{"id":64893,"date":"2020-08-29T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T12:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/another-farce-on-bill-blairs-watch\/"},"modified":"2020-08-29T15:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-29T12:06:00","slug":"another-farce-on-bill-blairs-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/another-farce-on-bill-blairs-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"#Another farce on Bill Blair\u2019s watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Another farce on Bill Blair\u2019s watch<\/strong>”
\nPaul Wells: How badly do things have to go for a government-app<\/a>ointed panel to shut down because it got no usable data and no help from the minister?<\/p>\n

\n I\u2019ve got my journalistic obsessions, Lord knows. But the notion that Bill Blair, the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness, is in way over his head was not something I brought to this game<\/a>. It\u2019s a learned response. Lately it\u2019s kind of getting locked in.<\/p>\n

First there was the federal government\u2019s response to April\u2019s mass murder in Nova Scotia, which amounted to three months of silence and stonewalling, a botched announcement of an \u201cindependent review\u201d that would have no power in law to compel testimony, and a hasty retreat after three days because basically everyone in Nova Scotia was saying in the news<\/a>papers what hundreds of them had been trying to tell Blair in private for months.<\/p>\n

The hallmarks of this farce were unfamiliar but, in hindsight, look characteristic.\u00a0 A long period of bland assurance that all is well in hand. (\u201cWe\u2019ll put the processes in place to make sure that those answers not only are obtained for Canadians, but done in a way which is trustworthy,\u201d Blair told Maclean\u2019s<\/em> in June. \u201cIt\u2019s not an easy thing to do, but that\u2019s my job.\u201d Nice touch, that last bit.) The belated realization that actually, freaking nothing is happening. And finally, the headline-driven climb-down, accompanied by assurances that the minister was on top of things all along.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the strange case of Anthony Doob, emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Toronto. He\u2019s 77, he\u2019s in the Order of Canada, he\u2019s one of the most-cited criminologists in the field. Last summer Blair\u2019s predecessor Ralph Goodale put Doob in charge of a distinguished panel to monitor changes to solitary confinement in Canada\u2019s federal prisons.<\/p>\n

The change was part of Bill C-83, and it amounted to replacing \u201csegregation units,\u201d where inmates could be holed up alone for up to 22 hours a day if they were deemed dangerous to other prisoners or if they were under investigation for disciplinary infraction, with \u201cstructured intervention units (SIUs),\u201d where they could be kept for up to 20 hours a day. Under the new law, summarized with its limitations in this article, inmates would also be given regular \u201cmeaningful human contact\u201d with a counsellor, elder or other helpful person.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very modest improvement to treatment that\u2019s been found systematically damaging to inmates\u2019 prospects of rehabilitation\u2014and, in some cases, to their lives. A succession of courts have found disciplinary segregation violated inmates\u2019 Charter rights. Finally a B.C. Supreme Court justice gave the feds a year to fix the system.<\/p>\n

The stakes were high. Section B of the court\u2019s decision begins with a long discussion of whether extended solitary confinement constitutes torture. The judge sounds inclined to conclude it does.<\/p>\n

So Bill C-83 was the Trudeau government\u2019s coerced response to a legal obligation, not a spontaneous decision for reform. But Goodale appointed Doob and seven colleagues because he wanted to make sure the reform was working. The SIU review panel \u201cwill play an essential role\u00a0in ensuring that the new SIU system achieves our goal of humane and effective corrections,\u201d Goodale said then. He told the panel to \u201cgive ongoing feedback\u201d to Correctional Service Canada during its one-year mandate\u2014and to \u201calert the Minister directly\u201d about any \u201cproblems or concerns\u201d with the new system.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday of this week, Professor Doob announced the panel no longer exists and that it had achieved nothing because Correctional Service Canada gave it no usable information and Bill Blair did nothing to help when Doob tried to tell him what was happening.<\/p>\n

Justin Ling has reported on this over at Vice, and it\u2019s been reported elsewhere, but I want to emphasize the Kafkaesque absurdity of the situation.<\/p>\n

Usually when this government screws up, its defenders look around for somebody they can designate an outsider, spoiler, saboteur or wrecker, somebody who doesn\u2019t understand the Trudeau government\u2019s beautiful mission and who seeks to discredit it. A Jody Wilson-Raybould, a Jesse Brown, a Postmedia<\/a>. That\u2019s hard in this case because every player in this drama was appointed by this government: Blair, CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly, Doob and his fellow panelists.<\/p>\n

From Doob\u2019s final report (\u201cWe have essentially not been able to examine any aspect of the SIUs during their first 7-8 months of operation\u201d) and a telephone conversation I had with Doob on Friday, the short version of what happened is as follows.<\/p>\n

In mid-November, the panel told CSC it would need a set of information on every inmate transferred to an SIU: the inmate\u2019s case history, the reasons for transfer, the maximum number of hours in the SIU in a 24-hour period, the average number of hours of confinement per day over the length of the stay, and so on. It was a long list of indicators, but that\u2019s why Doob sent the list to CSC before the SIUs even opened in late November, and it\u2019s why he asked for the first batch of data to be sent in February. This would take time. Updates would follow every two months.<\/p>\n

The information the panel requested was \u201call things that were administrative in nature,\u201d Doob said. \u201cIt\u2019s stuff that is almost certainly in their files somewhere.\u201d If anything he asked for wasn\u2019t available, he\u2019d adjust. \u201cI\u2019ve been working with quantitative data for 50 years. This is the sort of thing that happens all the time. And you don\u2019t worry about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Correctional Service gave no hint that any of this would be a problem.<\/p>\n

In mid-February Doob contacted the agency to begin figuring out how the data would be transmitted to the panel, how inmate confidentiality could be respected, and so on. This is three months after he told them what he wanted and five months after the responsible cabinet minister called his work \u201cessential.\u201d Doob\u2019s contact at CSC said the agency hadn\u2019t yet decided whether it would give the panel any<\/em> of the information it had requested.<\/p>\n

This turn of events \u201ccame to the panel as a complete surprise,\u201d Doob wrote mildly in his final report. After some back-and-forth to insist on the importance of the panel\u2019s request and gauge the agency\u2019s willingness to block, he wrote to CSC Commissioner Anne Kelly in mid-March\u2014and to Bill Blair at the end of March. From Kelly, he received no reply. Not until she saw her name cc\u2019d on the complaint to Blair. That got a request from her for a meeting. But it took most of April for the meeting to happen. Finally in late May, CSC delivered data to Doob.<\/p>\n

That data was unusable. Instead of a single spreadsheet with comparable indicators for every inmate, there were more than 900 spreadsheets. And Doob quickly discovered that depending on the criterion, the number of cases varied. Which meant that there was no way to compare among cases or between criteria. \u201cIt was a pile of crap,\u201d he told me. Remember, this is a guy who\u2019s spent decades in the field.<\/p>\n

Doob\u2019s dismayed response led to CSC, an organization with 18,000 employees, coughing up one (1) data analyst to work with him on cleaning up the data. His report is very complimentary about this data analyst, but after she\u2019d worked for six weeks, he sent CSC a report advising the agency that he had no systematic analysis because he\u2019d been given no useful data for most of his panel\u2019s time on this earth.<\/p>\n

CSC received that report on July 21. By an agreement Doob had reached with the agency when his panel was formed, it had three weeks to respond. After three weeks it hadn\u2019t responded. After three weeks and six days, Doob received a letter from a senior deputy commissioner saying, in effect, sorry for the crummy data, we\u2019re in the process of transferring our data collection from a platform that no longer works to one that doesn\u2019t work yet. On the bright side, CSC promised monthly updates. On the downside, members of Doob\u2019s panel were reaching the end of their one-year mandates, a couple at a time because they hadn\u2019t even been appointed at the same time.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Doob sent Ottawa reporters his final report with a cover-letter broadside, via the office of Kim Pate, a (Trudeau-appointed!) Ontario Senator with a long career in criminal-justice reform. \u201cOur panel no longer exists,\u201d he wrote. And it wasn\u2019t just a problem that it wasn\u2019t given the information it needed. It\u2019s a problem because the agency that jails a huge prison population seems uninterested in how they\u2019re doing. \u201cCSC is telling us that it does not have systematic information on the operation of its Structured Intervention Units and apparently never made the gathering of this information a priority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remember Bill Blair? Remember how he had nothing to say when Doob warned him through official channels in March? He did now, once Doob made his concerns public. \u201cThere have been news reports on the Correctional Services of Canada\u2019s work with an Implementation Advisory Panel,\u201d a statement from Blair\u2019s office read.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is amusing to me that they don\u2019t even acknowledge that these \u2018news reports\u2019 come from a report (from our panel) that CSC had for weeks,\u201d Doob writes in an annotated version of Blair\u2019s statement that Doob has been sending reporters.<\/p>\n

The statement rehashes some of the background of the panel and adds: \u201cWe have dedicated extra resources to expedite this request.\u201d Doob\u2019s response: \u201cCSC itself, for its own purposes, should want to know how the SIUs are operating. They shouldn\u2019t have to be pushed into getting these data by an independent panel. They should want to know. Hence the implication that we are requiring them to dedicate \u2018extra resources\u2019 is, quite frankly, offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n

At midweek, Doob received a telephone call from Blair. \u201cHe said to me, \u2018I\u2019d like you to do this job,’\u201d said Doob, who had written to Blair five months earlier warning that he was not being permitted to do his job.<\/p>\n

Doob still thinks it\u2019s worth knowing whether a court-mandated and hastily-developed reform is achieving its ends. He still thinks somebody should do the work he tried to do. Will he, now? \u201cI told [Blair] that a necessary condition would be that I actually have the data in front of me,\u201d he says. Promises of data later aren\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what Doob needs before he\u2019ll even consider doing for Blair the work Goodale assigned him, the work he\u2019s spent all of 2020 trying to do. \u201cThat\u2019s the necessary condition. I don\u2019t know what the sufficient conditions would be. If they even exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few concluding thoughts.<\/p>\n

Once at a public event, I met a staffer from the Prime Minister\u2019s Office I didn\u2019t know yet. This person worked on files related to science<\/a> and research policy, a longstanding preoccupation of mine. \u201cWhen you tweet about science policy, I wind up working all weekend,\u201d this person said. Sure, it was flattering, and I\u2019m sure it wasn\u2019t meant as a rigorously truthful or complete statement. But it also struck me as a little odd. I\u2019m not smart enough to write anything on science policy that I haven\u2019t heard from researchers. Why would my tweet be the thing that provokes overtime shifts? Why not the scientists?<\/p>\n

I thought about this conversation when I learned that a report from a duly-constituted government-appointed panel isn\u2019t enough to get the responsible minister involved in the file\u2014but a headline in Vice is. Blair\u2019s call was \u201ca response to what\u2019s in the media,\u201d Doob told me, \u201cnot to what I\u2019ve sent the government.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what many people who work with this government tell me. Public servants, consultants, NGOs. Official channels are useless. Process is window dressing. This government consults but doesn\u2019t listen, and whatever the plan is, it\u2019s never as useful to know the plan as it is to have the personal phone numbers of a half-dozen senior staffers so you can text one of them and urge an improvised change of plans.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago Rob Silver, a supremely well-connected Liberal working for a mortgage firm, was in the news for his attempts to secure a legislative change that would benefit his company. Silver\u2019s overtures were fruitless and I offer no opinion on their propriety, but he plainly knew what you need to do if you want to get something done in this town: Call Mike McNair, call Elder Marques, call Justin To. Write a letter to the minister? Don\u2019t be old-fashioned.<\/p>\n

When Anne Kelly became the Commissioner of Correctional Service Canada, Ralph Goodale wrote her a public mandate letter. \u201cI encourage you to instill within CSC a culture of ongoing self-reflection,\u201d he wrote, amusingly in hindsight. \u201cThis includes: regularly reviewing policies and operations to identify what works and change what does not\u2026 and welcoming constructive, good-faith critiques as indispensable drivers of progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in a government in which only a handful of staffers can actually make a decision, very few people in any department have the kind of autonomy Goodale was hoping Kelly would exercise. When the decision-making pipeline is no thicker than the PMO, and every particle of communication is the product of a chain involving dozens of staffers and bureaucrats reaching across government, nobody has the right to decide. So nobody is accountable for their decisions.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t just mean that in the negative sense that nobody is sanctioned for a bad decision. I mean nobody has the authority to make a good decision. Things just happen. Or they just don\u2019t. In a real sense, we\u2019re not governed. We\u2019re just given a constant runaround by people who, in many cases, would prefer not to be part of the immense machine delivering the runaround. Which is how a panel appointed to answer a basic question\u2014has Canada stopped torturing people yet?<\/em>\u2014could work for a year and find no answers. And somehow it\u2019s nobody\u2019s fault. Not even Bill Blair\u2019s, I guess.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

if you want to watch Movies<\/a> or Tv Shows go to Dizi.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a> <\/span> for forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#Another farce on Bill Blair\u2019s watch” Paul Wells: How badly do things have to go for a government-appointed panel to shut down because it got no usable data and no help from the minister? I\u2019ve got my journalistic obsessions, Lord knows. But the notion that Bill Blair, the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64894,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67918,67837,67806,67805,67838],"class_list":["post-64893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-another-farce-on-bill-blairs-watch","tag-bill-blair","tag-editors-picks","tag-ottawa","tag-solitary-confinement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}