Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Legal and Constitutional Affairs
Issue No. 8 - Evidence - May 6, 2016 (Morning Meeting)
HALIFAX, Friday, May 6, 2016
The Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs met this day at 8:07 a.m. to study on matters pertaining to delays in Canada's criminal justice system (Sharing Circle).
Senator Bob Runciman (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: I thank you all for being here. This morning we are going to be doing something a little different with the committee, a sharing circle on restorative justice organized by Professor Llewellyn. We thank her for all the work she has done on our committee's behalf.
At this point I am going to turn it over to Jennifer.
Jennifer Llewellyn, Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, as an individual: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for letting us open your hearings here in Halifax today like this. We know this is a bit of an odd format, but we are really excited to start it this way. We know this is new so this will be a great chance for you to decide if you would never like to do this again. We are going to introduce ourselves as we start, but I wanted to give you a sense of the process.
There are two main reasons for the sharing circle. One is it gives us a chance to show you some of the processes that we use in restorative justice. It gives us a chance to show you how we use talking pieces, to see how we have an opportunity to talk with one another rather than across tables from one another. We thought that might be another way in which you could gain a sense of the work that we do in the province. Of course, there are many processes, practices and ways to work restoratively so this is not necessarily a unique model but it will give you a sense of that.
The other reason is that it gives us a chance to talk with one another, as we do a lot, across our different areas, across our different focuses of work, but with a common commitment to the restorative approach. Also, it provides a capacity to have a collective impact on the issues that you care about today in terms of the hearing, which is our collective impact around public safety, on how we address harmful conduct and behaviour and its effects within the community; how we marshal the resources of many systems to do that in ways that do not over task or inappropriately end up within the criminal justice system and viewed as the only place that those problems lay and rest. We think it has huge implications for how the criminal justice system could work better, how we could work within it but also what we do in community and in our other social systems in order to take the pressure off that system, resulting in better justice within that system and better justice in communities.
Represented here are a lot of people who might not normally show up to talk to you about delay in criminal justice system, and that is intentional, and it gives us a chance to talk with one another. This approach is often referred to as a "fish bowl,'' so we are in the fish bowl and you get to watch us swim around for a bit. We hope that it will become sort of more natural, that you come to feel like you are part of our conversation even though you are not right in the circle.
We have three rounds of questions that I am going to facilitate with the group, and then we thought that we would scooch back and sit with you in the circle to give you an opportunity to ask us some questions.
Typically, the facilitator thinks a lot about where people sit, how people enter the room, whether they are well prepared, and then we will guide the conversation by the use of questions or discussion back and forth. That is my role. We use talking pieces, not always but frequently. In part, it is a mechanism to help moderate discussion, so people have the opportunity when they are holding the talking piece to be listed to, to be heard, to speak, they can pass but they have held that opportunity. It gives the group a chance to kind of moderate their own behaviour. In many of these groups you will hear people gentle saying, "Ah, you don't have the talking piece.'' Today, to keep it less cluttered, we are using, quite appropriately I guess, a mic as a talking piece. I am not sure it has the same effect as a weighty thing that reminds you that you are talking because, for lots of people, it does not prevent them from continuing to talk a lot. We will see how it goes, so we will pass this as a talking piece and then when we have a chance to let people jump in with comments to one another they will just pass the talking piece to one another. So you can imagine that this could be something significant to the group or something just that allows people to pass the ability to talk.
Unless there is something you think I have missed in terms of the explanation, I am going to invite people to introduce themselves in the first round and say a little bit about their work that connects with the restorative approach.
I have given them the questions in advance to indicate quick glimpses of this because we would like to give you enough of a foundation to ask questions, but not keeping you in the outside circle for too long. So I am going to ask you, in about sort of two minutes or so, tell us your name, where you work and how your work is connected to a restorative approach.
The other thing I am going to ask you to do if you can remember, and I will try to help facilitate that, is just to say, Emma speaking or Jennifer speaking or Scott speaking because there is a transcript being created of our gathering today. If you don't in the back and forth, I may recognize you by saying your name or by thanking you and saying your name, so it is not that I am being overly formal with you. I will reiterate that when we join the big circle.
So, Emma, I thought that you might start — we will go this way around the circle — with the first question about who you are, what brought you here and how you connect to the work of a restorative approach in the province.
Emma Halpern, Equity and Access Officer, Nova Scotia Barristers' Society: Thank you very much for having me here. My name is Emma Halpern. I am a lawyer. I work at the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society and I run the Equity and Access to Justice Office. I began my journey with the restorative approach in 2007, early on in my legal career, when I was with Nova Scotia Legal Aid and living in Yarmouth. I worked a lot with youth criminal files, and I saw very early on how so many of these things were causing delay and bogging down the court system when they should have been dealt with in other arenas.
In particular, my interest was in seeing some of these things dealt with within the schools. I began working with the Restorative Justice Agency, who you will be hearing from later today, Tri-County Restorative Justice on a restorative justice in schools' initiative, which later became a restorative approach in schools' initiative. I worked on that initiative for a number of years, even after joining the Barristers' Society. That sort of grew my thinking and evolved my thinking to where there are spaces in which the restorative approach can exist, whether it be, not just the criminal justice system or in schools, but in workplaces and in other systems. I will talk a bit more about that later.
I have more recently been involved in two areas where I have been looking at and thinking about a restorative approach. One is an approach to legal services regulation. It is in its infancy but thinking about regulated bodies and how they could be taking a restorative approach.
Finally, core to my major position is the area of access to justice. A lot of that thinking has been at a high level around principles and values-based thinking about the way in which we think about access to justice as being, you know, the complexity of the issues and therefore the way in which we address access to justice and taking a restorative approach to address access to justice. I will be talking about that more later on.
Jennifer Furlong, Executive Director, Cumberland Restorative Justice Society: Good morning. My name is Jennifer Furlong, and I am Executive Director of the Cumberland Restorative Justice Society, which is located in the northern part of the province in the town of Amherst, but we serve all of Cumberland County. Cumberland Restorative Justice is the agency for that region. It is one of eight agencies in the province that delivers the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice program with young offenders.
I have been with the program since, I believe, 1999. I started as a volunteer and just kind of stuck there. The work really fit with my passion for working with youth and connections with community. I went on to community education when the Youth Criminal Justice Act was first introduced, and I have been director of the agency since January of 2009.
In the early days with Youth Restorative Justice it was all about case management and processing files. Over the last five years or maybe a bit more than that, six years, we have really been able to expand the work that we have done through the use of thinking more about how we do restorative justice and using a restorative approach. As a result, I am now much more involved and connected with the community with things like Maggie's Place Family Resource Center, Cumberland YMCA and supporting restorative approaches in schools. So that is a lot of the work that I do now and I will talk more about that later.
Stephanie MacInnis-Langley, Executive Director, Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women: Good morning. My name is Stephanie MacInnis-Langley, and I am the Executive Director for Status of Women Nova Scotia. I have been in multiple careers for over 30 years. I started with the restorative justice approaches in the 1980s. So I am old time and old school and have always been a huge supporter on focusing on the needs of those who have been victimized or marginalized in our society and how we need to build our capacities for broader collective responsibility in a variety of ways.
I built and ran a shelter for battered women in the rural community. I started my career in the rural community. The service was comprehensive and I built it to provide service for those fleeing domestic violence with their children. Also, we had issues of transportation, issues of access to justice and issues of finance. I have been committed to the well- being of shelters and vulnerable residents and vulnerable Nova Scotians for my entire career. I was the first manager of special initiatives for victims. When I left community work in the 1990s and came into government it was to make a difference in terms of how the justice system responds to victims of violence.
So this helps me to come full circle because it is a privilege to be here today and it is a privilege to talk, as manager of special initiatives, about two of my keen interests. One was in developing for Nova Scotia a high risk case coordination protocol framework signed off by ministers that allowed us to talk to one another in a restorative and respectful way about issues concerning violence in families and how we would work together to provide a public safety response for victims of violence in their family.
That was a really impressive piece of work. We had all the barriers of confidentiality, especially around our system's response, and it was really an accomplishment to get departments, government and community working together.
From that initiative we developed, with the policing agencies in Nova Scotia, a response through high risk assessments. So victim services had had in place a high-risk assessment for victims and we didn't have the same at the criminal justice level. So police in Nova Scotia were wonderful partners and developed with us a response and an assessment for high risk cases that are going through the criminal justice system. They have been full partners since the beginning of that work.
My first focus as a director of crime prevention was on the crime prevention strategy, the first of its kind in Nova Scotia and on investing in prevention programs and supporting communities to collaboratively focus on safety and prevention. I had the privilege for funding through that program many, many initiatives that used a restorative approach, and with great success.
As Executive Director of Status of Women, I operate in the same model. I operate from a restorative and a respectful approach, and I have had great success within government and community. I would also say the focus is on the challenge of collective responsibility for the most vulnerable and how this gets attended to across systems, communities and through restorative approaches. Restorative approaches resonate powerfully for me and I believe they offer a pathway for strengthening communities and systems. I spent 15 years in the criminal justice system, many of my early years as a victim support worker in the court system. I often came out of court with victims unsure if we had a conviction or not and what the outcome was. So I really am a supporter of new pathways.
Scott Milner, Director, Education Services, Chignecto-Central Regional School Board: Good morning. My name is Scott Milner, and I am Director of Education Services for Chignecto School Board. Chignecto School Board is in the northern part of Nova Scotia. I am responsible for almost 20,000 students and 70 schools.
My journey to the restorative approach really is through Emma. Emma had an influence on me probably as far back as 2008, maybe 2007, working through SchoolsPlus. I would openly admit that I was a slow convert to this relational theory and this idea. I worked many years as a junior high school principal and I came slowly to understand the importance of relational approach rather than consequence for action, if I could say it that way.
In my time moving through school administration, I also realized that this is a way to think about how we work together in a way to influence culture in schools, the culture of our organizations to influence not just the students in school but their families and connecting them to each other. So I have spent a lot of time in my role recently thinking about the relational approach as an organizational mover, an organizational, I would say, influencer, to make sure that we are connected with each other, connected to our communities and we are not just processing students.
I know that sounds kind of raw, but sometimes in a busy day we do not think about each other enough. In my experience, as we have been moving through the school system, we have spent a lot of time — Jennifer Furlong has had a big impact as well — in thinking about how we can work with our schools to make sure they understand the relational theory and relational approach. Most recently in the last four or five years it has been about training our schools around this understanding. Later I will talk about some of the impacts that we have seen. Right now as I speak, in fact, we have teachers meeting together talking about relational theory and how that can connect to their practice in instruction. Our big shift now is how curriculum can be impacted through these ideas.
Thank you.
Jocelyn Yerxa, Acting Director, Department of Seniors, Province of Nova Scotia: Good morning. I am Jocelyn Yerxa and I work for the Nova Scotia Department of Seniors as a community development coordinator and then more recently, the past two and a half years, as acting director of that division which we call Programs Division.
I came to the restorative approach back in 2009 when I started with the department and was charged with how we look at senior abuse in the province, how we address those issues, and how we work with and support senior safety programs. Senior safety programs in our province are non-profit agencies that work in partnership with local policing agencies and often work out of police detachments and work very closely with the police officers. They are really responsive programs that meet the needs of seniors. So whatever a senior may be experiencing in their communities, there are resources to be able to speak with seniors about whatever is happening and support them.
One of the main issues that they are often faced with is senior abuse cases, so issues in families with seniors who are experiencing abuse. One of the challenges that they presented to me early on in my role was that there was not much that they could do and that this was one of the biggest challenges that they faced, that there were a multitude of reasons of why these cases were not going through the criminal justice system and that they felt very lost as to how to support a senior.
I was fortunate enough to fall upon a restorative justice approach and then able to connect with a multitude of partners across the province, including some of those in the circle — Jennifer and the Department of Justice as well — to look at how might we look at this issue differently to be able to support seniors and their families and community to feel safer and address the issues that they are facing.
Over the past almost seven years now we have been building with our community partners an approach that is more responsive to the needs of seniors, that looks at the community as a whole, at how we support each other and create environments where we really feel safe and part of the community in addressing the challenging issues that we face.
Tony Smith, Co-chair, Council of Parties for the Restorative Public Inquiry into the Home for Colored Children: Good morning. My name is Tony Smith. I am a former resident of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. I went public in 1998 about the abuse from that institution. In doing so, in 2001 we started to have individual claims against the government and the coloured home. In 2012, we had our first reunion for the former residents and VOICES was formed, it is Victims of Institutional Child Exploitation Society. We advocated on behalf of the former residents and we actually settled with the government as well as the coloured home, and we received apologies from the both the home and the provincial government.
In doing so, we also have a public inquiry that we are calling the restorative inquiry. I didn't know much about the restorative justice part of it, but one thing I do know is that in 2012, when we first met to deal with the stress, the anxiety, the pain that a lot of us were feeling in that room because we did not know each other — the eldest being 86 at the time — is that we said, "No matter what we do, we want to make sure that we do no further harm.'' In doing so with the lawyers, we met Jennifer Llewellyn. We had a nice conversation with her, and she started educating us that exactly what you are doing is restorative. She has been very instrumental in helping us. We had a design team called Ujima — various people with government, the community, the coloured home, the board for the coloured home and the former residents — and we came up with the terms of reference.
I would like to give you a copy when we are done. The terms of reference again look at no blame. We are looking at, like the sankofa bird is our talking piece. It is a bird that turns backwards with an egg in his mouth to say you can go back to the past and learn from it to go to the future. What we are trying to do is not to blame but to look at the institutions and how they failed us.
One of the reasons as to why the coloured home was put in place in the first place was that the government of the day didn't care where Black orphans went. Not only did we get apology for the abuse that we were subjected to by Stephen MacNeil, the premier, but he also apologized to the African Nova Scotia community for the historically systemic discrimination that is here. So this is a great opportunity for us to heal the whole community and to finally build relationships that we never had before with these institutions.
I am very excited to be a part of this. I would like to say that Jennifer Llewellyn is an amazing individual. She works tirelessly and is relentless, like she is there all the time. She was able for us, as a group, not to say this is what you need to do but what is it what you want to do? As individuals, we all have different things to bring to the table, but what is the focus? That said, we came up with the terms of reference. It is something that we use when we go out into the communities — we are going throughout the whole province and I went across Canada — and when people actually start to listen to this process it is like, "Oh, okay.'' So it is not telling you what you have to do, it is what can you bring to the table. What is it that will help us to help you? So I am very excited to be here today.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thank you all very much. That was a great introduction to the breadth of work and also the ways in which you have been connected, in having a collective impact and working across systems.
I wonder if you might take the opportunity now to sort of help each other and the senators understand the difference it has made either to the area of work, to your way of working, to working in a restorative way. What have been the opportunities as a result or the differences that it has made in terms of how the processes you engage in work differently? What have you been able to do that you otherwise would not have been able to do or the ways in which you work within your area or with others. Say whatever you would like to say to address that, and I think we set aside about three minutes each, and then we will have a chance to comment on each other's comments and make some further connection after.
Emma, can I ask you to start again?
Ms. Halpern: I have been thinking a lot about this question. It is in some ways a very difficult question because there are so many possible answers for me. I probably would have had a different answer last year than I have this year about where I have arrived at and where I see the most significant impact and opportunity for change.
I have worked in a number of systems, whether it is the criminal justice system, the legal regulation system, the Human Rights Commission a lot of different systems. I have encountered a lot of people who are great people who are doing very good work and who feel very trapped by the system in which they are working. They feel that the work, the system is so entrenched in a certain way of doing things. Despite the fact that many of us know it is not really working for the people that we want to be serving, we feel there are not a lot of other options or opportunities.
What I would say about a restorative approach is it has provided this opportunity to think differently about our systems because it puts incredibly different pieces at the center. So a restorative approach puts our relationships at the center. Automatically, when the myriad of relationships that we are in are at the center you start to think differently about the problem, about how you solve the problem. When you know that you need to think about context, when you know you need to think about the cause, when you know you are trying to think holistically — these are some of the concrete restorative principles — and when you want to be inclusive or forward focused, and you put those as the starting points for how you are going to address any challenge, you look at that challenge very differently.
What is fascinating about it is it often does not require wholesale throwing out what you are doing and starting again, it actually just requires thinking quite differently about the problem that you are encountering or the challenge you are encountering. Whether that is me, as a lawyer, working with youth in the criminal justice system or in the school system or even now with professional regulation, or even in terms of this grappling with this very large problem that is access to justice, when you are putting those principles at the center you are thinking about the problems differently and inevitably you are coming up with a different type of response, a much more proactive, a much more relational response.
I thought I would give one little example to illustrate that and it is the example that actually brought me to this work. I was working in legal aid, and I had a young woman come to my office. Some of you will be familiar with this story. She had been charged with assault and it was an assault that had occurred in the schoolyard. She was charged with an assault and she was so angry. She felt there was such a deep injustice for her with this charge because the assault had arisen out of some bullying that had happened and some terrible racial slurs that had been uttered toward her. She was a young Black woman in a high school, very much one of the few Black women in her high school, and felt very marginalized in that school. They had a zero tolerance policy for violence. They called the police, and there was no space to look at and understand what she was experiencing, the racism and the bullying that she had been experiencing.
I don't have time to go into it in great detail but I can tell you that this process ran through. It ended up getting referred to a restorative approach and she was able to find some peace in the community but she never found peace in the school. She was in Grade 12 and she never went back to school. She was so angry at the way she had been treated and her life was so deeply damaged as a result of this. That was what led me to come into the schools to say, "We need to think differently.'' It doesn't mean that that young woman is not held accountable for the assault; of course we cannot go around punching people in the schoolyard. But it is much more complex than that. We need to be looking at her experience as well, in order to actually heal the harms. We need to look at our institutional responses. We need to be looking at the way in which she is experiencing the school and the others in the school, other young Black children, or children who are in the school who may be experiencing some of these things; other students who observe this and how that impacted them. If we are really going to move forward on addressing these types of issues we need to take a systems-wide approach where we look at these things together, and a restorative approach really offers that opportunity.
That is what sort of hooked me, and since then I have been working in so many different contexts and looking at conflict in our workplaces through a very different lens. It has opened up for me an opportunity to see everything that I do through a different lens and through a different set of principles. I think it has really been a very positive thing in a variety of settings.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thank you, Emma. Jenn is about to start. You will see me sort of lean into them as I am trying to get them to realize they are holding the talking piece. I am really, really, interested, but I am also interested in making sure that we move along too.
Jennifer.
Ms. Furlong: Thank you.
The focus of my work, as I said earlier, has been Nova Scotia Restorative Justice program with young offenders. It was only in recent years that I began to think of restorative justice as the light bulb moment, "Oh right, this is a restorative approach to justice.'' In the early years when we switched from alternative measures to restorative justice it was really used by the criminal justice system for the low end offences, the first time offenders. I often thought that the youth that were referred to restorative justice were the ones who were most likely to complete successfully and not reoffend. The police, at their discretion, used to select who deserved to be referred to restorative justice.
Over the years, we have seen such a shift in the referrals of cases from shoplifting and vandalism to really complex cases. We might have a youth referred, really, for anything, but we dig into what brought them there, using that restorative approach and the principles of being holistic and inclusive when considering the contributing factors. There are families in crisis, there are youth who are falling through the cracks as they say, not engaged in school and community and through the restorative lens we now, I feel, are doing such a better job at addressing the needs of those youth.
Over the years I feel we have a much better buy-in from our partners, from our police officers and crown attorneys recognizing that restorative justice is a really appropriate response to higher level cases where there is harm, especially where relationships have been harmed. Very often now we see referrals for youth where the victims are family members. So if that youth were to go to Youth Justice Court and plead guilty and be sentenced to community service, nothing is done to address the harm to the relationship with the family members or with the people in the school or the community or the YMCA where the youth used to go every Friday night. Now they are banned from going there and that was the one positive they had in their life.
With all those impacts now through the restorative justice program, we are much better able to prepare them to reintegrate into the community, repair harm, work on relationships. They are still being held accountable and there are still opportunities to do community service, to write apology letters, to pay restitution. Probably, because I do not know the numbers, but there is definitely a higher completion rate of doing community service or paying restitution. I say that from experience.
Also, our agency oversees the youth who are court ordered to do community service. We know, through 15 years of experience, that those youths are less likely to complete. As I see Jennifer lean forward, I just want to say that by looking at restorative approach as the connection with the youth and the victims in the community, we are seeing higher victim satisfaction where the victims get to have a voice in what happens and get to tell their story and are heard and all those other factors that are taken into consideration. I can't really imagine, especially for the youth justice system, not having restorative justice. As we move forward with adults, I think we are going to see the same outcomes.
Ms. MacInnis-Langley: I have to agree with my two colleagues, and my observation is that the experience for women in the justice system, for women who experience violence, whether it is intimate partner violence or sexualized violence, they are often left wanting.
Victims who access the system, and we know that many victims never access the system, are left with no choice. The system narrowly prescribes the role of victim. The criminal justice system has made advancement over the years and improvements. Despite that, it remains not victim-centered; it is very much an adversarial system set up on the rights of an accused. So victims going into court, and I have been in court with many victims, are always afraid and they always feel like they are on trial.
I am not criticizing the necessity of the models we have in place, but I am saying that we need to, if we are going to look at justice in the true sense of what justice means, look at it in the context of a gendered lens. For the restorative approach in the criminal justice system for women, a fundamental question is how we perceive the concept of justice. Restorative programs or restorative approaches are not a program to be administered by a set of practices in an applied system. Restorative approaches require us to support a fundamental shift in thinking about individual cases and a broader understanding of context, causes and conditions and how harm manifests. Nothing happens in isolation, and we have learned that over and over and over. In this way I think, if we want to do things differently, we must think differently. That is a shift that takes a long time to get people to move to. Restorative approaches is a broader concept than individual approaches. Our system is built on a one-size-fits-all model, and we know that has not always been successful.
I can give you two examples. One is that I had the opportunity or the privilege of travelling to Hull in the U.K. with Professor Llewellyn a few years ago. Hull has worked tirelessly to ensure that its social welfare and public safety responses are restorative. It showed me in a very real way that, by working differently together through a restorative lens, new approaches and better outcomes would result.
I also had the opportunity to coach here the first domestic violence action plan in Nova Scotia. One of our goals was to build bridges with the community. There had been a disconnect for some time and it was really important that we find collaborative ways and new ways of working together. With the women's advocacy community the relationship with government had become very strained. We were able to establish bridges; we were able to open the door to other perspectives and we were able to work and look at new ways of working collaboratively and respectfully. Those conversations have gone on for several years and we have been able to bring people to the table and have people share with us their understanding of changes that need to occur.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks.
Scott, I will re-state the question: We are just trying to create an opportunity to think about what difference this approach has made for your work and how your work has proceeded.
Mr. Milner: Thank you, Jennifer.
A lot of people think about school from their experience. So whether you were in school 10 years ago or 30 years ago, you sometimes think about what it was like then. I would like to tell you what you would see if you walked into schools in the school board that I work for. If you walk into a school today, you would see a classroom with no desks. You would see a classroom with chairs in a circle like this and a teacher conducting a lesson, whether it is a math lesson, a history lesson, a language arts lesson. People are participating and there are no microphones, of course, but there is usually a talking piece and conversations and relationships are held in that manner. That is really one of the big changes that you would see in our system. When you talk to the students that participate in those classrooms the big difference is about engagement and the connection that the student is making with the teacher in that regard. Again, it is not that relay of information, it is a relationship that is built with the instructor, with the teacher and the connection that is made for students.
We see that in other ways as well. We see in schools that have embraced this approach that school attendance is up; students want to come to school. We see community engagement increased, parents enjoy coming to the school and they see a connection with the teachers and they see a connection with what is happening, not just with the individual teacher but with school as an organization in the community. So the community connection is a really important piece.
When you see staff meetings, when you see teacher professional development, you see settings like this, not the traditional "sit and get out'' as we say. So again, those connections between the professionals are stronger.
I was thinking about that student engagement piece. Yesterday I actually looked at our suspension statistics in our board. We have a large board, almost 20,000 students. Yesterday, when I counted I was looking at extended suspensions, so suspensions that are over 10 days in our system, as of yesterday we had lost, I say those are lost school days for students, 2,131 days. Well, a year ago we had lost 4,969 days. That is a 57 per cent improvement in lost days. That is significant for me. You cannot have an impact on a student if they are not there. When students are in school, we can have that impact and connection.
Overall days lost to suspensions: Our suspensions this year are down 26 per cent. Last year it was about the same this time of year. We are getting to the point where the suspensions in one of our largest schools are down 60 per cent from a year ago. So that is an indicator of many things, but when you ask the principal and you ask the teachers, they talk about relational theory and the relational approach that they are taking with their students in their classroom and this engagement piece. So is it an indicator of success? I would say yes because our students are there and in school.
The other piece I would like to talk about is student-initiated responses to behaviours in the schoolyard.
In many of the elementary schools in our system you will see students solving their own problems. You would see students approaching teachers to say, "We need to have a circle right now. We just had recess, something happened on the schoolyard, we need to take care of it.'' To me, for students to engage in that conversation, that relationship, it means that we are growing and building a society that will think in this manner.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks, Scott.
Jocelyn?
Ms. Yerxa: I thought so much about this question, and I have got to say that when we came to look at senior safety, we were really focused on senior abuse and how we might address responding to senior abuse. In the early days in coming to the restorative approach, it started opening up our mind to questions around what justice is. Those were the early questions. We could use a restorative approach to respond and provide more of a feeling of justice, that the harms have been addressed and that we are able to move forward. As we began working together and looking more deeply at what the restorative approach meant, asking questions about what safety means in a community, how we care for each other, what are those important relationships, I think probably the biggest change and shift for us was in coming to see that this approach is really about prevention. We have people working in community who can see red flags and who can respond to issues before they even get to a point where they would be seen in a criminal justice system. So we are able to really be much more responsive early on in helping when things are starting to go awry. I think that is probably the biggest impact that I have seen, that we are no longer looking solely at how we can respond after something has happened but how we can stop things early on so that it does not ever get to that point. That is probably the biggest impact that it has had.
Early on the response to what justice means was: justice is getting this through the criminal justice system; it is getting cases in; it is getting heard in court; it is people being put through. Now, it is really about what does this mean for this family, for this senior, for this community. Fundamentally, we are really looking at justice quite differently.
The other biggest impact is about how we work with and support each other. We are a network of people who come from multiple, different places within the system and the community. We have senior volunteers; we have restorative justice agencies; we have the police; we have lawyers; we have senior safety coordinators, people from government. We have a multitude of people who are around the network and it really has shifted how we work with each other. It is not, "I work here and this is what I do,'' but it is how we together are approaching this issue. It has really caused us to work much more collaboratively and to really see how we can support each other. As opposed to, "This is my job,'' it is about, "What can I do; here's the problem we are trying to solve together and what can we do together to solve that issue?'' There is a multitude of examples of that. I will give one really quick one. It is around seniors' housing and issues of "bullying'' in seniors' housing and the challenges that senior safety coordinators and police often find in those situations. The network of folks who have been working on this on the ground have come together to look at how can we go into seniors' housing and support that community to look at how they are living together and how they are creating an environment of safety in a healthy community for each other. So it means working with that network of folks in seniors' housing as well as the community members. Whereas before it would be call the police; the police respond and go down that road which sometimes leads somewhere and sometimes does not, depending on the case.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks, Jocelyn.
Tony, what difference has it made?
Mr. Smith: It has made a big difference. I look at the very first time we met in 2012, as I spoke earlier, and the former residents and the pain and suffering that they were facing, when we started dealing with individual cases. There were 160 people who came forward after I went public in 1998. You were not only being discovered by your own lawyer but the government's lawyer, Community Services, the Children's Aid lawyer as well as the coloured home lawyer, and not just once, but twice, three, in some case six times. So you were being victimized over and over again by telling your story. They think it is a dollar sign and that is not what the case is about. So then we are doing the class action and when it came to class action back then the government of the day was really opposed to it. They would say that we want to form an independent panel to hear your stories about healing but, and by the same token, we want to throw that out of the justice system. So they were fighting, which caused more trauma.
When it came to actually settling, when it came to the monies the government took responsibility for the wards but not the other kids from out of province or the kids that were dropped. We were saying that we cannot leave anybody behind, so we said we will take less to make sure everybody gets something.
The biggest thing about this action is that a lot of perpetrators are dead. You are never going to get justice in the justice system in that way. But to be vindicated, to get the apology and to start working with this restorative inquiry and being in a place that is different from a traditional public inquiry — like, the lawyers and "yes/no'' kind of answers — people were able to tell their story their way, whatever they felt comfortable with. We did that.
When it came to the settlement part, there were two claims — common experience and if there was further harm. With further harm, we made sure that there was a facilitator and not an investigator to help support former residents as they came forward, as well as an evaluator. What was the impact of the harm that you had then, at the home, what kind of impact did it have on your life? We would measure from there, not the check box as to the different types of trauma that you went through.
The overwhelming thing from 2012 was seeing the people with so much pain, stress and anxiety and living with the shame and the guilt that we lived with for some many years. A year later, after that reunion — it was a four-day event — we had another reunion. They were saying, "Can we go down to another local government office and protest?'' You looked at them and they had confidence, smiles, they looked into your eyes instead of being all slumped over kind of stuff; the pride, it was a big thing. We wore the badge of shame, now we wear the badge of pride. So going through this process, going through the restorative inquiry is completely different from your traditional public inquiry. We are shared partners. It is not the government in place saying, "If we don't like the information that's coming out then we are going to stop this.''
We have a council of parties. I am a co-chair of that council, and we have 10 people who can vote and we have subpoena power. We actually changed the Public Inquiries Act to give immunity to the former residents so they can tell their stories without being sued or being threatened. We have the restorative inquiry team. At our first meeting with former residents they came in and you could see the comfort that they felt from that surrounding environment. They are able to support one another and be a part of this inquiry. The big thing about the restorative inquiry is that we are building relationships as we are doing this. We are not waiting until we have a commissionaire, a retired judge, to hear all the recommendations and then it is put on the bookshelf somewhere, or whatever. We are actually having things being changed as we go along. So we have the council of parties that gets the information. We have a reflection action team, built of deputy ministers and people from the community are asking about what it is that we need to do to make these changes. Now we are actually building these relationships that we never had before. So that is the big change, to be heard, to be vindicated. And you see these people living with this pain, shame and guilt all their lives. Their grandkids say, "Can I talk about you, you are a survivor of the home and going to school.'' The strength of what they had to do to endure this and to live through this and now to be vindicated for this is amazing. In 2012 the elders said, "Tony, we want you to keep on fighting because we are not going to live to see this day.'' So many people went to their graves without this acknowledgment. And then, a year later everything is changed because a new government has said that we have to take responsibility for what we have done to you.
A lot of it is all systemic discrimination and institutional racism and this is the only way that we can look at trying to address this injustice. We have to be united as the Black communities in Nova Scotia, because we never have been, and we have to have real relationships with these institutions that we never had. I am very excited about the work that we have been doing so far, and it is a "we.'' It is not an "I.''
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks very much. I want to give you an opportunity; I know that you work together in many ways in securing success across the systems and for the communities you are in. Before we turn to the last question and help you to make a link for senators to the implications of the way we do justice in the criminal justice system, I want to give you a chance to be heard. If there are some thoughts or connections from knowing each other, some things you think each other should have made mention of — just quick one-minute interventions or comments about something someone else said that made you think, "Oh, I should have said . . . .'' Does anyone have anything they would like to add?
Mr. Smith: It was very interesting hearing everybody from the different backgrounds talking about the justice system. I have never been in trouble with the justice system. I didn't know too much about the justice system until I went public about the abuse at the home. But I have a long career in addictions and mental health and working with people, and what I hear is very clear. Sometimes when you have a kid that has behaviour problems, that is them asking for help because they do not know how to get help. Once you are able to tap into who they are as an individual, then they want to talk. Then they have respect for one another.
I also work with Second Chance, CEED and that is for people who have been incarcerated or on probation and things of that nature, a lot of young men and women. Again, it is just a matter of sitting down and understanding exactly who they are because it takes a lot of intelligence to be a criminal. You just turn that around and become an entrepreneur. To see their lives changing in that short period of time, it is about the investment. The system we have is about punishment. You are putting them into an environment that is going to create more criminals because they have to survive in that kind of environment. But if you have something in there for them to look forward to, that says, "This is your issue as an individual, and we are going to work on you as an individual, teach you those skills and build on what you already have, those kinds of things within the justice system will make a big difference. It costs $10,000 a year to incarcerate somebody.
Ms. Llewellyn: Scott?
Mr. Milner: Thank you, Jennifer.
I talked about reduced suspensions and suspensions being down 57 per cent and shared some of those numbers with you, but behind every one of those numbers there is a person; there is a student. Tony said that, — I wrote it down — through this process you are able to tell your story. One of the differences we found through this approach in working with students who misbehave or have a crisis is we stop and listen to their story. That really has been the difference. Sometimes it is so busy in our school system and there are so many students who are exhibiting behaviours that might not allow them to stay in school, but now we stop and hear their stories. So when we go through a suspension review or talk about these situations, the student has a voice, the family has a voice and we bring partners to the table and co- create solutions for that family and the student. That is one of the biggest differences that this approach has made in our system. The language of blame and shame is dissipating. It is gone and it is more about co-creating that solution and what we have to do next to help each other and wrap our arms around the situation. So I appreciate you saying that you are able to express your story. That is really important and has caused a big shift in our board. Thank you.
Ms. Llewellyn: Jennifer?
Ms. Furlong: I thought I might as well go next because my thoughts are also around kids in school.
After I spoke last, as soon as I passed the mic, I thought of all the things I could have said and did not have a chance to say.
The collaborative approach in the work that I do in our agency with our community definitely has extended into schools. Because the agency where I am based is within the Chignecto School Board, I have attended lots of training with teachers from those schools that Scott oversees. The language has shifted from when I first got involved. I do not think teachers understood why restorative justice that typically deals with conflict and harm would be involved and that it is not all about conflict and harm. Now, with the shift in language, instead of saying "substitute teachers,'' some schools are referring to "guest teachers,'' and talking to students before that guest teacher comes in, like how do we treat our guests and how do we behave when there is someone new, and how do we welcome them?
The other one that stands out for me is, instead of saying "misbehavior'' or "bad behaviour,'' using the language of social mistakes helps kids to learn how to behave properly in the school setting, as does Tony's comment about looking to where those social mistakes and misbehaviours are coming from and what is the root? Now I feel like we could not do our work without mental health and addiction services, SchoolsPlus, Parenting Journey and all those partners. As they say, it takes a community to raise a child and it is not just about what did you do and what can you do to make it better and repair the harm? It is who was impacted, how are those people impacted, how have you been impacted and how can we work together to repair the harm done. So we need all of those players to make that happen.
Ms. Llewellyn: The last comment?
Ms. Halpern: I felt like I needed to correct my story because as I was sitting here, I realized that in fact the young woman that I referred to in the story that happened many years ago was not referred to a restorative justice program in the community. If she had been, she would have had those connections and been connected to the school. Tanya Bain is going to be speaking later. The matter was dismissed, which is what happens frequently when you have something like an assault in the schoolyard. These things sort of run their way; you make it to a certain level into the courts. They take up a certain amount of time in the courts and then often these things do end up getting dismissed. As a result of that, there is absolutely no healing. There was no opportunity, as Jennifer was saying, which would have happened had this matter been referred, to connect with the community, who can be the support person in that community for that person? Certainly in this case there was absolutely no relationship with the school. I am just seconding what Jennifer was saying, and that is the shift. Over the last seven or eight years that we have been working with this approach, we have been seeing more referrals to restorative justice in a variety of ways that allow for that kind of relationship building to happen through the systems and across systems. It is a wonderful opportunity for us to start thinking about how we break down our system silos and start working with one another. It provides a forum for that and that is really very powerful.
Ms. Llewellyn: Great.
I will turn to our last question before we join the broader circle. I invite you to think about and help the senators think along with you about what the potential benefits and impacts and implications are for the criminal justice system. I recognize that some of you engage directly with the criminal justice system and are familiar with the ways in which cases that do wind up there can be handled and responded to.
We know that you have been hearing about a youth model that, when contemplated at the time it was created in 1997, could work for adults. We have been piloting that in three sites, at Dalhousie University, in Truro and in Cape Breton and with MLSN for some time. Since the beginning of the program the Mi'kmaq Legal Support Network that you will hear from this afternoon has been using it in an adult context. We have certainly heard about the public inquiry and about work with women's organizations and seniors that have been working with adults as well.
We have learned a great deal. We took a lot of time with the youth model. Out of that has grown all of the work you have been sharing in terms of seeing the need for proactive and preventative work. We are not trying to only do this work around public safety and creating a better way forward when things appear in the criminal justice system.
I want to give you each an opportunity for a couple of minutes to begin the conversation then we will move into the broader circle. Help us to think about the opportunities and the implications, what the collective impact might be for the way we do criminal justice; for what ends up in criminal justice and for addressing problems in a better way at a community level for our public safety in the broader goal of our criminal justice system.
Emma?
Ms. Halpern: Something I actually did not mention at the outset in my introduction is that I am also the regional advocate for the Canadian Association of the Elizabeth Fry Societies. I spend a lot of my free time in our women's institutions, in the federal prison and in the provincial prison here for women. I spend a lot of time with women who are either currently incarcerated or who are in halfway houses, and it has given me a lens into who we have in our prisons. I can tell you with very strong conviction that the women in our prisons are women who have often very severe, debilitating mental health challenges, who have cognitive issue delay, who have grown up with severe trauma, a lot of poverty. That is who is in our prisons for the most part. That is who is going through our criminal justice system.
Of course, because of my background and the work that I do around access to justice, I am always thinking in a restorative way about how could this have looked different for these women? What could we have done earlier? What systems could have been there to support the women so that they didn't end up here? I have had many conversations with them about what they needed to have things go a different way for them, about housing, access to mental healthcare and education in a system that cared about them, understood them.
That is actually something that has come up again and again in my work around restorative justice. I had a young person one time say to me, "How can a lawyer represent me when they do not know me? How can they represent me when they do not ever take the time to get to know me or know who I am or where I come from?'' To me, going back to what I said earlier, the principles behind a restorative approach allow for that time to be given to understand the complexity of the lives we live, the relationships we have, who we are as individuals. That has to be taken into account throughout our processes, has to be valued, and to Scott's point about the importance of our story, has to be part of the picture. It allows us to come up with much, much better solutions to the challenges that we face in our society and certainly the challenges that lead to criminality.
The other sort of beauty of a restorative approach is that it requires a cross-jurisdictional approach. That is why all of us are here. It is not just the criminal .justice system that is responsible for criminal justice issues. It is education; it is health; it is mental health; it is senior care. It is our communities; it is hearing the voices of our communities. That is certainly a central tenet to restorative approaches, that we bring in those voices of the community; we bring in the families of people; they play a major role in our understanding of how we move forward on any issue. Criminality, because of the way it is situated in our society, can be a sort of pressure point. It is an opportunity for response. We can respond punitively, send more people to jail and put them away or we can actually try to get at the root causes of what is going on. We can try to address the complex social dynamics of why people are arriving in front of us in our courtrooms. That is what the restorative approach offers us, that opportunity.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks Emma.
Jennifer?
Ms. Furlong: As was mentioned, Nova Scotia has a long history of doing restorative justice with youth. I have recognized that nothing magical happens on a person's eighteenth birthday and you do not suddenly get smart. There are a lot of adult offenders, people who are being called adults. I don't think many 18 year olds see themselves as adults, especially if they are still in high school, living at home and don't have a job. There is that age group of 18 to mid 20s, maybe late 20s for some, who still has a challenging time. If people had considered restorative justice as a second chance, that someone deserves a chance to not have a criminal record, I think there would be lots of adults who deserved the same treatment, who faced the same challenges as, especially the 16 year olds and 17 year olds. Nothing magical happens on an eighteenth birthday I have realized. If we can move beyond those pilot projects and have a provincial adult restorative justice program I can only imagine the impact it would have in the courts were we to effectively deal with those offenders who need to be better connected to communities and services and programs to move them out of the criminal justice system.
I do not want to get into the very challenging topic of talking about recidivism because there is not enough time, but I believe there would definitely be an impact. Over time we have to see an impact on the number of people going through the system.
I also want to highlight that with the restorative justice provincial program in Nova Scotia, there are four entry levels. It is not just the pre-charge diversion. There are opportunities to deal appropriately with sentencing circles and reintegration, post-sentence, post-conviction and coming back into communities, where we are still looking at relationships and meeting the needs of those offenders whether they are youth or adults.
That brings me to my last point about dealing with adults in the criminal justice system with very specialized needs. I think of the specialty courts like domestic violence court and drug treatment courts and Mental Health Court in Halifax. Then recently in Amherst we started a wellness court. We decided it is not a mental health court, it is not drug treatment, it is wellness, because how can you separate substance abuse issues from mental health issues clearly?
I feel very lucky to be part of the wellness court team in Amherst and have an opportunity to give some of that relational restorative lens to the work that is being done where, yes, people have substance abuse issues. I think there is so much more that can be done to hold adults accountable, to have them look through that restorative lens of the specialty courts at the relationships they have harmed. That is one piece that we can still do so much work on.
Ms. Llewellyn: Stephanie?
Ms. MacInnis-Langley: I believe Nova Scotia is a leader in developing tools and resources to support a restorative approach in many of our province's systems, not only the justice system. Whether it is government or community led or collaborative effort, I think Nova Scotia has set the bar in terms of moving forward in responding from a restorative and respectful approach. We have talked about it at almost every government table. We talk about it at community tables. We talk about how it is a way forward. We know that we definitely have more road to travel, but the essential commitment to the value of this way of understanding just relationship is embraced by people as we go forward in fundamental ways.
The strength of restorative approach is recognizing the importance of context. The context matters. I sat through a murder trial with a family of a young man who was murdered on his nineteenth birthday and the mom said to me as we sat in the court, "I do not know how we got here, Stephanie, and I do not know how to get out of here.'' She said, "I understand sometimes,'' the boy that murdered him was his friend. She said, "I understand that perhaps there are things we could have done as parents that might have led us to a different outcome,'' but she said, "I don't understand the young man who took his life either.'' She said, "I would really like to be able to talk about what brought us to today.'' Now that case did not go well in the criminal justice system. Although the offender was found guilty and was incarcerated for quite an extensive period of time, he had a long criminal record. But it reminds me constantly of the sadness of people going through the criminal justice system with no sense of relief or justice at the end of the outcome. We sit through a six-week trial or sometimes longer, and we come away with the feeling that there is no justice, that nobody came out a winner in that situation.
I see that repeatedly with the re-traumatization of victims and the lack of individual concepts in the criminal justice system and I think we need to know that context matters. We need to know that understanding violence using a gender lens, that the nuances of the contexts of relationships are highlighted, that the context or dynamics of a relationship matter. Practically speaking the criminal justice system tends to decontextualize the experience of women and denies their gender and rationalized experience in the world.
Restorative approaches are not solely concerned, it is not a feel good model, they are not concerned necessarily with only restoring relationships after harm has occurred. There is a preventative aim and in that we learn from past experiences in order to make change for the future. We have conceived that in the design process. I sat on the design process for the Nova Scotia Home. I had that privilege of being on the design team. The notion of restored focuses on the structures and conditions of relationships that are needed for wellbeing, whether it is personal, interpersonal, social or institutional, relationships based on equality, on respect, on care and concern and dignity. I can tell you that sometimes it is the smallest intervention that can make a large difference. I had a young woman who was couch surfing for a whole variety of reasons. She was barely 16, going on 17. She could not stay at home and was couch surfing. She was late for school; she would get to the school when the breakfast was served, every morning. She could never be first in the bathroom. She could never be first out the door. So the school would not allow her to eat; that was her only meal of the day. After the folks talked to me, my outreach was to call the school and speak to the principal. I asked, "Is there a way that we can make an exception for this one student? I am not asking for an exception of staff, I am asking can a sandwich or some bread and something else be left on a corner where she will know where to get it?'' It was just that much that made a difference in her life until she got to the next phase.
Oftentimes with abused women we go to court and there are tremendous delays in the court system through no deliberate fault but the system but because an abuser will use the system to his or her advantage. In most of the cases I deal with women are the victims. So we end up with women who have no money to pay a power bill, they have no money to buy groceries. They have no money to pay for the expected results that the child is participating in the school system. There is no intervention that will help them move to the next phase.
It is not simplistic; it is a very complex issue. It is complex systems we work in but there are ways to be restorative. There are ways to think restoratively. I am not a punitive thinker to begin with and that always challenges me, that people really feel that punishment is the best outcome. I would say that there are many people who work in the justice system who are champions of trying to do things differently.
Restorative approaches focus on healing and restoring relationships to that of dignity, equality and health. These are principles that are fundamentally linked to just outcomes and it is the way that we need to move in the future.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks, Stephanie.
Scott?
Mr. Milner: I want to say less about the criminal justice and more about social justice. Thinking about relational theory and working, thinking about a restorative approach has made a culture shift in our school system in Chignecto. It has allowed us to think differently about how people might be expressing their abilities, how we connect with our First Nations people, how we connect and think about sexuality and gender. I call the cultural shift a "slow burn.''
When I first met Emma she made me think I have got to do something right now. I mean she has lots of energy and she makes you think I have to do something now, go. I felt that way. However, I have realized in working with these ideas the slow burn, the cultural shift, the way we think about each other and think about how we are more alike than different have been the biggest shift. It is a big idea that I struggle with every day.
When I work with students and staff and influence school administrators and talk with them about these concepts they are thinking this way. For me, that is the success in this work. We have to be patient; we have to be relentless but patient. My concern is that we need to keep our foot on the gas and remember that we need to keep moving forward. Sometimes it feels like you are walking in sand, you slip back a little bit, but every time you slip back you learn to take that step forward again in these ideas. The small successes lead to big change.
For me, it is that shift to thinking about our social justice ideas. I know that connects to the criminal justice system but it is that larger cultural piece that seems to be important right now for us. Thank you.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks, Scott.
Jocelyn?
Ms. Yerxa: No small questions around here. How are you going to do this? Well, one of the things that is coming up for me and has come up for me is the complexity of all of the situations, all of the systems and how each of the complex systems interact with the others, as well as the multiple levels of harm that we see. As soon as you start looking into a situation it becomes evident that it is not simple.
Stephanie talked about gender, poverty and socio-economics. Human beings are complex, and all of our identities intersect and all of those things impact what happens and how we respond to them. The criminal justice system itself is a complex system and so layering all of this on top of each other I do not think there is necessarily a simple answer.
Something that Tony said to me earlier around co-creation really struck home to me, the ability to try to unpack the complexity and figure out how to move forward together. A restorative approach allows you to do that, it allows all of you to bring your stories into perspective, to unpack it and to figure out a way forward that you are part of creating something that is not dictated to you. That is more successful in moving forward than I think something that is dictated to us. It is a social justice issue for sure, as well as a criminal justice issue.
Scott just said something around the culture shift that struck home to me. I will describe one experience. We spend a lot of time talking and unpacking and we had a number of people who were real doers, like we've got to do, we've got to take action. It is like, "We're not doing anything,'' and then I realize, actually we are doing things; we are shifting how we are thinking about this, how we are responding to situations as they come to us. We are really taking a different path that is making a difference in the lives of seniors and communities, and that is important.
I will end with this quote I read recently. I thought it was really powerful in a multitude of situations and I think means something here too. That is, every complex problem has a clear, simple and wrong solution. So dig deep, try to figure out how we can find that solution that is not so wrong.
Ms. Llewellyn: Tony you are last pithy two minutes before we join the circle behind us.
Mr. Smith: Thank you.
Listening to everybody, I am in complete agreement that it is so diverse when looking at the justice system. One thing I would say in general, that it is not a fair playing field. Those who have, have better opportunities for receiving lesser punishment than those who do not. There are some things that we have to look at in that sense. Going to the issue around the coloured home, if we just went through the justice system and had a trial, we would not have told our story; who wins? Whether you win or lose, you do not learn from it, you go off and you repeat the same mistake again. No one wins.
With the restorative approach you are able to tell your story, build relationships and hear and respect one another in the context of the diverse backgrounds involved. One thing that we did with the design team is that we wanted to make sure that we had a safe place because we do not know each other. People say, "I may say something that is going to offend you. I don't mean to do that but this is what I understand it to be.'' You have to be in that space to let people do that. It is the same with the council of parties, we are different people from different backgrounds with different strengths. You have to be comfortable in saying what you need to say so that we can collectively arrive at that one voice. That is what we have to do in order to move forward.
There are all kinds of things I would not like to say about the justice system because I am an indigenous Black in Nova Scotia. I worked in addictions and in mental health, so I do see the other side. It comes back to the same thing: We have to have something in place where you can tell your story, where people can understand you. If you feel respected, if you feel that you are being heard then you can learn. But what if you are constantly in an environment where no, no, you cannot achieve and one where whatever poverty, whatever issues remain in that household they will not be resolved if you are in the system. Once you get into the system because of a behaviour problem the system will continue to treat you the same way because there is no means of getting out. So you increase the number of people incarcerated.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thank you very much.
One of the things you will learn about a restorative approach is that we get really good at moving furniture. We hope that we can back in and be part of a broader circle with you and that everyone will be comfortable when asking questions and listening to the responses. It is a daunting task, and I have a feeling you might be less amenable to my leaning in.
So we will sit next to each other and your chair can lean in for me when he feels that the question is good. We want to give you an opportunity to sit together and ask us some questions on your points of interest. You can ask particular people or you can just ask a general question and we will monitor ourselves.
The Chair: Thank you.
Those are remarkable stories from all of you and very impressive. What I want to try to zero in on is the purpose of the study by Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee to address court delays.
In terms of what Scott said about what is happening in the school system and the stats on suspensions is pretty compelling metric, there is no doubt about that in terms of impact on courts of the future.
Jennifer, you talked about the youth side of the equation. I am interested in how that is impacting the courts in Amherst or elsewhere across the province in terms of young people heading into the legal system, into the courts and how you take them away from that process and put them into something else that turns their lives around. We know from crime statistics that crime levels are dropping but the courts are still plugged. So there are real problems at that level.
I do not confine this question to you, Jennifer, but to anyone who has a comment with respect to what you are doing and how it, today, impacts what is happening in your courts. Of course, I guess you are all hopeful that at some level it is going to have an impact going forward and I guess you are encouraging as well that this approach be extended into the adult system which currently, I gather, is not occurring to any great extent.
Ms. Llewellyn: One of the things we did not talk about in the circle is being able to address problems in a more timely way whether outside or within the court. On a point of clarification, our restorative justice program is contemplated to move to adults in a short period of time. There is certainly the political will and the willingness of the community and the system is there. It has been a matter of doing that carefully and well. It is being piloted with the explicit intention of arriving at a shared skills model between the criminal justice system and community justice agencies, which, we anticipate, may be a reason for you to come back to Nova Scotia at some point.
I invite one of you to answer.
Ms. Furlong: I can start and try to address this big question.
Actually, over coffee this morning Tanya and I were talking about how we would answer that question, because it is kind of an obvious one. We know that for youth in the criminal justice system the numbers are down. We know that probation, Legal Aid, Crown, court and restorative justice the number of youth engaged is lower. Maybe it is because we are doing really great work. Maybe it is because there are fewer youth living in rural communities, we are not really sure. Certainly, like I noted before, there are more complex cases and we are doing work with higher needs youth and families and more harmful types of offenses.
On Jennifer's comment about timeliness, Wednesday afternoon we received a referral from a local police officer, municipal police. The referral was in our office two hours after the offence happened. Someone in downtown Amherst called the Amherst police to say they'd seen a couple of youths hanging around in a back alleyway and they suspected that they were putting up graffiti or involved in some kind of vandalism. One of them was found to be in possession of marijuana. It was processed; the referral was filled in; it was faxed; it was in our office I would say, like 118 minutes after the time of the offence. It was so fast. That has been happening more and more.
Within a week our case worker has contacted that young person to come in for a meeting, scheduled a restorative justice session and put in place within weeks, definitely less than a month, an agreement. Depending on how things go, that file could be closed within weeks or less than a month after the time of the offence, compared to the way things happen in Cumberland County, Amherst Youth Justice Court. Youth Justice Court is held the first Wednesday of each month. If you offend on the first Thursday or Friday of the month then you are waiting a month before you go back to court and then you are being adjourned to the next court date to have time to speak to a lawyer and then you come back. It is definitely more timely.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you kindly for your presentation. I would have liked to hear it when I was 39, and I'll tell you why.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jean-Guy Dagenais, and I am a senator from Quebec. Before becoming a senator, however, I was on the Sûreté du Québec police force for 39 years. I spent 24 years on patrol in my police cruiser in an underprivileged community, where 80 per cent of the population was receiving social assistance. I often had to intervene in situations of domestic violence, assault, aggravated assault, murder, attempted murder and armed robbery, and in many cases, young people were involved.
I spent 24 years of my police career in courtrooms and I saw many adjournments. Something I often observed defence lawyers doing — and some lawyers may not like this — was requesting adjournments simply for the sake of having a case delayed for an excessive amount of time and asking judges for the case to be thrown out because it had dragged on for two or three years. I saw young people who were arrested at 14 or 16 years old not have their cases go to court until they were 19 or 20 because of the overly long timelines. I commend you on your strength, your determination and your patience, given that police officers today obviously have to have a bit of social work training, something we didn't have in our day.
Even so, last week in the Montreal area, a police officer was assaulted with a knife and had to pull out his taser gun. But it didn't work, so he used his weapon and shot the homeless man who was mentally ill. Now, I don't know how things work in Halifax, but in Quebec, young people have been deinstitutionalized. That means that the government has shut down the facilities, leaving many people dealing with mental health issues out on the street, where police are the first responders.
That said, my question — and our chair pointed this out, in fact — has to do with not just court delays, but also the very real problem of timelines, especially in Quebec. I don't know how things are done in Halifax, but Judge Rolland, the former Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Québec, told us that the next available court dates were not until 2019. The problem is that we need a justice system that can rehabilitate. But we also need one with shorter timelines because they do have an impact on inmates.
Of course, we cannot forget that they have an impact on victims. A victim who has to wait two or three years before going to court experiences a considerable amount of stress. Appearing in court is no small feat for them. I'm not sure how things work on your end, but I want to commend you on your outstanding work and your determination, as I imagine it takes a lot to do your job. Thank you.
[English]
Ms. Llewellyn: I am going to invite people to respond.
We are very excited that you are going to see the Mental Health Court after this and we are very excited that you are be with our Chief Judge Pam Williams, who used to be our Youth Court judge. One of the interesting opportunities within the court to address delay and work restoratively was putting a restorative justice case worker on the court team and the use of restorative processes by that court team in order to increase communication and collaboration in a timely fashion around how matters were dealt with once they got there. That preparation by the team before they go to court lessens those delays and adjournments. She has been a very significant figure in terms of encouraging and creating space actually within the court structure for these sort of restorative processes not only to be used for those who are encountering the system but amongst the players within the system so that they can work more deeply and collaboratively. She has carried that into the Mental Health Court. That will be a very exciting opportunity for you, to see her team in action.
We have had questions about how this will address our opportunity to be doing justice more efficiently and more effectively outside or within the criminal justice system.
Emma, did you want to start?
Ms. Halpern: Going on what Jennifer said, there is no deny that there is a culture of delay in the criminal justice system and that it is pervasive across Canada. We still encounter some of the things you are talking about where, you know, a matter will be set down for trial two years from the date it first entered into the court system. The opportunity that restorative approaches offer is, one, the obvious, which is to divert many things that should not be in our court system to other processes and other mechanisms, which are all the things we talked about earlier that bring in the various departments and individuals to help solve the problem at hand.
On Jennifer's point on the specialized courts, they offer another opportunity to take a more restorative approach. It is my understanding, and I know Justice Pamela Williams will be able to tell you this much better than I, that the timelines are much tighter in some of our specialized courts, like the Mental Health Court. There are not the same challenges in some of the specialized courts because they are designed to address the complexity of the social issues that someone is facing and to give sort of tight timelines where they have to come back and illustrate that they have been addressing the problem, whatever it is.
In my view the best way to start to address some of these problems is by thinking differently, by taking a very different approach to our system. The system that we currently have, in my personal view, rewards delay to some degree because you are actually more successful if you can put things off and manoeuvre the system. That is generally the perspective of the defense, which was my role way back when. You are often waiting for various things to happen. Often there is no benefit really for counsel to be moving things ahead in the current system. If we start to think differently about what we are trying to do with our system, i.e. we are not just heading toward this one final result but in fact trying to address the problem this person is facing. Whether that is mental health, through our Mental Health Courts, or wellness courts, the use of a restorative approach I think will inevitably address a lot of those delay problems. We are seeing that with the courts, certainly seeing it with restorative approaches.
I mean, again, I do not have the statistics, but I know that the recidivism rates are much lower for young people who go through a restorative approach, and maybe Tanya or Jennifer will speak to that later. So we are seeing less people come back.
Another point that I wanted to make is that a very small percentage of our population is coming in through the criminal justice system. It is not, you know, huge numbers of our youth for example. We are talking about a very, small, select group of people and if we can really start working with the issues that those people are facing and the challenges they are facing we will inevitably start to address the delay and the f challenges that our system faces.
Ms. Llewellyn: I think when we do have some statistics about compliance with orders, they will be in keeping with the comments in the circle. People are much more likely to comply and fulfill commitments that they make collaboratively and are part of than when they are being ordered. That contributes to the recidivism rate as well.
It would also be remiss of us not to say that, in lots of these programs and institutions you have heard talked about this morning, police have been an essential partner in terms of community policing and crime prevention. They play an active role in policing not only in terms of public safety but in real partnership roles and opportunities within schools, within communities, within community services at my university campus where there is a much more collaborative approach, not just diverting out of the criminal justice system but allowing the criminal justice system to use those resources earlier within community through a collaborative and restorative approach.
Senator White?
Senator White: Thank you.
My question is to you, Emma. I have been listening to witnesses over the last few months now, and in fact lawyers typically want a bigger broken system. They do not want to fix the broken system. And to be fair, we are talking about the breaks in the system, not talking about having more people in a system that is not working.
I have a bias. I have had 32 years in policing. In 1985 I got involved in my first restorative justice program in Nain, Labrador. I did my masters thesis on restorative justice, so I am a big supporter of it. But the biggest pushback no matter where I have been, three territories and three provinces, has come from Defence and Crown, every single time. It is because they want to own the justice system; they do not want someone else to own it, and they want to be a part of the solution. I think it is the way they are trained; it is their system. How do you fight that?
Ms. Halpern: Well, I have a few answers to that question. I think you have to make space for them within the restorative approach that you are taking. You cannot exclude them.
I am putting Tanya on the spot a lot. She is speaking later I know. I was in Yarmouth in her community, and we had great participation in our restorative circles and also on her board from both Crown and defence. It was amazing. I had an experience with a lawyer in my office who is now a judge who attended his first circle and he came back to me, and his eyes were like wide open over the experience. He came in as a member of the community and did not attend the circle as a lawyer. You are not there speaking on behalf of your client. That experience really shifted his acceptance, support and willingness to refer, to try to support his clients in a restorative approach.
It has to be less of an "us and them'' system and we have to figure out ways to build restorative principles into the current system and shift the roles to some degree, but not saying that we no longer need defence lawyers or Crowns. In my work I spend a lot of time talking about restorative principles as they pertain to cultural competency, so being more competent to represent the diverse cultures of our province and using restorative principles as they pertain to trauma, to better understanding trauma. I believe we are seeing a shift among lawyers in terms of understanding that they do play a bigger role beyond simply knowing the substantive law and fighting for either an acquittal or a finding of guilt. Certainly with Crowns, that is their job; they are supposed to be playing the role of ensuring that we have a just society.
I certainly think that we are seeing Crowns who are exploring this. As someone said, I think it was Scott, this is not an overnight shift. It is going to take time. We are going to have to bring people in, give them a role, help them understand and see their place and how they can fit into the system. We are not trying to sort of form a diversionary program that does not involve the current players in the justice system. It is really important that restorative approaches not be seen as this diversion that is sort of done sometimes when it is nice and with young offenders, but as a core component of how we as players in the justice system can play that role.
I have the advantage of being in the law society and therefore sort of having some authority over lawyers. We are moving toward, as I was saying at the outset, thinking about our professional regulation through a more restorative lens. That will also move lawyers along because they are, whether they like it or not, part of the law society. They will be seeing a shift in the way in which their regulator thinks and works and that, I hope, will also sort of translate to thinking differently about how they see their role, or to at least an openness to thinking about it differently.
Senator Batters: I am Denise Batters, senator from Saskatchewan and a lawyer. I practised privately for more than a decade, and then I was the Justice Minister's Chief of Staff in Saskatchewan for almost five years after that. I have some experience on both sides of the lens and I have been in the Senate for three years now.
Mr. Smith, I really appreciate your contribution here. It is valuable for us to hear from victims and people who have worked with victims to hear about how court delays impact them. It can have a very significant impact, and we have not heard a lot of that at our hearings yet. Obviously many victims are hesitant to come forward. I was wondering if you could give us more of a perspective from a victim's point of view?
Mr. Smith: Thanks for asking. I am in a fortunate position because they wanted me to be the lead spokesperson, so I got to hear a lot of people's stories. It is very painful. Like as I said, we were discovered by our own lawyers. Some of the females found it very difficult to be in a room with a male. We are fighting for you, but it is very traumatic. Those were the people who came forward.
As I said, there was 160 civil suits so you are being discovered, rediscovered. One thing is that we were telling the same story, but we didn't know each other. There was the waiting and delay, and the courts, judges, lawyers can do that. For example, three lead plaintiffs for the class action traveled here only to have the hearing suddenly cancelled. One was suffering from cancer and the treatment and eventually had passed away. It was very devastating but important to her. Even though she was suffering physically, it was more important for her to be here spiritually and physically to address this.
With a class action people do not necessarily know that it is going on and then all of a sudden they find out and it triggers the memories. When you go through the process of the claim it is very difficult because it triggers again. We try to, as I said, minimize further harm. We try to have support there. People who tell their story will have it taped, it is going to be recorded, and they can pass it on to the inquiry so they do not have to repeat it.
There has to be another way of looking at this and looking at the population that you are talking to. The longer the process the more that they are suffering and there is more rejection. You start to think you are not being believed; nobody is going to believe you; nobody cares and that kind of stuff that they have lived with all their lives.
I have to say, it was very painful for us former victims to deal with the justice system in that way. Also, we were dealing with another element of racism because in our particular case we could not move forward because of the justice system. But the same cases being of different colour were being moved forward and they got more attention. So that is like a double whammy kind of thing, it is not just dealing with the issue of abuse and stuff like that but dealing with the issue of racism. The longer that it is delayed the more you re-victimize the victims so there needs to be something in place.
This restorative part of it is the best thing that happened for us, I can tell you right now, and to have a government to look at the vision and say that we need to make a change and we need to do this differently. I am going to be very honest with you, Premier Stephen MacNeil said, "Tony I want you to come up with a design team that involves residents. I want you to look at how do you want this public inquiry to be. I do not want it to be perceived as the government telling you this is what you got to do. We are going to be shared equal partners in doing this.'' You know, normally you have the commissioner, a retired judge. Now, you have people from the community, people from the government, former residents and we are inviting everybody, the RCMP, the Halifax police, the various opposition parties of government. The various agencies like the Departments of Justice, Education, Health, all had an impact as to how we could learn. I worked for the government for 30 some odd years, I know the bureaucrats, I know that there are a lot of decent people who want to do the right thing but because of whoever is in power and the policy of that day they have to make changes.
Before I went public about this I was an advocate for foster kids and I did talk about the coloured home and stuff like that and I said that I had a lot of resentment toward social workers. They said, "Why?'' I was not a troubled child. I was not in trouble with the law or school and stuff like that, but because I was not in trouble I did not get to see you, even though I was still being abused in that system. There were a lot of them saying, "We have a lot of resentment because our priority from our supervisors is to deal with the kids that have got the behaviour problems.'' So after a few years they said, "Tony guess what, we have made a change, we see all kids.''
I felt neglected; I am thinking I am doing the right thing as a kid growing up but I had nobody to talk to. So for me going through that system at a very young age I thought it was, well, you can do whatever you want to kid. So when I went public it was not about me. I got my life together, I have a beautiful wife that I have been with now, God, I think it is 36 years. I got a son who's an RCMP; I got a daughter who's a teacher. So for me, yeah, I got my life together. I did not know that there was any process to deal with what I went through as an individual. What haunted me was my friend who took a beating in the home and died as a result of that. I felt helpless because I tried to help. That scarred me and one day I said that I just had to tell the story. I did not go to the media, it was just the work I was doing. They came to me and they said, "Oh, you are a former resident of the coloured home. The coloured home is looking to get heritage status to renovate and it would be nice to have a former resident's perspective.'' I said, "I do not mind telling you my story but I may not be the story you want to hear.'' That is when I went public and as a result more people went public.
There is delay in getting this going, because it is to their advantage because people are passing away. Then you see somebody who's a part of it, like when the elder said, "Tony, continue to fight because we will never see that day,'' that inspired me to keep on fighting. It has been a lot of years, 1998 is a long time. But for them to actually see that day come, to see their faces was great. For me, the most important thing and the most exciting thing is seeing how they now know who they are, that positive person as the little kid they have always been, and to now be vindicated. So the longer you postpone that opportunity of having some kind of resolve causes more harm.
Ms. Llewellyn: Thanks, Tony. One of the interesting things to think about for us as a result of the inquiry, which we are very hopeful about, is how to make system change using a restorative approach. So one of the challenges I presume you will face in addressing delay in the criminal justice system is not just what programs and practices and changes in policies and laws there might be but how to recommend effectively that governments undertake those changes. One of the things that you might want to watch in terms of the way in which the restorative inquiry rolls out in this province using a restorative approach is how did we bring different system players together to be able to engage and actually make and work an action-oriented change in systems that tend to move like cold molasses.
Our sincere hope is that a restorative approach, as Tony has said, will allow us to work collaboratively to find those solutions within systems that might stick and bring about the kind of change you need.
Senator McIntyre, a Dal grad I think?
Senator McIntyre: I will be very brief.
My name is Paul McIntyre. I am a senator from New Brunswick. I found that what you had to say was not only interesting but very touching. The reason I say it was touching is that when I was young there was no restorative justice approach, there was no circle meetings. The only circle meetings that I knew was that you had to fight your way through, you had to fight your way through school, you had to fight your way in sports and so on. I had good parents; my sharing circle was really my mom and dad. They had no education; my father was a lumberjack, worked in the woods and all that but they worked hard and they sent my brother and me to school. Eventually I became a lawyer, a Dal graduate, by the way very proud to be. I practised law for 35 years in northern New Brunswick, a lot of criminal law, family law, and civil law.
Senator Baker: NCR.
Senator McIntyre: NCR, yes, not criminally responsible, that's right. I was on the review board of New Brunswick, mental disorder Part 20.1.
Anyway, all I want to say is that the violence that I witnessed when I was a child resurfaced in the courtrooms and I could see that. I had heard about the restorative justice approach and I am so proud to hear of the good work that you are doing. Please keep on going.
I will end on this note, and I mean it, we have to talk. We have to talk, if we talk things will move on, if we do not talk that is it. Thank you.
Ms. Llewellyn: Well, the applause in response to your comment is touching in itself.
Senator Jaffer.
Senator Jaffer: Thank you very much to all of you.
Listening this morning has just been really empowering. I sort of have to pinch myself to thing that I have had this powerful experience. I would be remiss if I did not thank Senator White for insisting we do this part today. He was responsible for getting us here, and I think we were a little hesitant because there are so many demands.
I have a question for Scott, but I also we have run out of time. All of you have given up so much of your time and I was wondering if, as part of our report we could make some sort of appendix on how you did it so that other jurisdictions can use it. It would be very useful as a follow-up if we had something to say that these are the steps.
My question to you, and I know we have very little time so maybe later on, is being in an authority position, being in a position of making decisions, how did you become convinced that this was the right thing to do? I heard Emma, and I get it. I get it, but then how did you push; I got that part so do not repeat it.
Mr. Milner: No, I won't.
Senator Jaffer: But the rest.
Mr. Milner: No, I won't. It was really dealing with the children and families and seeing children and families excluded from the school system. My intellectual shift to thinking about this is a way of engaging was by doing it. I was not convinced at the beginning. I really saw this approach as a means to getting my way as an authority figure, but when I experienced it I made the shift. I realized it was not about a process to get my way as an administrator or a principal or a teacher but a way of engaging, and it made me learn. It made me understand that I do not know everything. The teacher is supposed to know everything. It made me become more mindful and more reflective of my own thoughts and my own approach.
Really it was taking the chance. Part of it was, I guess, having the courage to be vulnerable, having the courage to put yourself out there. It was really small little steps. Sometimes it got pushed a little bit, I won't say by Emma again, but you know, she pushed me to say, "Take the chance.'' Once I experienced it, it opened your heart to the circumstance and by opening your heart it made your head shift.
As I am talking to you, I am picturing the children and students that I have dealt with in very complex situations. We are not talking about children who forgot their pencil and could not study; we are talking about children who were not coming to school because of very complex situations. So opening yourself to try to understand and going to their homes and figuring out solutions together was like building blocks, the small little steps to help make the change in the way I thought.
Then the next step was trying to influence others. There I experienced both pressure and a support. You do have to make some bold statements and put pressure on people in the institutions and organizations because they want the status quo. I had to put on that pressure in an authoritative way, but also lead by example when there was an opportunity to work with a governing elected board, for example, or senior administrators in the system, work in this manner and walk the talk and demonstrate it.
It is a slow methodical process and it is like the rocky path to a beach: You get to the beach but sometimes it is a rocky path to get there.
Your question is very difficult because it is built on small experiences over time, influencing and being constantly mindful of trying to move the organization. I hope I have answered your question but we can talk about later.
Ms. Llewellyn: We would be happy to be at the disposal of the committee in terms of any further information you would like and ask that you let us know if there is anything we can provide. We certainly will provide some short write- ups in context of the work we have been doing in the province. We know that you have the rest of the day to learn a bit more about the justice system in Nova Scotia and about the work of a restorative approach when you head off to see the Mental Health Court. We wish you safe travel there and back.
We are very grateful for this opportunity and we look forward to seeing Senate committee meetings in restorative circles via webcast. It has been our sincere honour and pleasure to have an opportunity to share with you. Thank you very much for having us here this morning.
(The committee adjourned.)