Bill C-10: a costly headache for Nunavut?

Bill C-10, the big new criminal justice law the Conservative government placed before the House of Commons Sept. 20, promises to create a costly new headache for the Government of Nunavut’s Department of Justice.

For those of you who may not have heard of it, Bill C-10, marketed to the public as the “Safe Streets and Communities Act,” would, among its many provisions, create mandatory minimum jail sentences for a variety of criminal offences. It’s intended to reduce the discretion that sentencing judges may now exercise when considering the individual circumstances of certain classes of convicted offenders.

With a brand name like “Safe Streets and Communities Act,” the new law’s a political winner. It may not represent wise policy, but it’s popular policy and for this federal government, that’s all that matters.

And in Nunavut, where rates of victimization from crime, especially violent crime, stand much higher than in most parts of Canada, this bill’s likely to meet with widespread albeit uninformed approval. Though attitudes towards matters of crime and punishment in Nunavut are difficult to assess, the majority of letters and comments submitted to Nunatsiaq News tend to favor retribution and vengeance, not rehabilitation.

And few residents or elected officials have ever displayed much concern for the conditions within which imprisoned Nunavut offenders must live. Remember the revelations about unsafe conditions inside the Baffin Correctional Centre that emerged in 2010? In the end, hardly anyone cared.

But even if you favour harsh punishments for offenders, Bill C-10 still raises a big questions that ought to worry you. How will Nunavut pay to keep them all in jail?

For example, one of Bill C-10’s provisions would set a mandatory minimum sentence of 90 days in jail for the summary convictions of those who commit sex crimes against children and others. Similar offences, if prosecuted by indictment, would attract mandatory minimum sentences ranging between one and five years, depending on the class of the offence. Conditional sentencing, often called “house arrest,” would be eliminated for sexual assault, child-luring, arson, kidnapping and other crimes.

These, and other provisions, will hit Nunavut hard. The per capita sexual assault rate in the territory ranges 10 to 12 times higher each year than the rate for all of Canada. Between 2002 and 2009, the Nunavut court system handled 2,059 sexual assault cases. Crimes like sexual interference, sexual assault and incest are common as dirt.

And even without the effect produced by mandatory minimums, spending at the Government of Nunavut’s Department of Justice, which now totals about $90 million a year, is ballooning already. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, the GN’s justice department spent about $20 million on corrections. In 2011-12, that figure will have risen to at least $30 million.

The largest single item within the justice department’s budget, this money pays the cost of sending convicted offenders to correctional centers, youth institutions, on-the-land camps, and open custody homes. It includes money paid to jurisdictions like Ontario and the Northwest Territories, who accept inmates for whom there’s no space within Nunavut’s overcrowded system.

Consider also that the territory’s only secure correctional centre, BCC, sometimes houses more than 100 inmates, in a jail first designed to hold only 48.

A new 46-bed jail, due to open next year in Rankin Inlet, may relieve a bit of that pressure. But not for long. Bill C-10 will surely add new streams of inmates to Nunavut’s correctional system and they’ll remain there for longer periods of time, creating new costs for the GN.

Right now, we don’t know for certain how high those costs will soar. The department’s deputy minister Janet Slaughter, told CBC North radio last month that Nunavut’s inmate population could rise by 15 per cent, but that sounds like a rough guess. It’s likely no one really knows.

At the same time, there are indications that institutions like the North Slave Correctional Centre in the Northwest Territories and the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre in Ottawa may run out of space for Nunavut inmates. That’s because those facilities are expected to be overun also with inmates from their own jurisdictions. Where will Nunavut’s inmates go? Who will pay?

The best guess is the GN will pay — using money extracted from other programs.

With Bill C-10, the Harper government is playing the victim card on a national scale. It’s designed to manipulate fear and trauma. But there’s little or no evidence its punitive approach will reduce crime rates, which, in any case, are decreasing in Canada, though not in Nunavut.

Criminal law, however, is a federal responsibility and the majority party in the House of Commons may amend the Criminal Code as it sees fit.

But at the same time, the financing of territorial governments is also a federal responsibility. Now that they’re about to impose big new costs on Nunavut, the Harper government must also prepare itself to help Nunavut pay for them. JB