Bill 58: Corrections Amendment Act (Second Reading)
Ms Blakeman:
Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. Thank you to my colleague, who as the official critic for this area in our caucus sort of sets the tone and the direction that caucus would go in. It’s very kind of him to allow me to contradict him, well, at least to push back a little bit.
I have spent a lot of time becoming familiar, or at least trying to, with the amount of surveillance that we have in our society now. Generally, that sort of monitoring, let’s call it, tends to fall into two areas. One is marketing, and one is surveillance. You know, they’ve now got those chips that they put in your clothing when you buy them, and when you go out and you walk by the store that sells that kind of apparel next time, they know that you’re walking by in one of their outfits, and they can phone your cellphone and ask you to pop in because there’s a sale on that kind of jacket that you like. Those are called radio frequency identifiers. That’s right: RFIDs.
So there are lots of ways for sort of putting something on somebody and monitoring their activities or their movement. As I say, some of it’s used for marketing. You know, you have a choice as an individual to say, “No, I’m not going to pop in and buy that jacket because I have another one like it” although it can be pretty persuasive, and there are lots of studies out there and many PhDs have been earned on advertising and the effect of it. Let’s face it: it’s successful.
The second kind of monitoring you get is surveillance, and I have a lot more trouble with this. I prefer to think of most of our citizens as pretty law abiding, pretty decent people who are just trying to get about their own lives. I understand that there are people that are not law abiding and are not trying to get on with their lives; they’re trying to take something from mine. But I think that when we have a technology that is advancing so fast on us that we cannot keep up with it, we’ve got to be very careful when we pass legislation that gives pretty unfettered control to any government or anybody of authority to be able to use monitoring methods on parts of our population. It can get away from us pretty quickly and move far beyond what the legislation anticipated before we could even get in here in some cases and get the legislation back up to deal with it. This is an ongoing argument, but most of us have not lost the right to privacy.
I would argue that even going about your life in a public place should not make you subject to surveillance by authority figures. I don’t think it’s right that there are cameras in some areas. It’s not the taking of the image. See, people always say: well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of; what’s your problem with it? Well, you may well have done nothing wrong, but you may not be in the room when that information is interpreted.
You may not have the opportunity to pop up and say: actually, my boss knew that I was out on the street at 2 o’clock in the afternoon going for a coffee at Tim Hortons. The person’s wife may not know why they were out in the afternoon going to Tim Hortons at 2 o’clock, and there could be problems there. That individual doesn’t get to be in the room when that data is interpreted, and that’s a big part of the problem.
I think we’ve had a couple of changes here. To me they look like they’re interlocking or they could interlock. We’ve had a change in the way our new remand centre is being built, the new remand centre that’s in north Edmonton in which, in fact, there will be no direct, face-to-face meetings between inmates and anyone except for their legal representatives.
All communication – and I’m making those finger quotation marks again – all of that communication will fall under this bill. Their MLA could go out to visit somebody that’s an inmate in a remand centre and will now be also included, also captured, in that monitoring of whatever that inmate is doing because they’re not a legal representative, and the only one that’s cut out of this or set aside is their legal representative.
We’re now setting up a remand centre in Edmonton in which all of that communication could be and I’m sure will be captured under this bill, and I think that’s problematic. I think the fact that you’re dealing with people who are in a remand centre who are not convicted in a court of law – and that’s the dividing line we make. I will point out yet again that a very high proportion of the people that we have in remand centres are people who are dealing with a mental illness and did not have an address. That is why they end up in the remand centre, because one of the criteria is: do you have a fixed address where we can come and find you? If you’re homeless or you’re out on the streets for a mental illness . . .
[interjection]
Well, it will get much worse with Alberta Hospital releasing a number of people, and they’re trying to move them into the community because as soon as they go off their meds, they don’t return home to their group home, et cetera, et cetera. They’re out in the street. They get picked up for vagrancy. Guess what? No fixed address. Yahoo. You’re in the remand centre, and any communication that you have with your social worker, with your family member, all of that now is going to be done by video conferencing, where they can monitor it, all of which is subject to this act.
Right there that technology has already moved ahead of what I see being talked about in the debate around this bill. Now, maybe the government is very aware of it. Maybe they planned this. Okay. Fair enough. But fess up that you intended to do this. I think it’s wrong that the taping of family members that are visiting people that are not convicted – they are remanded; they’re not an offender – are subject to this taping.
As well, we have to be very careful with the implementation of something like this that we don’t subject 90 per cent of the people in order to catch 10 per cent of them. And we do that a lot, where we put in legislation that is going to cover a whole bunch of people. We’re just trying to get at a smaller percentage that we’re trying to catch, but we cast that net wide enough to catch everybody. I think that’s wrong of government to be treating their citizens as though they’ve done something wrong and subjecting them to that kind of surveillance.
And it’s surveillance. There are no limits in this act on how long that surveillance can go on, how long the information is kept, and who is going to look at the information. When I say information, I’m covering what they call communication in this act. A number of these clauses are exactly the same as what we had before, but they were specific to telephone calls. Now “telephone calls” has been removed. Let me give you an example: that the telephone calls are or will be made to a victim as defined in section 14.3(1) or to another person who would be likely to consider the telephone calls intimidating or threatening.
Okay. That same section reappears as: that the inmate communication is or will be made to a victim as defined in section 14.3(1) or to another person who would be likely to consider the inmate communication intimidating or threatening. So the telephone call stuff has been taken out. It’s identical except for now we call it communication, and that’s repeated in almost all of the clauses that are in this bill. All of the old stuff, telephone calls out, communication in. That covers everything. That covers e-mails. That covers video conferencing. It covers Skype. It covers voice over Internet protocol. It covers every kind of communication that that person’s involved with. I mean, an argument could be made that it covers your tattoos because that’s a form of communication in saying who you are and what you do.
I know I’m getting some funny looks, but it’s true. Communication: tattoos would cover for that in some places. There are no limitations put on how much of this information is going to be collected on an individual, how long it’s kept, for whom, who looks at it, who gets to interpret it. Can this pop up 25 years from now in a different trial being used out of context for somebody? Don’t know. I have trouble with this bill as a result of that.
I understand that we have a huge problem with gangs now and that we are struggling, casting about trying to find ways to control gang activity and that gang culture inside of our prisons from operating inside of our prisons and remand centres the same way it operates outside. I understand that, and I agree that we need to test a lot of different models to try and find what is the best thing for that. But I’m not sure that this bill does this. I think that in trying to deal with the gang problem, we’ve thrown a net way too wide and captured far too many other people with a technology that we can’t control and that is moving so fast that limitations we fail to put in this act could cause us deep problems down the road.
I think it was probably a good idea at the time, but there wasn’t enough scrutiny and thought that went into this. I appreciate what the member for Calgary-Buffalo has said and his comments on it. He is the lawyer; I’m not. You know, he has signalled to our caucus that we should be supportive of this bill, but I want to put my concerns on the record while we are talking about the principle of this bill because I think the principle may be all right, but the implementation of it as described in this act is deeply flawed.
There were a couple of criteria that were in place previously that don’t appear anymore. Before what we had was: “Subject to the regulations, the director of a correctional institution may direct . . . where the director believed on reasonable grounds.” Those three have now disappeared and don’t appear as a trio together again, where all three criteria must be met. It’s down to two in most cases and one in some cases. I think we are creating some problems here for ourselves. We’re disrespecting our public, and we need to put some limitations on that kind of surveillance.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk to that. I appreciate it very much.
Thank you.
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