Canada has a revictimization problem, but doesn’t want to find out why.

The federal government can’t ensure that murder victims' families won’t be revictimized during prison transfer processes if Parliament doesn’t examine why it keeps happening.

Last June, an uproar arose when the notorious serial rapist and killer Paul Bernardo was transferred to a medium-security prison from a maximum-security facility.  

At the time, the families of Bernardo's victims were not given reasons for the transfer. A lawyer for the families, Timothy Danson, described the federal government's opaque process as having a severe revictimizing effect.

As the furor over the transfer unfolded, and more details about what happened behind the scenes emerged, it became clear that the federal government had, putting it mildly, been lacking in its oversight of the process and in its consideration for the impact it would have on victims' families. Finger-pointing between Corrective Services Canada, the agency that oversaw the transfer and the office of the now-former Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendocino, suggested that the Minister knew ahead of the transfer but failed to act on the information.

These failures are problematic for several reasons, the primary one being that the federal government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has been found lacking in addressing internal process concerns across various high-profile issues, even after major incidents have occurred. For example, the government that oversaw the failures in the Bernardo prison transfer also found itself in the same situation in 2018 when child-killer Terry-Lynne McClintic was transferred to a minimum security healing lodge.

This repetition begs the question, why did the government allow this failure to happen twice, and has the government taken adequate action to ensure it doesn’t happens again?

The answer to that question remains unclear, despite an internal report on the Bernardo transfer issued during the summer. The report outlines some startling process gaps that led to the opacity and lack of sensitivity to victims' families, but likely not all, particularly critical errors that occurred within the office of the Minister of Public Safety. Further, the report largely failed to examine the impact of those issues from testimony directly from the experience of the victim's families. 

In that, it is currently impossible to know if adequate measures have been taken to stop this type of revictimization, including whether or not a Ministerial directive issued to Corrections Services Canada is sufficient. Today, there are few public details about whether concrete processes have been implemented or whether victims' families feel they are appropriate.

The scrutiny for these questions and providing a forum for victims to have their say on the matter would typically fall to Members of a Parliamentary Standing Committee. Attempts made by Conservative members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety to review the issue over the summer were rebuffed by other committee members. With Parliament having resumed for the fall sitting, now would seem to be an opportune time to bring the matter forward for study.

Unfortunately, the Committee has not been able to come to a consensus on whether a study is needed or what witnesses should testify should a committee study be undertaken. The last meeting of the Committee saw Liberal Parliamentary Secretary Jennifer O'Connell use procedural tactics to attempt to block the passage of a Conservative motion that would have the Minister of Public Safety appear, ostensibly to testify regarding whether or not the process issues that had occurred in his office around the transfer have been rectified. More importantly, the Conservative motion also called for an opportunity for victims' families to appear to have their say on the impact of the government's process failures and whether or not they felt measures taken to date have been sufficient.

Last week, the Conservative Vice-Chair of the Committee, Doug Shipley, signalled that Conservative members would attempt to pass their motion once again. It would seem prudent for the Committee to do so, given that at least two high-profile prison transfer failures have now happened under the current federal government's watch, with others having happened with less public scrutiny. For example, in 2021, the mother of a high-profile murder victim that occurred in Jennifer O'Connoll's riding, Sherry Goberdhan, described the revictimization process that happened when her daughter's murderer, Nicholas Baig, was transferred from a maximum security prison to a medium security facility.

There are other issues that must be explored too, like whether or not correctional services staff feel safe and protected under current policy when these types of transfers occur, and also other prisoners who don’t have dangerous offender classifications.

Parliamentarians may have differing views on how to address the issue of punishment for Canada's most heinous criminals, be it through new legislation or process reform, but it's difficult for Parliament to have that debate if Members of the governing parties or its supply-and-confidence partners, the New Democratic Party, don't even allow the debate happen to begin with.

In that, to prevent more revictimization, here's hoping Doug Shipley and his team have more luck getting their motion to study the Bernardo transfer passed this week.