QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Public Safety
Mental Health Services for Inmates
April 21, 2026
Welcome, minister. Thank you for your life’s work in the area of human rights.
In 2024, a judge sentenced a person to a provincial hospital to avoid his isolation and consequent risks to his mental health and therefore to public safety.
Corrections receives funding to contract beds in provincial psychiatric hospitals. Despite tens of millions of dollars allocated since 2019, no additional bed spaces have resulted.
The Correctional Investigator and the Parliamentary Budget Officer have made the case for contracting external beds instead of continuing to sink billions into corrections-run initiatives that deliver less effective care and, therefore, hamper community safety. Instead, corrections is spending $1.3 billion for a single 150-bed corrections-run health centre in New Brunswick.
Especially given current cuts, how do you plan to ensure transparency and accountability of corrections regarding the impact on mental health and rehabilitation of spending billions of dollars in-house rather than on those with proven experience —
Thank you, senator.
Thank you, senator. I want to acknowledge the work you do each and every day on improving our corrections.
Let me say at the outset we have a new Commissioner of the Correctional Service. I believe you have already met him. The commissioner has been mandated with a number of very important issues that he will need to review. This is one of the issues that he is undertaking. I will have more to say in the near future.
Having said that, there are some pressing needs, I think, within corrections that we need to address, including the issues around reductions on librarians as well as CEGEP issues, that I’ve asked the commissioner to review and come back to me on.
I will say that there is no clear, easy fix here. It depends on the province/territory where a centre is housed right now. In terms of the centre in Shediac that you are referring to, it is progressing and does offer an alternate model. I would not fully discount that. I would say there is a great deal of thought that has gone into that process, and I do believe that it is a centre of excellence that will serve many inmates who may require those supports.
