let's have some more cultural awareness training let's have some diversity training we are not going to professional development our way out of this because the problem is our culture there is nothing wrong with us the problem is on the flip side and if you have to go to professional development training to learn that it's wrong to rape an Indigenous child you shouldn't be in policing you shouldn't be in corrections to begin with but the problem is we don't have any transparency on how prevalent it is we don't have any accountability in terms of what are we going to do to stop it and there's no consequences how many police officers you can probably put them on one hand have ever been held accountable for the sexualized violence against Indigenous peoples for corrections officers because honestly who's going to believe anyone in prison so what i'm asking people to do is help us change this whole concept of what it means to commit a crime how it is that we interact with people who are trying to navigate poverty racism and sexism and is the answer always going to be prison is the answer always going to be corrections because what are you trying to correct born female and Indigenous it's not a crime and the fact that they've managed to survive should be celebrated so thankful all of you are here today because it is such an incredibly important topic and if you do nothing else tweet about Pam underscore palmitter on twitter but seriously this is about people caring and putting pressure on and not allowing Indigenous women and girls who have been erased and hidden in prisons to languish there that reconciliation is far more than that it's about real justice right now and bringing our people home thank you you said a lot what i was going to say because in Australia same issue a country that was invaded and colonized and continues to colonize and we see you know the examples of the ongoing violence is perpetrated against Aboriginal people at home when we walk into our prison system because of the mass over representation of Aboriginal women and girls i'd like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral and unceded territory of the mcmoor people and i'd like to acknowledge elders present and past and emerging i'd also like to acknowledge the sovereign people from the country where i reside and work sisters inside has offices on terrible and jaguar land in the engine and on bindle land up in north Queensland i reside a no longer land which runs towards down to minjera bar where my husband who is a bachelor man resides and has ties to that beautiful island there sovereignty was never ceded in australia just as here in canada as in all invaded states colonization has been ongoing and continuous in australia colonization continues to have a devastating impact on our first nations peoples especially women and girls and children through soul and land through loss of culture loss of language through child removal through imprisonment through separation from families and premature deaths i want to thank the organizers for inviting me to resent to the conference tonight and also i'll be on a couple of panels over the weekend i'd like to acknowledge distinguished guests who are with us and anyone who's in the audience that has been in prison themselves or has family members in prison i'd also like to bring to the forefront of our minds all the women and girls and men who are languishing in prison right now and i can think of a law that we have in our prective services act which a number of women um the practice will out of that law and policy be inflicted on them very soon after having a contact visit with their children and their family and that's our strip searching legislation so our strip searches at home are supposed to be dignified so that sounds nice and fancy and feels warm and fuzzy for all of us out here in the free world about a word dignity and dignified and i can imagine that you're imagining what a dignified strip search may look like maybe not but at home a dignified strip search is where we remove the top half of our clothing including our bra and give that to the prison officer we raise our breasts flick our hair turn around open our mouth then the bra may be given back to you then you take the bottom section of your clothing off including your tampon or your pad and hand that to the prison officer and you may be asked to squawk and cough and even over a mirror that's a dignified strip search that's the practice that comes out of the law those of us that are lawyers or studying to be lawyers we need to be very careful because at the end of the day the language in a piece of legislation might sound fine and dandy and really warm and fuzzy but when it comes to the practices of those who's supposed to be adhering to the rule of law in our prison system are actually undertaking sexual assault by the state nothing more and nothing less the only difference is that they won't be arrested if i did the same thing because they're prison officers or the extension we could take that to as police officers and women will we'll have to undertake those strip searches now as i stand here because they cuddled their baby they cuddled their children they kissed their grandmother or their two-year-old goodbye that is what they pay the price for having to be able to touch and care for their loved ones and i'm sure you all know the background you know it's been spoken about already the histories of horrific violence that women and particularly Aboriginal women have experienced and before they hit the prison gates and the violence continues inside the prison wall i'm the CEO of sisters inside which is an independent community organization which exists to advocate for the collective human rights of women and girls in the criminal injustice system and we do so alongside women and girls so what that actually means in practice is that women sisters inside was born out of when i was in prison and when i was released and i said i would come back the screws the prison officers would say to me yeah you'll be back because they thought i'd come back as a prisoner because i've been in and out of prison since i was 13 i first went in for actually wagging and truanting school social workers convinced my working class parents poor parents to have me locked up for four weeks because it would teach me a lesson yeah it taught me a lesson not the lesson that the social workers and cops thought it was going to teach and of course when i was criminalized as many other girls are the slippery slope that you're on cannot be stopped in most women's cases so i did come back to the prison and it was after a period what we call um in the jurisdiction that i live in Queensland where there was a window of reform there was a murder in the prison my friend close friend who i knew very well was murdered sitting beside me closer than his honor sitting beside me here and they sacked all the prison management and then new management came in and so at that time the head of corrections which we call the director general the commissioner now he decided to run a bit of experiment on us women because there's about 100 women in prison at that time it was overcrowded then and the experiment was to split us up into committees who wanted to be on committees so we're on committees like around issues of food of health of family contact children contact um there was a number of committees that were established and i was on one of those committees and we had a life as a long term as committee and when i came back into prison that's the committee that i continue to work with and those life as a long term women have been on the committee ever since i'm happy to say now that all of them are released the last one after 23 years imprisonment is now in the free world however it's still on parole it will be till the day she dies because she's a lifer and she's on our committee outside but we still have our board meetings inside the prison and they have other women on our management committee and it's part of our actual constitution that a group of women in prison must be part of our management committee to drive all decisions and make all decisions for the organization so the organization now um quickly has four pillows or four arms i call so one is that we provide a lot of services and support to women in prison and our service provision staff we have over half of our staff that are engaged at sisters inside our Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander women it's fundamentally important as a white organization that Aboriginal people are employed to provide those sort of services to work with and for for Aboriginal women and Torres Strait Island women in our prisons we um do a lot of law reform and advocacy so we present to parliamentary committees meet with ministers regularly um we're out on the streets as activists because we're a prison abolitionist organization and so we talk about imagining abolition and how we're going to get there i don't want to talk about reform i'm sorry i know other people um may want to talk about that but reform is just a net widening mechanism for more carceral structures and we see that now in the US for example everybody in Canada included are now turning to electric monitoring that you put around your ankles or home detention type of carceral structures that actually just netwines it means every house can be a prison and it means every person can be imprisoned by having an electronic monitor around their ankle so we don't want to talk about reform it's time for reformists to be reformed and become prison abolitionists and how we get there we also do a lot of community um education so we've developed our own frameworks how we work with and for marginalized racialized criminalized disadvantaged women and girls and the and some of those frameworks come out of a human rights framework we don't have human rights legislation in our country um we don't have a charter our government at the moment of the day a left-wing labor government is talking about now um drafting up human rights legislation so we hope that that may be enacted next year but on that note we don't want a human rights act if it's skeleton and it has no meat on it and it actually means nothing for women and girls and men in prison so it's we go back again to the word a dignified strip search people get excited about human rights legislation but if it's there's no meat on the bones it actually means nothing it's just a marketing model for those in power to say that we are looking after people's human rights that are in the prison system and they are the most voiceless the most powerless than anybody else because they are disappeared from us in our communities behind razor wire or concrete walls and as um his honor said before i'm also now lawyer so i have a law firm that's attached to sisters inside so we represent a lot of the women and girls um who are criminalized and charged with criminal offenses and support them advocate for them in the courts we undertake a number of decarceration strategies which is about working towards abolition so we work very hard in keeping women and girls our prison in the first instance that's where we've got a filter the money to not to prison as kim would say the more money spent on prison the less money spent on community and it's time instead of allowing governments to eviscerate social services continually but pouring billions down the throat of a prison industry that that money must come back to all of us in the community particularly the most marginalized and disadvantaged indigenous peoples of our country i want to talk a bit about um i'm not sure people know but we know globally at least just under 800 000 women are in prison around the world and girls which is a horrific number and it will get to a million in the next couple of years and that's on any one day that's not over a year that's an any one day in our world and the number of women and girls in prison worldwide have increased by around 53 percent since the year 2000 so women and girls and particularly Aboriginal women girls are now the target of the prison industry the prison industrial complex the arm of that the police they're catching up they're criminalizing Aboriginal women and what we're seeing at home and i imagine it'll be the same here i'm sure kim or pam could um um let me know if it's accurate but what we're seeing now is the police are actually targeting Aboriginal girls more so than anybody else and their numbers are increasing at a great rate being pipelined into the youth prisons Aboriginal and Torres Strait women at home are 16 times more likely to be in prison and 74 percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait women have been in prison before so we're talking about a system that's a fundamental failure if Dalhousie Law School had a 74 percent failure rate where students just didn't come here anymore they would freak out yeah they would call board meetings they'd be calling the judges that used to that did their law degree here they would be calling every resource possibly and saying what have we done what have we done we've got to do something different because it's not working because we have a 74 percent failure rate but when it comes to prison and we have a 74 percent failure rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait women what do we do nothing well we allow and endorse our governments to continue to pour millions of dollars down the throat of the prison industry that's a fundamental failure why do you why do we as taxpayers allow this to continue because it's an industry and you're actually part of the industry and you will make your paycheck on the backs of women and particularly black women who are in our prison system and I want you to think about that that's why we as an organization are a prison abolitionist organization so we work towards ending imprisonment so we all live in a world of freedom each and every one of us we need to smash oh one minute the capitalist world because that's the world we're living in very individualistic it's driven by racism go and have a look in a prison and it's driven by the value of property and money it's not driven for the value of people and the value of the most marginalised women and girls in our community I have to end there I had lots more to say very much thank you to everybody here and I want to also start by acknowledging the traditional territory on which we have the privilege of being and to for the Mi'kmaq people for being the custodians of this land for many years before so many of us uninvited guests arrive and thank you in particular Pam for being from the broader territory here and for the leadership you've shown and thank you to all of your family your community your elders and your leaders I also for all of the years that I have spent and it's now getting I'm getting older and for the more than 35 37 years that I've had the privilege of walking in but most importantly being able to walk out of prisons for young people then prisons for men now again prisons for men and and for women it's been painfully obvious the impact of what you've just heard from from previous speakers painfully obvious the impact of colonisation and the impact of the lack of substantive equality in this country I want to talk a bit about what I think and I want to actually I want to thank all of the local panelists so I'm terrible for not doing that and anything I say that I'm going to be proposing some of it you can hold responsible people like Justice and Derek who taught me how to be a client and how to be with clients and I'll talk a bit more about that and you can you don't have to hold Justice Cromwell or the Honourable Thomas Cromwell responsible but he taught me evidence and judicial remedies and I took very creative license with what I learned from that and I'll talk a bit about how how I think some of these things could be done and what tools we have available and what we could be doing quite differently and I want to thank all of you who've done work in this area or will be doing work in this area and I had the privilege last week of being with an amazing another amazing group of young people who are students in the school as we're exploring issues and criminalisation and imprisonment and I thank all of you for the work you do because all of you have helped me learn the things that I I now hold true and and believe so the first thing I want to talk about is when I said Anne taught me how to be a client what I meant was that she taught me that if you really are going to work well with people they are not just props or puppets that your client isn't just your proper puppet and no more more than in the prison experience have I seen that being far too true of time my first visit with a woman named Gail Horry who some of you will know she she told me something that took me a while to learn and then helped me learn it as well and she said if you come here and you just you just take out the words and parrot them it will be just as disrespectful as if you never came here and listened to me in the first place and it took me a while to understand what she meant and what she meant was I came in with information not all the information but I had greater access to information than she had in the segregation cell in a men's prison where she was being held at the time and so then I had an elder tell me you need to learn the seven teachings and be guided by that I thought what does that mean so I I went and learned and it is to treat people with respect to know that they have knowledge have truth have experiences that they can teach us is to respect them by treating them as you would want to be treated it is by being truthful when you hear something that's racist or sexist to confront it just as you would want to confront her I would say should but that's my judgment confronted if you heard it from anybody else you know to love if you're not if the person you're going to be working with you are incapable of caring about you will not provide the same level of service and quality of intervention if you don't see them as someone that could be your loved one someone you care deeply about and want to make sure is not feeling injustice if you don't have wisdom to be able to acknowledge with that humility when you don't know what to do when you're not sure which way to go to say that I need to find more information and that I will share it with you when I know it and to above all have with all of those not above all sorry they're all equal in total I keep being told that there's no hierarchy in him so but with all of that to then have the courage to do something that when you know this you can't unknow it but you can just ignore it and lots of people do never do anything to have the courage to recognize your privilege of opportunity of experience of position of resources whatever it may be because no matter what even if you've been in prison before and you're in this room you're in a position of privilege relative to everybody else who is in prison right now so do that so that was really those were really important teachings they think okay that's great and then what do you do with that well what I've seen over my years as people are doing more work work in prisons is just the opposite often a belief that we know better than the people in prison I believe that we come in with the knowledge that we can tell them how we can fix it and it's at the root of the reform that Debbie talked about that if we think we can change it and fix it one do we really have that authority and power to do that that's not being honest we actually don't do we trust that the system will fix itself no but how can we challenge some of those things well we can use the tools available to do just what Debbie and Pam challenged us to think about is how do we actually ensure that we use the tools we have available to try and get people prevent people from going in or get them out so Justice Derek talked about international norms charter that sort of thing all of those are standards by which we hope the law will operate so when we talk about the Mandela rules or the international minimum standards of treatment of prisoners recognizing those are floors not ceilings recognizing that they are not aspirational documents they should not be they are standards and that if anything especially in a country like Canada we should be aspiring for far more than that international standards are based on what is happening the world over if you're comparing what's happening here to what's happening in the united states or other countries that are doing things far less progressive then you're actually diminishing the position that you're actually trying to achieve louis our war two years ago at a conference that the elizabeth fry society held talked about the fact that she felt no lawyer no judge no legislature legislator should be actually involved in sentencing someone to prison if they do not know where they're going and by that she meant the conditions of confinement how they will be treated and what will happen to them once they're there how many judges how many lawyers how many senators and members of parliament do you think go in regularly to see what the conditions of confinement are i know there are very few there are increasing numbers of senators canada can and should be a leader in this area and we can and we should be demanding no less than that standard so i want to talk a bit about a few cases and not just individual cases but a few approaches that have shown the the fragility and the problem when we don't take that approach so those who go into the prison regularly and i know there are a whole bunch of people from and they were lost people know i used to work with the fry so from the kneading association once a month at least without fail there are a group of advocates who go into every federal penitentiary for women in this country they go through the entire prison including segregation to see the conditions of confinement and to try and address the issues they see in addition there are women advocates in the prison serving prisoners who work on those issues in between and keep in touch with the teams so why do you think that that organization came to a position of saying we should decarcerate we should start with things like getting rid of segregation we should ensure that as much as possible we're doing everything we can to prevent people from going in and get them out why did they have a position around guaranteed livable incomes why did they have positions around ensuring that we have free education because they're all intertwined and what they see by seeing those conditions of confinement is that every attempt to reform has led to an expansion of the type that debbie talked about of the prison system and entrenchment and in fact more and more particularly women but those who are most vulnerable particularly racialized women those are most marginalized i should say racialized women as well as those who have mental health issues those that experience violence and the like so because of an inadequacy of the true knowledge of what's happening in the prisons we see aberrations like the one in the segregation case in bc where at one instance the judge is saying segregation is bad and there's tons of don't hear me as saying there's not lots of good information in these cases there is first time that there's a recognition that segregation is bad across the board is happening all of those things are true but you then have a judge saying that because of his inadequate knowledge of the conditions of confinement based on what was put before him but also his obviously his belief we end up with a situation where he doesn't feel that women are disproportionately impact you just heard an abundance of evidence the correctional investigator has been documenting this for years why because nobody knew enough to know to cross examine the corrections witnesses about all the details that were incorrect about what was being put on the record nobody wanted to take a position of no segregation couldn't be done i heard lots of arguments about it and i heard people say and i was actually i said okay i don't know enough i haven't been working with men for a while they said men want this well i'll tell you what we're about to go on the fourth trip the prison the senate human rights committee into prisons and i've yet to find a prison where when we talk about the options and i challenge them to think about other ways to deal with what they're dealing with in the prison and that they don't come up with alternatives to being segregated and they say well we were some of the ones who said we need segregation for these reasons so we do need to keep challenging in my view those floors and create new opportunities and make canada the example that we could be internationally for true reform if you want to use that word but true emancipatory action true substantive equality particularly for prisoners if we started looking at what's actually happening why did that judge think that he's not a stupid man why did the the people who are involved the lawyers the clients put that information because in fact the work that had been being done for the better part of 20 years to reduce the numbers of people in segregation meant that there were fewer women in segregation over the previous period than they had been before those cases started so of course it looks like there's been improvement but what never got put on the record is every single prison in this country for women and now I'm seeing for men as well every person classified as maximum security in this country is in a state of segregation may not be the place because those of your lawyers know segregation is both a status and a place the place they call segregation and a status of being separated from general population and not having access to programs services your loved ones visitors and as the correction investigator has articulated very well we're seeing an increasingly repressive regimes throughout the prisons when every maximum security prison for men that I've been in on this prison visit they are starting to do the same thing that they did with women 20 years ago all these segregated units no mix 21 hours 22 hour walk up and now it's permitting worse now we've got lockdowns which I consider another state of segregation when you've got institutions locked down for increasingly extended periods and nobody is allowed out of their room their cell their observation unit whatever you want to call it you're in fact creating increasingly segregated states so one of the things that that were where we can look at in my view is look at some of the decarceration strategies that Debbie challenges to where right now you don't have to change the law just have the courage to start to do this when you have someone who comes before you and they have mental health issues issues look at section 29 of the corrections and condition release act it allows the prison to transfer people out of the prison to health facilities to health authorities and they could do that do they do it sure if they think I'm having a heart attack or if they believe I'm having a heart attack but I'm not just making it up to get attention that some people die when they say they're having heart attacks but if I'm having a heart attack and I go out there's no presumption that any guard can do cardiac surgery but there's a presumption that somehow they can triage mental health issues so section 29 my time is up so the other ones are section 72 every senator every member of parliament every judge has a right of access to our federal penitentiaries go get them take them in and tell them you want them to help you get access and do what you need to do in there section 77 says for women there needs to be specific approaches and it needs to involve those doing the work hello you can go talk to all that gang up there about what you can do there sections 80 81 and 84 are specifically focused on indigenous and everybody else so the subsection of those of 81 and 84 says these can apply to non-indigenous prisoners too and they say you can take someone who's a serving prisoner and take them into the community and have them serve as serve their community there corrections will tell you and I suspect you may even have a presentation here will tell you that you have to open up a little mini prison I call this is being taped I say that's nonsense there is nothing in the legislation that says that it's only in the policy that corrections has developed we have been working on and I see Darcy's here and Tief is not here but some of the students who have done incredible work researching that and we have the background material showing that the intention not just of those provisions but of the CCRA itself was to be a piece of human rights legislation and listen carefully to reduce the numbers of people in prison if that was the legislative intent then we sure have not been doing a very good job so sections 81 84 can be used 81 is for people serving prisons sentences 84 is a paroling option then we can do things like they did just recently in Brazil a woman went to court and challenged just like just like had been done in South Africa when Nelson Mandela came into into power in the Hugo case he he was challenged but he decided that every mother and talking about what Pam Pomona talked about every mother who was in prison who had children on the age of 12 would just be free that's it did it no increase in crime no increase in risk to public safety they've just done it in Brazil and guess what they also released everybody a waiting truck who had children of the age and so you can be doing some of these things we can also say if you do if you're more interested in legislative reform okay well challenge the new the cease 56 that is supposed to be the fix to the segregation issue many many members of parliament believe it's a fix you have to challenge that and and we can also say let's do at the very least what they did with the youth criminal justice act about 15 years ago everybody was up in arms oh my god we had this young offenders act and now we're jailing eight kids at eight times the rate we're jailing adults by the change of a policy or a piece of legislation saying judges have to first look at other systems they cut in half the number of young people in custody but newsflash guess who didn't get cut in half indigenous kids black kids and girls and so we can and must do better and so I know my time is up so I have spent the first half of my career trying to reform prisons the second half is now about trying to prevent people from getting into prisons being put into prisons shoved into prisons dying in prisons and to get them out and I for one know you're all up to the challenge and I look forward to working with all of you to do that too so thank you can we have a collective even bigger around 20 minutes and we'll try to do this as democratically as possible perhaps I'll get uh professor devlin to help me make sure I take the questions in order and do we have a roving mic or do you for someone want to take this oh yeah oh there's a mic yeah okay good so um it's open for questions I'm sure you must have yes right here thank you so are we all going to ask the government to put up some money so that lawyers can keep taking the correctional system to court in order to force them right comments isn't the government the problem of the first place in the sense that they are legislating to ensure that the prison industry is aligned well so I can't see that they're going to fund lawyers to get people out they may be smaller but I think the reality is that those of us who are lawyers we're in a position of privilege and great honor you will never have that set of skills I think we need to use the set of skills to actually assist the most marginalized people in our prison system to get them out and to challenge correct services and the government and that may mean that there is no money doesn't need money to do something I don't even live you've got to live on your house but do you need two cars do you need two properties do you need a flash set of high heels a nice handbag to get back to the community because of the privilege that we carry for being lawyers I'm sorry I'm sorry so the point is you need some carrots up there to encourage them in order to do it so one of the remedies that um within that louise arbor recommended in 1996 that I think could deal with some of this is she said that where corrections interference with a lawful sanction basically frustrates the sentence if someone is put in segregation with their laptop or they're not getting access to programs or or or that they judges should be able to revisit those sentences and I think that's one way to get it and in addition to civil claims that have some which have been being brought I think that is the other thing is I do think to pick up on one one thing that I raised that I didn't expand on is one of the things I'm exploring right now oh and if anybody wants to support the bail that's a good two if you want but just like discretion um but the one of the things that we're exploring is guarantees of blinker as a way to allow people right now there are so many young lawyers that I that want to do this work and can't afford to though they can't even find jobs to do if they can't find places particularly racialized um young people who are graduating from law school and if we had a guarantee of the income thing I I can guarantee I know at least just off the top of my head 20 young people who would want to do that work and get their basic income which would really be a huge benefit so I think it is about thinking creatively if I won well I'm gonna say that I thought you know it's not anyway I'm gonna say our plane got struck by lightning today that's I thought it was pretty cool my dad just told me I'm stupid it was not cool and anyway I didn't know what it was but um but at that point Debbie looked at me says maybe we should buy a lottery ticket I often have said I've never bought water tickets since uh prof taught me and I realized but in all seriousness if we if we had a lawyer for every single prisoner I guarantee that every single prisoner has a lawsuit in this country and that's more than one yeah that is the Supreme Court of Canada said in the Carter case that lawyers should be encouraged problem and the way that they can be paid is through substantial indemnity costs and the court's awarding costs for doing so so that's something that I think needs to be looked at as ways to fund some of these issues I think that if you actually look to the south you actually get a good answer here in the United States at a federal level if there's a statue that says that it was claimed against a government whether it's a state government or the federal government and the there's a successful challenge in terms of a civil right violation lawyers are entitled to reasonable fees and this is how the American Civil Liberty Association is now only present and taking all these cases to court and they are now represented in over 50 states so there's a way that you can legislate it legislate which I think is a much more stronger position than for example the Chartered Court Challenge Program which is much more narrow so I think these are the kinds of things that looking to our thinking could resolve the issue but nothing else I'm actually glad to raise it because with regards to whether it's prison justice or justice for indigenous peoples the question of money always comes up what about the cost and we have to ask for more money and here's the thing in Canada there is more than enough money pipeline we buy there and this is about being it's if we care enough about the issue there's more than enough money to go around but is this little finite pocket of money like the cost needs to be a lawyer should absolutely meant that you represent prisoners that you represent people that don't have the money to do it and not just cases that might make a law firm look good but you get to practice unless you're practicing for the people social back in our justice system most of the lawyers I know do exactly that but they don't get the evidence and I've been here for 20 years I haven't had anything to say I'm the common representing Quakers fostering justice I'd like to ask senator Payton if there's any chance that the government counter will adopt the Mandela rules as minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners in Canada well they they say they do and the the reality is that's not good enough as far as I'm concerned and just to pick up on something that pandas raised there is no end of money and resources to do security interventions in prisons so you know can you James who's a indigenous woman who died having a heart attack because they thought the mental opposition was just trying to get attention her brother said it better than I can he said when she wanted to get the education it was E fry and others who supported her to get an education they would not give any money to support her getting an education the minute they wanted to transfer across the country or put her in segregation there's no end of resources to use force and so it is also about saying how do we spend that money and why do we spend it that way and going back to using section of 77 of the CCRA for women if you go back and look at what the plans were for women it was way more than what the Mandela rules or the Bangkok rules which apply to women are and it was way more than that and it's been totally frustrated by the way it's been informed by the way the plan has been implemented so we we need to I think go back to basic principles but what we are trying to do and the costing that they the parliamentary budget officer did in 2010 and then just recently again after our requested it or our office requested it is you know they've come out and shown I mean it's more cost effective to get people out of prison and invest in social services health care and education than it is to continue this practice so I think we also need to look at another work movies our board's recommendations which was judicial oversight something and and really to ensure that what's happening is exposed and and so that people can be paid for their work but I think there are other ways and creative ways which we're looking at these things as well thank you president and and here it is yes you're on my side I'm not a person you are now you know I'm trying to portray that um actually I was going to ask a question from just talking about who I will remind if you are retired so I expect a very open answer off the top speaking very widely about what do you think uh judicial activists should do I will simply say we're talking about minority representation I do see it having practiced prison law for 10 years I don't think that I think I've maybe seen one or two prison lawyers of indigenous backgrounds um actually practicing for indigenous people here in prisons I think that's unfortunate I can say that I am one of the only visible minority uh prison lawyers that I have known um and I come from fairly privileged circumstances myself so we're not doing enough to encourage the people that we say we are trying to hook out to actually the lawyers representing those people we need to do much more that's a good one so Jeff Cuomo was going to ask me was in 1978 you wrote an article on Havie's Corpus uh I think you were working in the Queens at the time as well as well and I can say actually that whenever a prison law case came in front of you like one court council on both sides of the aisle trying to set your article on music but what I wanted to ask because now there's two things you know you've been a jurist and now you're interested in access to justice what do you think Havie's Corpus could be at the time that you wrote that article in 1978 and what do you think has become because part of the issue with Havie's Corpus today is an access to justice issue fundamentally uh when we're trying to get redress for what's happening to prisoners in the federal system we have two options which is a federal court system and then we've got Havie's Corpus before permission spirit court the problem is that there are boundaries to Havie's Corpus and there was a time when jurists were trying to expand those boundaries uh the case of Gamble in 1988 where they did they ran the Havie's Corpus along the section 24-1 Charger with you seems to have been forgotten and I struggle with this in the sense that you want to be able to do things quickly and effectively so you try to Havie's Corpus but then you find yourself bound by risk which dark finally and traditionally people say the only remedy is release what to be done in terms of your now interest in access to justice as well as your extensive knowledge of Charger's Remedies uh to attend where can we go with Havie's Corpus and did it develop the way you might have seen it in 1978? I can try to be a quick answer that number one I think when we were doing some of that work on Havie's in the 70s we were dealing with two realities one was the overlap between the judicial review jurisdiction of federal court and the Havie's jurisdiction on the original security courts and we were constantly confronted with the argument that if you wanted to do anything more than review the sort of the facial legality of the detention you needed the Charger's Remedies was called Charger's Remedies Corpus but that was within the exclusive jurisdiction of federal court so we resisted that I think that issue went to the Supreme Court about three times I'm not quite sure why I had to go three times I didn't see that complicated to me but I don't know yet um so we're sort of that one and really had a more searching ability to probe the conditions of incarceration the other piece of it is I think we were inspired by the 70 leftist jurisprudence on the use of Havie's Corpus to get that conditions increase um because of the way our criminal corrections are set up and the explicit limitations of remedies other than appeals we didn't I think feel that we would ever get into a whole lot of conviction review stuff through Havie's Corpus but we did expect that we'd be able to be quite a bit in terms of conditions of incarceration and some of that I think has come come to pass um but it seems to me that a lot of litigation is still taken to the federal court by way of judicial review whether that's simply because it's hard to link particular challenge to any condition of imprisonment that could be seen as a restriction on the reading or whether that's a decision that's made for other reasons I don't know you could probably help us with that but I think we hoped that Havie's Corpus would be an important tool for challenging conditions of incarceration in those days and I think to some extent that it's short answer to your tough question I'm going to try to get one more in here if I could up here yes me yes you I'm not going to guess the professor again so just you uh Tom Engel from Edmonton uh Dr. Zinger I have a question I want to pick up on your statement that you have the power to call a public inquiry and never have um and Justice Cromwell said it's important to shine the light on what is going on in our prisons and I'm very surprised that the correctional investigator hasn't called a public inquiry in Edmonton the Edmonton institution the max is a cesspool of violence and corruption and it's there's a lot of notoriety publicly about it and it seems to me if you're going to have a public inquiry on some sergeant pepper in Vancouver spraying a bunch of demonstrators with pepper spray which is a serious incident this is way more serious what's going on in our prisons so how come there hasn't been a public inquiry called well uh I can tell you uh our office um have the authority for for decades now and we have yet to use it that doesn't mean that we will never use it um I think the um often the uh part of the problem I would say is the nature of being an ombudsman office so it's a delicate balance in terms of especially when you're a prison ombudsman that you are dedicated constantly to um to oversee an agency and then you have to sort of uh it's not like a for example an ordinary general that comes in and then makes a bad report and then meets the department alone for another five years and then comes back we're always there and part of the ombudsman uh I guess one of the pillars is to attempt to resolve matters uh at the lowest level and informally and we are if you want an informal avenue or address that was the that's one of the reason for setting up ombudsman offices um and if we one day would decide that it would be appropriate we would have to you know seek out all sorts of lawyers to help us to you know to meet the requirement uh our office uh we only have two lawyers out of a you know 40 employees uh and that's not a bi accident these were decisions that were made by my predecessors um and it's the the whole idea is that if you try to resolve matters um and you bring lawyers to the table uh then then it becomes problematic because then the you know the correctional officers will come with their union arrest and they're lawyers and and then you you won't get that informal resolution so I think it's a it's a it's a it's a difficult one for me to say I'm not saying no never uh but it is very unusual that we have that authority um and um and as I say sometimes you have to go to a route of the formal system and I will tell you um in my role as the executive director prior to this this role when I managed the office and I was in in intertwined and daily cases which now is is uh they manage by my new executive director it was not a day where it was not a case I was brought to my attention where I sort of said this would be better dealt with by a lawyer or by a formal system because we were basically uh often um resolving matters that deals with human rights violation and I'm not sure whether every time that that's an appropriate way of dealing with it uh informally um I think eventually you some of those cases would be better uh served in the long term by having formal system with everything that thank you all very much we're at seven thirty I just want to say this has been a tremendously humbling and informative session for me until tonight I would have been part of the professional development crowd and my takeaway is is that we're not going to professional develop their way I think the biggest challenge uh in these types of conferences is to see everybody so enthusiastic and then say what's for dinner and go on to our busy busy lives but I get a sense at this conference due to the wonderful staff and wonderful organizers that there will be some tangible takeaways and I would urge all of us to think about some tangible takeaways I'm going to Vancouver in the morning unfortunately but over the weekend uh think of some tangible takeaways because uh it's not enough to be inspired for a few hours I think we've got a tremendous interaction so thank you all very much I'm out of here