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Bill 58 – Corrections Amendment Act (Third Reading)

Ms Blakeman:

Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. Speaking in third reading to the anticipated effect of the implementation of Bill 58, the Corrections Amendment Act, 2009, I had a couple more questions. I wondered if there had been legal advice that had been given on the constitutionality of this bill. I know that we are dealing with people who, when convicted, have lost some of their rights of an expectation of privacy. This also covers, my understanding is, people in a remand centre. My colleague had looked at an amendment that would have tried to change the language to indicate that it only affected those who’d been tried and convicted in a court of law. The problem was that, of course, you can only amend the parts of the act that are open in front of you. We would have had to go into a number of other consequential acts in order to correct that term in all of the areas. So it became more problematic, and we weren’t able to do it. But you can see why we were trying to do it.

People in the remand centre have not been convicted. The first reaction I get is: well, they wouldn’t be in the remand centre if they hadn’t done something wrong. Not true. People are in the remand centre because there’s a concern about failure to appear. Why do you get those concerns? Well, it’s basically that courts want to know that if they let you go, you’re going to come back or that they can find you to bring you back. People of no fixed address automatically get put in the remand centre. So anybody that’s homeless, anybody that’s on the street, whether they’re guilty of that crime or not, is in the remand centre.

There’s a group of people – and it’s not a small group of people – in our remand centre that doesn’t fit into that category of: well, if they were in there, it’s pretty much guaranteed they were bad. No. Actually, we can pretty much guarantee that they were homeless, and that’s how they ended up in the remand centre. They get captured under this legislation. I have an additional concern that we are far too quick to place people under surveillance for the convenience of the state. Let me put it that way. I don’t think that the government and their agencies, like the corrections service and the police, come at this with any kind of subterfuge or ill will.

They’re trying to get a certain job done, and it’s easier to get their job done if everything is laid out in front of them. I’ve spoken before in the House of how the police have said to me that, you know, they wouldn’t mind it if everybody had a chip that could identify where they were on planet Earth. They’d find that kind of convenient because they feel it would help them get the bad guys earlier. It just doesn’t work. I mean, with the number of closed-captioned cameras that we’ve got, did it make our crime rate drop? No, it didn’t. Guess what? The crime rate just moved over a block. Most criminals, particularly the ones that get caught, are pretty stupid, but the ones that don’t get caught are not so stupid. Now we’ve ended up basically keeping our law-abiding citizens under surveillance. What was the point of that? They’re decent people going about their life, but those are the ones that are showing up in the closed-captioned cameras. I’ve gotten a bit off the specific purpose of the effect of Bill 58, but I have concerns about this.

What I see is a very concerted effort from the government to place people in the remand centre and in corrections – and I think it’s important to distinguish between those two – into facilities now where everything they do is under surveillance, including an area that used to not be, or at least not with the level of intimacy that they are now able to watch somebody’s life. That was about the communication. What this act has done is change everything from telephone calls to communication, which covers everything, particularly the familial video conferencing that will now be in place at the new Edmonton Remand Centre.

All of those will be watched. All of those families who have not done anything wrong will be under surveillance, even if we get reassurances that: oh, we’re not going to keep the stuff that is on the family. Really? Somebody is going to go through those tapes and watch all of that, so somebody else has heard that conversation between a husband and wife, a mother and a son, a father and a daughter, whoever, siblings, that they had every right to expect that their portion of was not going to be listened to by somebody else.

There you have a decent citizen who has now been listened to, has been under surveillance by an official, and they have done nothing wrong. There’s no reason why they should be under surveillance, but they will be because of what’s in this act. None of us ever expects to see ourselves in that position, but part of what I try to do is look at legislation and go: well, how would I feel if it happened to me? I’ll tell you that I wouldn’t be very happy if I went to visit someone, a brother, a nephew, a father – sorry that I’m naming all the males in my family; that’s not very fair – my aunt, my cousin because they were in a remand centre, and I’m now on surveillance and somebody has listened to things that I said in confidence or in an intimate way to someone that was in those circumstances. How fair is that to me? It’s not.

But that’s what this bill does. It captures that. I think we should not give up our right to privacy without a fight. I don’t think we should impose that or, rather, take it away from others without a great deal of thought. What I see here is ease. This is about ease of managing people who are in an apprehended situation. They’re in a remand centre or a corrections facility. It’s going to make it easier for them to monitor the communication. It’s going to make it easier to watch people. I’ll be very interested to see if there’s a way of coming back to me in a year or two or three and saying: “You know what? We’re able to show to you that because we watched this, these intimate conversations between people, and we watched all of that communication from people that were incarcerated or in a remand centre, we’ve been able to reduce gang violence in corrections facilities by 50 per cent.” I’d be very interested if that’s able to happen because, frankly, I doubt it.

There are a lot of other ways of passing information and communicating that wouldn’t necessarily be caught on a camera or a telephone or even Internet communication, websites, whatever, or tracking, you know. This will allow them to go and track where people have been when they go online on a prison computer because it’s about communication. If you’re online and you’re communicating one way or another, you’re sending cookies out. That would count. I mean, the discussion of gangs and trying to get at gangs has already been discussed once in this House. Clearly, it’s an issue that people are really concerned about. I think this is subjecting a whole bunch of decent people to surveillance by the state, and I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t support it, and I never will.

Thank you.