Proposed ’11th-hour’ reforms won’t help Canada’s inmates: B.C. lawyer
VANCOUVER — Canada’s correctional service continued to use indefinite solitary confinement for prisoners despite decades of policy-reform recommendations and a call for change from the prime minister, a lawyer said Tuesday.
Joe Arvay told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that change did not come after the Liberals won the election in the fall of 2015, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the justice minister to implement recommendations from a coroner’s inquest into the suicide death of a young inmate who’d been isolated.
Arvay is representing the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and the John Howard Society of Canada in a lawsuit launched against the federal government in January 2015. He told the court that even a bill Ottawa introduced two weeks ago to impose a time limit on what prison officials call administrative segregation falls short.
“Instead, through the course of this litigation there has been policy tinkering, and at the 11th hour the introduction of a bill that may one day but has not yet amended the laws that govern solitary confinement in Canada,” he said in his opening submission.