Moved third reading of Bill S-230, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.

She said: Honourable senators, we as senators and the Senate as a whole have long worked to uphold the human rights of federal prisoners, closely tied to our role as representatives and protectors of so-called minority groups, the people too often at risk of being left behind or abandoned by the legislation we pass. Bill S-230, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, reflects this work.

In 2021, the Human Rights Committee issued a report on the human rights of federally sentenced persons, endorsed by the Senate, whose recommendations on isolation and Structured Intervention Units, or SIUs, Bill S-230 aims to implement. As part of its study, in 2018, committee members visited the East Coast Forensic Hospital in Burnside, Nova Scotia, and had the privilege of speaking with Tona Mills, whose name this legislation bears.

An Indigenous woman and survivor of the so-called Sixties Scoop, Tona was imprisoned for a decade in federal penitentiaries, including in segregated units in prisons for men. She spent all that time in solitary confinement. For those never imprisoned in such conditions, it is impossible to find the words to describe what she experienced.

For more than 10 years, she spent almost every hour of every day locked in a cell the size of a parking space or a small bathroom, barely more than a concrete closet. Instead of time outdoors, a tiny metal cage was built for her in the yard of the Prison for Women in Kingston. It remains there to this day, a reminder of how Tona was encaged and of the horrific reality that her time in those metal bars was meant to be a respite from even more restrictive confinement indoors.

Parenthetically, colleagues, last summer, when I was there with some folks who had never been to the Prison for Women before, they asked if that was where they kept the dogs.

When Tona was finally admitted into the mental health system, she was diagnosed with isolation-induced schizophrenia. Tona implored senators to do whatever we could to end solitary confinement and get others out of prisons and into appropriate mental health services so that what happened to her would not happen to anyone else. She does not want anyone else to be driven crazy. She asked if we might consider calling it “Tona’s Law.”

Tona exited the forensic unit one year ago. She was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. As she has for decades, including through three years of Bill S-230’s halting progress — through procedural delays at committee and now in the chamber — Tona is continuing her incredible advocacy. She is watching us today. In the time she has remaining, I believe we owe her —