Corrections and Conditional Release Act
Bill to Amend--Third Reading
April 28, 2026
Moved third reading of Bill S-205, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, as amended.
She said: Honourable senators, 32 years ago today, my life and work changed forever as a result of my visit to the ormer Prison for Women in Kingston as the first non-corrections-related person to gain access following the events that would give rise to the Arbour Commission.
In nearly 50 years of regularly going in and, most importantly, recognizing the significance of being able to walk out of prisons for young people, men and women, I have had the privilege and responsibility of bearing witness to some of the best and some of the worst ways that we treat one another.
Thank you to those of you who join us today in person and online.
Through nearly a decade in this chamber, I have been so very grateful to work alongside you, colleagues. I’m especially grateful to the 50 of you who have ventured into the prisons as well, for helping to breathe life into our commitment to represent the interests of those whose lives and experiences are more likely to be marginalized and ignored: people who have too often ended up in prison after being failed by every other system. These people live the reality of a dearth of economic, health, housing, educational and social supports and resources that leaves them teetering on the edge of or deeply sunk into poverty and, therefore, all the more likely to face criminalization and incarceration.
I know that each of us has chosen to be here, colleagues, because we believe in the work that this chamber can accomplish on behalf of all Canadians. Millions of Canadians — and the number is growing — live with entrenched uncertainty about their futures, as well as those of their loved ones, as indicators of institutions that do not work for them. If we are to credibly counter such realities, especially now, at a time when conspiracy theories, institutional distrust and political polarization run rampant, we must consider our role in acknowledging and responding to systemic injustice and inequality as not just a so‑called minority issue but something that hurts us all.
Tona’s law, Bill S-205, is the product of years of senators’ collective work to uphold the human rights that protect those most marginalized.
I speak today as just one in a chorus — now missing our leading voice — calling on you to pass the human rights protections that Tona Mills, a survivor of more than a decade in isolating confinement, dedicated her life to advocating for so that no one else would experience what she endured.
Tona’s law consists of two accountability measures recommended 30 years ago by the Honourable Justice Louise Arbour in her report, entitled Commission of inquiry into certain events at the Prison for Women in Kingston. They are court oversight of decisions to isolate prisoners and the ability for prisoners to return to court to seek a remedy in the event of correctional mismanagement of their sentences.
Tona’s law also includes measures to expand and breathe life into existing alternatives to isolation in the form of placements in the community for Indigenous Peoples and others experiencing mass incarceration. At committee, additional provisions seeking to encourage the use of existing avenues for transfers to provincial and territorial hospitals were removed from the bill.
I thank Senator Tannas and Senator Simons for their leadership in stewarding those provisions.
Together, senators have spent years studying the measures included in Tona’s law and have endorsed them three times: first as amendments to government legislation in 2019; second, as recommendations of a Human Rights Committee study in 2021; and third, in a previous iteration of this bill that was sent to the other place in 2024.
In December 2016, a month after my appointment, the Human Rights Committee received approval for a multi-year study of the human rights of federally sentenced persons. While some assume the study was my idea, in fact, the chair, Senator Jim Munson, laid the groundwork before I was even appointed. He focused, in particular, on the need to respond to the death of Ashley Smith in a segregation cell.
He was urged forward by colleagues, including Senator Joan Fraser, who rose in the Senate Chamber to note:
This is the point where I always . . . say, “How much are you going to spend?” . . . For the first time I’m going to say that I hope you spend a lot. I hope you can assure us today that you will travel across this country and visit . . . many prisons and do hard investigation of what happens there.
On one such trip to the East Coast Forensic Hospital in the spring of 2018, committee members met with Tona Mills. The torturous isolation that Tona had experienced in federal prisons caused irreparable and lifelong health consequences, including isolation-induced schizophrenia. She implored us to end isolation for everyone, everywhere, a proposal that she joked we could call “Tona’s law.”
Other committees made visits to prisons. During the Indigenous Peoples Committee’s 2018 travel for its study on nation-to-nation relationships, committee leadership, including Senators Tannas, Christmas and Dyck, visited the Saskatchewan Penitentiary to meet with men imprisoned there, the majority of whom were Indigenous.
In 2019, the Senate studied Bill C-83, the government’s response to court decisions ruling that Canada’s existing practices of segregation and solitary confinement in federal prisons were cruel, unusual and unconstitutional.
By the time the bill left the chamber, about a third of sitting senators had made visits to prisons. I remember Senator McCallum’s regular visits to Stony Mountain Institution and her work, in particular, with Indigenous prisoners and staff seeking to build connections to community. I remember Senator Petitclerc patiently signing autographs in the Quebec Federal Training Centre for prisoners who knew her, first and foremost, as one of their sports heroes. I remember Senator Colin Deacon’s question, which resonated long after we left the Nova Institution for Women: Why a system clearly based on presumptions of punishment is called “corrections.”
Those with lived experience, as well as legal and human rights experts, warned the Senate that Bill C-83 would rename spaces of isolation as Structured Intervention Units, or SIUs, but would not prevent solitary confinement. To strengthen the bill, experts pointed us to the types of measures Tona talked about, including the unimplemented recommendations of the 1996 Arbour report.
In response to mass violations of women’s human rights and a subsequent cover-up, Justice Arbour’s recommendations sought to counter a culture that was punitive and oppressive for both prisoners and correctional staff. Her work was informed by the experience of women she met at the prison, including a woman who was not only isolated but was often shackled and strapped to her bed frame or floor. That was Tona. Tona’s experiences made clear that the human rights abuses that gave rise to the commission of inquiry — uses of force, stripping, shackling and segregation — were not anomalous; they were systemic and ongoing.
In 2019, the Social Affairs Committee, and then the Senate as a whole, voted to amend Bill C-83, the government’s proposed response to solitary confinement. Those Senate measures were not ultimately incorporated into government legislation. They were, however, reiterated and recommended by the Human Rights Committee in its 2021 final report, Human Rights of Federally-Sentenced Persons.
Senators’ experiences with Bill C-83 also led colleagues to organize further visits to monitor implementation. Senator Klyne was instrumental in this. His office developed a survey tool to track and evaluate conditions. What senators saw following Bill C-83 aligned with the government’s own data, indicating that solitary confinement persisted in federal prisons and persists today.
Our dear late colleague Senator Josée Forest-Niesing, who had championed the Senate’s amendments during consideration of Bill C-83, planned to introduce a bill based on these measures. I became the sponsor because she was ill and continued after she passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the meantime, Tona moved from the hospital to the community. New colleagues joined our work. We appreciate Senator Clement’s frequent visits to Collins Bay Institution and other prisons, focusing on issues from anti-Black racism to voting rights.
In the last Parliament, around the time that we learned Tona was terminally ill with cancer, we passed the previous iteration of Tona’s law and sent it to the other place. Unfortunately, they did not have time to consider it before the last election.
With the reintroduction of Bill S-205, Tona continued to work and advocate from her community in Halifax and Atlantic Canada. Not long before her death, she was overjoyed to meet Senator Francis and members of his family and community when we presented at a Mi’kmaq Confederacy conference in P.E.I. She was also overjoyed to spend time with Senator Bernard, whom she first met nearly a decade ago through the Human Rights Committee but who had visited her several times since then.
The last time I visited Tona, we talked about the next steps for the bill before you today, about her family, her friends and my children, Michael and Madison. We talked about the many who have called and written to her and to me about the need for these provisions. Tona talked about the many who worked in the prisons who reached out in support, especially those who called and apologized for not speaking up when they witnessed what was happening to her and to others.
We talked about the pressures good people experience when they work in oppressive environments to conform and turn away from even blatant abuse. We talked about the dichotomous experiences of love, care and compassion in places that also produced violence, inhumanity and brutal abuse. We talked about the importance of this bill to help good people do better and provide a means to call to account those who abuse power and privilege.
I often reflect on how different your life, mine or those of any of us would be if we had experienced what so many of the women in prisons have. It impacted me and my children. My son Michael met Tona for the first time at the Prison for Women when he was five years old. As part of a resource event, we brought in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and we took some to the women in segregation.
When Tona waved at him from behind a steel door, Michael instinctively reached for the handle and tried to open her cell. Tona started to cry and Michael’s lips trembled as he asked me, “Mummy, why won’t the door open?” Tona often recounted this to others, saying, “Even a little child knew that it wasn’t right.”
Tona’s law would finally implement court oversight of decisions to isolate prisoners and judicial remedies that Justice Arbour recommended 30 years ago, which she explained as follows:
I see no alternative to the current overuse of prolonged segregation but to recommend that it be placed under the control and supervision of the courts. . . .
For those who have not seen it, how can I capture the horror of caging rows of humans in little more than concrete closets for hours, days, weeks and even years on end? I can share what courts and clinicians have found as fact: After 48 hours, sensory deprivation and other irreversible harms can take root, and by day seven, brain activity can be permanently altered. As summarized by the Court of Appeal for Ontario, isolation is “. . . repeatedly . . . linked to appetite and sleep problems, anxiety, panic, rage, loss of control, depersonalization, paranoia, hallucinations, self-mutilation, increased rates of suicide and self-harm . . . .” More than 15 days in isolation is considered internationally as amounting to torture.
I don’t know how to describe the sounds that haunt me: torment, despair, screams and cries that would cause prison staff to call me to come in, which were visits when I could not bring my children. Those were the sounds as I pleaded on my knees on a cement floor at a tiny slot or at the hinges of a door, trying to find some combination of words to stop the person on the other side — someone’s loved one, child, sibling, parent or partner — from smashing their heads, slashing their bodies, tying ligatures around their necks, trying to gouge out their own eyes or otherwise mutilate themselves.
Our former colleague Senator André Pratte, arguing that senators should insist on the amendments that became the basis of Tona’s law, observed the following:
I’m not an expert on prison issues. . . . but I think we can easily imagine what being deprived not only of freedom, but of dignity, does to a human being. . . .
. . . the wait is, of course, unbearable. There is just no way that a stable person can stay in these small cells for days and weeks without their mental health being affected. For mentally ill inmates the effects can be absolutely irreversible.
Senator Frances Lankin, our former colleague and a former correctional officer, highlighted travesties from the perspectives both of prisoners and staff:
I have seen situations, and, in fact, I have a lasting moral injury from having observed and been a correctional officer in charge of a segregation unit for a period of time. I’ve seen situations that would be unthinkable for most of us to ever consider doing, but that people have done to get that human contact. . . .
Ashley [Smith] was videotaped dying as correctional officers observed, but failed to intervene to remove the last ligature she tied around her neck. She had every right to believe that the staff had a duty of care and a duty to save her life.
She also said:
Correctional officers were urged to write off the suffering that she experienced in segregation as attention-seeking behaviour.
Constitutional expert and former Senator Serge Joyal noted, in support of the same Senate amendments:
The system by itself doesn’t have the dynamics to police itself, to meet . . . the bare minimum to maintain human dignity.
This is why Tona’s law would require prison authorities to seek the approval of a superior court to keep a person in isolation for more than 48 hours, the time at which the Court of Appeal for Ontario found that irreparable physical, psychological and neurological harms can begin. This time frame was supported by forensic mental health experts at committee. In addition, if correctional mismanagement has made a person’s sentence more punitive, for example, due to extensive periods of time in isolation, that person can apply to the court that sentenced them for a reduced sentence or parole ineligibility period.
Currently, if abuse occurs before a sentence is issued, the Criminal Code permits judges to reduce the length of the sentence in response. However, what about abusive conditions of isolation that a judge could not foresee, such as those imposed post-sentence? As recommended by Justice Arbour, Tona’s law would fill this gap. Finally, as recommended by the Office of the Correctional Investigator and the government’s own advisory panel on Structured Intervention Units, or SIUs, Tona’s law would ensure that practices of isolation that have flourished outside SIUs in recent years are equally subject to court oversight and safeguards.
When the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee voted in support of Tona’s law, it did so on the strength of testimony in support of court oversight from witnesses, including the former chair of the minister’s advisory panel on SIUs; the Assembly of First Nations; the BC First Nations Justice Council; the Canadian Bar Association; the Indigenous Bar Association; the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers; the Canadian Psychiatric Association; the Mi’kmaw Legal Support Network; Disabled Women’s Network of Canada; the Canadian Prison Law Association; the John Howard Society of Canada; the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies; forensic psychiatrist Dr. Maryana Kravtsenyuk; and legal experts Professor Sheila Wildeman, Professor Debra Parkes and Michael Spratt.
Asked about potential drains on scarce court resources, witnesses, including the former chair of the minister’s advisory panel, urged us that courts and corrections would be able to handle the 48-hour reviews. Courts already accommodate 24‑hour bail reviews for tens of thousands of people on remand, far more than the 1,000 to 2,000 people per year in SIUs.
Under current law, corrections already has to complete necessary documentation for the application, including risk assessments, compatibility assessments and case management, within 48 hours as a result of existing requirements to eliminate all other options before transfer to a SIU, a requirement to provide written reasons for the transfer within 48 hours and a mental health assessment within 24 hours of a transfer to a SIU.
Court oversight will also incentivize corrections to find alternatives to isolation more proactively, avoiding the need for hearings. By contrast, not a single witness appeared to suggest that non-judicial measures would provide sufficient accountability. Regarding existing internal reviews, even a prison guards’ union representative, who raised concerns about the bill, conceded: “Probably it is not enough . . . .”
Law professor Debra Parkes urged the Senate to continue to insist on court oversight:
. . . we don’t say to the police, “We don’t have court resources to prosecute” when there are violations of the law and “You shouldn’t be laying charges because we don’t have court capacity.” In the prison context, if we have violations of the law, there needs to be a meaningful review and remedy for that.
By curtailing the documented health and safety harms of isolation, court oversight will enhance, not undermine, safety. Corrections itself did not identify any safety challenges associated with 48-hour court oversight, so long as “. . . we could hold those individuals in the SIU until we got the decision from the court . . . .” This is how we expect courts would proceed.
Tona’s law can save resources as well as lives. As acknowledged by the Parliamentary Budget Officer, fewer people in SIUs will save hundreds of thousands of dollars per person per year.
Finally, Tona’s law would encourage, as a meaningful alternative to isolation, full use of community-based options for Indigenous Peoples and others allowed by sections 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, in line with the legislative intent of these provisions, and the calls of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Government data confirms that half of men and nearly all women in SIUs are Indigenous. Prisoners who are Black, trans and experiencing disabling mental health issues are also overrepresented and in urgent need of connections to community.
Speaking in support of the measures that went on to become Tona’s law, our dearly missed colleague Murray Sinclair-iban reminded us that, for too many Indigenous children and communities, residential schools were the beginnings of solitary confinement, forced removals and mass institutionalization now perpetrated by child welfare and prison systems. He told us:
. . . during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we toured as many of the residential schools that were still standing . . . . In every one of them, there was a small room, usually under a staircase, where the residents would be confined if they were not listening to what the teachers were telling them. In each of those little rooms, some of them only two or three feet tall, you could see scratch marks on the wall and sometimes even bloodstains . . . from where the students, as children, had tried to claw their way out or leave some kind of evidence of their being there.
Last year, I went to visit the “Mush Hole,” which was the Mohawk Institute residential school located at Six Nations. I will carry with me for the rest of my life the sight of the under-stair isolation cupboard, shown to me by members of the Survivors’ Secretariat, just as Senator Sinclair described.
Witnesses at the Legal Committee explained how prisons perpetuate these travesties. Paula Marshall of the Mi’kmaw Legal Support Network said:
Trauma . . . can look like anger. It can look like shutting down. It can look like mistrust. It can look like self-harm. Inside prison, those trauma responses are often treated as risk . . . .
Vice-Chief Joseph Tsannie of the Prince Albert Grand Council testified:
. . . prison conditions, including isolation-like conditions, create crisis responses, they end up criminalizing trauma and treating institutional damage as proof that release is impossible.
This was Tona, her trauma criminalized and then exacerbated by institutional abuses.
My daughter Madison was an infant when she met Tona, one of a group of predominantly Indigenous women with mental health issues characterized as “dangerous” and isolated in the Springhill Institution, a prison for men in Nova Scotia. At a time when her own physical and mental health were rapidly deteriorating in segregation, and knowing that I was coming to meet with the women and work on a transfer for her while I was on holidays and therefore with an infant and an eight-year-old in tow, Tona’s priority was to make gifts for my children.
It took years before Tona got before a judge, who then immediately recognized that what corrections called behavioural conduct and personality disorder issues were, in fact, unmet mental health needs. She was then sent to a forensic hospital.
Many more years passed, marked by all the springs when Tona played the Easter Bunny, speaking with my kids over the phone, fielding their questions with patience and creativity. In Grade 2, Madison announced to her class, with authority, that the Easter Bunny lives in a purple egg and, “She’s a girl!”
All her life, Tona made friends wherever she went — one letter, one email, one joke, one act of care at a time. Over the past few years, as Madison graduated university and now law school, Tona was finally welcomed into the heart of a community.
Like so many others, Tona was haunted by memories of her torture. For years, I had nightmares every night, too. In community, Tona’s caregivers were incredulous that she could ever have been described as dangerous. They experienced her as witty, kind, generous and patient, someone who embraced every opportunity to advocate for others.
Dr. Pamela Palmater provided the Legal Committee with an overview of how sections 81 and 84 came to be included in Canada’s correctional legislation three decades ago as a means of redressing mass incarceration, upholding self-determination and moving people whom the colonial system classified as dangerous — people like Tona — out of prisons into their communities, where their needs can be adequately met.
All Indigenous organizations and experts appearing at committee emphasized that these options have been tightly controlled by corrections — they described it as “colonial gatekeeping” — underfunded and consequently underused. Indigenous witnesses highlighted that Tona’s law would create presumptions in favour of transfers and release to community. It would shift decision-making power away from corrections, back to the Indigenous communities and Indigenous prisoners.
Most Indigenous witnesses also supported the bill’s measures to allow non-Indigenous communities experiencing mass incarceration to benefit from similar community-based options, as recommended by the Senate Human Rights Committee in its study of federally sentenced persons.
Dr. Palmater highlighted that Tona’s law properly reflects the legislative intention of sections 81 and 84 as “. . . primarily focused on reuniting Indigenous peoples with their communities, in line with Canada’s legal and constitutional obligations . . .” while also having “. . . always included a reference to non-Indigenous prisoners being able to access section 81 and 84 options.”
Kory Wilson, Chair of the BC First Nations Justice Council, noted that there is no finite pool of resources for which different communities would need to compete, as funding would come from the hundreds of thousands of dollars the federal government saves when a person is in the community instead of incarcerated.
Representatives of the Assembly of First Nations supported Tona’s law as “. . . a chance to address systemic inequities” and reminded us what is at stake:
The connection of family. The connection of culture. The connection to community. We’re all seeking it. We all want it and we’re all trying to do our best to be part of this. . . . We don’t want our people to be isolated and basically dealing with crimes against humanity in a different way, where they’re in institutions . . . .
Canada will need to reckon with its criminalization and incarceration of people in need of supports and services. Those who are living on the streets, in poverty, with mental health issues, trauma or addictions are all too often criminalized when they’re in crisis, sometimes in the hopes of getting them treatment or supports. Instead, they are more likely to end up in isolation, including in prisons that may be called treatment centres and even healing lodges, but controlled by prison authorities instead of Indigenous communities and health professionals.
Witnesses were clear that corrections has the necessary resources to invest in community-based options and that doing so will save Canada money. What is needed, what we hope will be encouraged through Tona’s law and court decisions like the Warren case — the appeal of which is being heard today, dealing with a decision to sentence an Indigenous man with disabling mental health and intellectual capacity issues to hospital instead of prison — is a push to encourage the use of these resources to meet human rights obligations, save costs and save lives.
Tona died on February 19, just weeks before the thirtieth anniversary of the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston, whose findings were shaped by the human rights abuses inflicted on Tona and others, and whose recommendations for judicial oversight of correctional decision making remain unimplemented.
Through too many harms and three decades of inaction on the part of Canada, Tona persisted. Tona’s law aims to ensure that human and Charter rights matter no matter who you are or where you are, that there will be meaningful accountability and remedies if rights are violated and that there can be hope for brighter futures in the community. Tona’s law consists of the safeguards that Tona wanted to extend to and wrap around those suffering today in the torturous cells she experienced.
I pray we will all work together to continue our collective efforts in support of those most marginalized, that we will pass Bill S-205 and answer Tona’s dying wish — that her life would help move us toward ending the torture and abuse of solitary confinement, too late for her to benefit from but, hopefully, to help others.
I close with Tona’s urgent refrain: “Please end segregation for everyone, everywhere.” Chi-meegwetch. Thank you.
Honourable senators, I rise today to speak in support of Bill S-205, An Act to Amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, known as “Tona’s Law.”
The purpose of Tona’s law is to ensure oversight, remedies and alternatives to isolation in federal prisons. In my speech, I will speak specifically to the context of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and non-status women and men.
Colleagues, as I speak to this bill, I would like you to keep in mind the following: We look at the history of Tona and her life and the violent incidents she experienced as a young, innocent girl. Having violence in one’s life stays with you for a lifetime. I can attest to that.
Eighty-five per cent of all women — and ninety-one per cent of Indigenous women alone — in federal prisons have histories of physical and/or sexual abuse. In other words, nearly all Indigenous women in prison were victimized before they were criminalized. The legal system left them under-protected and failed to respond adequately and efficiently to the violence they experienced, forcing them to protect themselves and those in their care. Where women do so — whether that means using force against an abuser, using substances to anaesthetize themselves, fleeing and ending up on the streets — that is all too often how victims and survivors end up not only charged and criminalized, but labelled as high-needs, high-risk and dangerous.
Tona was one of too many women who lived this reality — women who are not dangerous but who are trapped in security protocols and conditions of isolation that are incredibly dangerous, that cost the health and lives of too many and to which no one should be subjected.
How did she get a life sentence that placed her in institutions for 30 years? And how inhumane and cruel is it to place a fellow human being in isolation or solitary confinement for 11 of those years?
As you will remember, 80% of Indigenous inmates come from the foster care system. I wonder how many of us in this room would spend time in isolation as an exercise to understand the conditions.
On one of my visits to the Stony Mountain Institution in 2019, when I had been approached to work with the First Nations, Métis and Inuit employees to address racism within the penitentiary, I met with the inmates in medium security. The psychologist advised me at the time that 75% of the inmates did not belong there. They needed support for mental health issues that should have and could have been addressed outside the prison system, especially at the start of their lives in the prison system.
The Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, or CAEFS, states:
In Canada, the mass incarceration of Indigenous women and gender-diverse people represents on of the most egregious human rights travesties our country faces. Indigenous women and gender diverse people make up over 50% of people in federal prisons designated for women—more than one in two federally sentenced women are Indigenous! This represents a . . . staggering disparity, considering Indigenous people make up less than 5% of the total population.
In some regions, provincial and federal prisoner populations include between 75%-to 90%+ Indigenous people. This travesty reflects the deep systemic violence and racism that persists in Canadian institutions, and signals an urgent need for our collective action.
Senators, I urge you to think about the part you can play in collective action.
In his evidence, given to the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs on February 28, 2024, Dr. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, stated:
In 1992 the role of my office was entrenched in legislation, and the Mulroney government enacted the Corrections and Conditional Release Act. That was . . . legislation, very progressive, which spoke to charter rights and administrative law principles, and it included two very progressive provisions—sections 81 and 84. Those sections enabled the Minister of Public Safety—which at that time was the Solicitor General—to enter into agreements with indigenous communities for the care, custody or supervision of indigenous incarcerated persons.
Dr. Zinger continued:
In 2013, my office issued a special report on indigenous corrections. It found that Correctional Service Canada had moved away from implementing section 81 in the early 2000s, favouring instead investments inside penitentiaries, under its Pathways initiative. Today Correctional Service still operates four healing lodges; they have not been transferred to indigenous communities as originally planned. My office reported a significant funding disparity between CSC-operated healing lodges and section 81 healing lodges, basically 62 cents on the dollar.
He went on to testify:
Over the last 20 years, Correctional Service has developed five distinct strategies on indigenous corrections. Unfortunately, and despite significant efforts and resources, my office has not observed any significant or measurable improvements on key correctional outcomes—which . . . Corrections has control over. If you compare indigenous versus non-indigenous prisoners, indigenous ones are overrepresented in maximum-security institutions. They’re overrepresented in structured intervention units, which is the old regime of administrative segregation. They’re more likely to be involved in use of force. They’re more likely to self-injure. They’re more likely to attempt suicide. They serve the higher proportion of their sentence, and the great majority are typically released at statutory release, which is at two-thirds of their sentence. They have a higher rate of parole suspension and revocation, and also a higher rate of recidivism.
When I visited the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Saskatchewan with Senator Pate in 2023, I learned that one of the women being released was left to find her way to Saskatoon — that is a long way — on her own, with no bus service. She was supposed to be in Saskatoon by 5 p.m. to see her parole officer. She couldn’t reach the city in time, was considered a reoffender and had her parole suspended.
Dr. Zinger highlighted some of the findings in three initiatives:
The first one is healing lodges. There are currently 10 healing lodges in federal corrections. Four are operated by Corrections and have a capacity of 250 beds, which is enough for about 4% of the indigenous in-custody population. Six of those healing lodges are operated under section 81 and are therefore community-based, but they have only 139 beds—a capacity to house only about 2% of the indigenous in-custody population. There are no healing lodges in Ontario, the Atlantic provinces or the north. . . . Corrections mentioned to us 10 years ago that it had increased funding to healing lodges run by indigenous communities, but it also increased funding to its own healing lodges, so the disparity has actually remained the same.
Let me quote from a news article by CBC on March 28, 2026, entitled “Man under house arrest sues over access to Indigenous ceremonies.” In a lawsuit, the man alleged that:
. . . his probation officer’s decision to refuse his participation in ceremonies is unlawful and unreasonable, and violates his Charter right to freedom of religion.
As the article reads, “Amid a diagnosis of unspecified psychosis, as well as depression and substance use disorder . . .,” the man has worked hard to maintain sobriety, yet “. . . he can’t leave his apartment for nine months without permission from his probation officer.” The article further states:
. . . he asked to attend cultural activities — including cedar baths, pipe ceremonies and sweats — as part of his addictions treatment while facing lengthy waits for an available bed in long-term treatment.
[He] alleges his supervisor denied the request, saying [he] could not do anything “fun” until he completed detox.
He was denied again after finishing detox . . . .
“I feel like I am being punished for trying to stay connected to my culture. Connecting with my heritage is one of the things that helps me stay away from drugs,” [the man] said.
Senators, I offer you this insight into prevalent themes of racism, lack of understanding and racial profiling of culture by people who are in charge of the incarcerated and paroled, and the need for section 81.
As Senator Pate said, the Senate first voted in favour of the measures in Tona’s law in 2019 as amendments that were proposed to government legislation: Bill C-83, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act and another Act in Canada. According to the Charter Statement by the Minister of Justice, Bill C-83 was aimed at amending the use of administrative segregation in federal penitentiaries. It introduced structured intervention units, or SIUs, which allow inmates to receive structured interventions and enhanced mental health care tailored to their needs. Bill C-83 sought to improve correctional outcomes by addressing the underlying causes of high-risk behaviour and reducing violent incidents in prisons. It also emphasized the importance of procedural fairness and the rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights, ensuring that the conditions in SIUs promote rehabilitation.
The Charter Statement goes on to state:
Section 7 of the Charter guarantees to everyone the right to life, liberty and security of the person, and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Because the transfer of an inmate to an SIU would impose additional constraints and conditions on the inmate, it would engage their residual right to liberty and potentially their right to security of the person. The provisions authorizing the confinement of inmates in an SIU must therefore respect the principles of fundamental justice, including procedural fairness. One notable aspect of procedural fairness in this context is that the decision-maker imposing the measure must have an appropriate degree of independence and impartiality.
All the above safeguards, which I just mentioned in the Charter Statement, were put in place to prevent abuse of segregation and guarantee health care, including mental health — section 7 of the Charter — as well as protection under section 15(1) of the Charter and elimination of disciplinary segregation under section 12 of the Charter. Despite all the above safeguards, Tona was to spend 11 years in segregation with irreparable and lifelong health consequences. So what is the purpose of a Charter Statement that is ignored?
In the absence of Senate amendments, Bill C-83 has allowed conditions of solitary confinement to continue and expand.
Today, we have another opportunity to send Tona’s law to the other place and to take another step toward long recommended and long overdue measures to ensure oversight, remedies and alternatives. Sections 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act are underfunded and consequently underused —
Senator McCallum, the time allowed has expired. Did you want a few minutes to finish your speech?
Yes, I would like a little bit more time, if I could.
Is leave granted, honourable senators?
Thank you to everyone.
If fully implemented in line with their legislative intent and adequate resourcing, they would provide options toward supporting Indigenous and non-Indigenous prisoners as they serve the custodial and parole portions of their sentences in their communities.
In the absence of such steps to decolonize and decarcerate, Indigenous women will remain Canada’s fastest-growing prison population.
Honourable senators, let us work together to pass Bill S-205. Let us take this opportunity to uphold Charter and human rights obligations and bring about a more just criminal legal system in what will benefit all Canadians.
Kinanâskomitinawow.
Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-205, An Act to amend the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, also known as Tona’s law.
I wish to begin by acknowledging that we are gathered on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people. I believe that land acknowledgements need to be more than performative, and they are especially vital when discussing matters of justice and law, as it grounds our work in the reality of both historical and ongoing systemic inequities.
Today, I am really pleased to be here to add my voice to this debate. I will do so firmly and briefly. I want to thank Senator Pate for her persistence in bringing this bill forward again and especially for the speech today, which highlighted so many interventions that have taken place just over the last 10 years alone that speak to the need for this bill. I also extend my deep gratitude to all colleagues who have contributed to this debate at its various stages and the various iterations of the bill.
With over 45 years of social work experience — and I know I don’t look that old — working with incarcerated people and supporting the families and communities of incarcerated people, I want to tell you that lived experience brings me to fully support this bill, full stop. I support this bill.
Tona’s law is more than a legislative amendment; it is a response to the lived reality of those who have been most marginalized. Named in memory of the great Tona Mills — an Indigenous woman, a Sixties Scoop Survivor, a tireless advocate and a person who still found joy every day — this bill seeks to protect the most vulnerable people in our communities against one of the most heinous human rights violations in Canada: solitary confinement. Colleagues, I want this to sink in. I want you to think for a moment. We are talking about some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. They are people who Senator Pate and Senator McCallum have spoken about today in their speeches — people whose lives have been steered, directed and guided by the impact of systemic racism and colonialism. We are talking largely about Indigenous Peoples and Black people who deal with the daily struggles of racism, addiction, mental illness and intergenerational trauma that never goes away.
Tona’s law is a step in the right direction for the type of change that I would like to see for my community. We need community-based options for African-Canadian communities because, quite frankly, isolation does not solve issues. In fact, as we have heard, it creates more of them. During the study conducted by the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights on the human rights of federally sentenced persons, we repeatedly heard about the importance of community-based alternatives for prisoners. I will remind you, colleagues, Recommendation 46 of the report states:
That the Correctional Service of Canada work with independent experts and civil society organizations involved in the —
— and note this —
— rehabilitation and community integration of federally-sentenced Black persons and otherwise racialized persons to develop and fund correctional programming and integration opportunities as are available pursuant to sections 29, 81 and 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
As you have already heard today, our committee tabled 71 recommendations urging change in our criminal justice system. Through this bill — Tona’s law — we have here an opportunity to make progress on some of these recommendations, including but not limited to Recommendation 33, which calls for eliminating the use of solitary confinement.
Honourable colleagues, the message I wish to convey here today is clear. Healing happens in connection and in community. Healing does not occur in isolation and certainly cannot occur in solitary confinement.
For the last visit I had with Tona last summer — following the visit with Senator Pate — I took her some homemade treats that she absolutely loved. Tona told me that she wanted to see this bill pass so that she could die in peace.
Tona had been forced to navigate her deepest traumas and mounting health crises in a vacuum of silence, denied the community support we know is essential for connection and healing. Tona was determined to see this through so that no one else would suffer as she had ever again.
So, while Tona did not live to see this day, she is still fighting, through you, Senator Pate, and for all of us who speak to this bill. She is still fighting for this change.
Honourable senators, I ask you to pass this bill in her memory. Let’s make Tona’s law her legacy.
Thank you. Asante.
Honourable senators, I rise today on behalf of Senator Carignan at third reading of Bill S-205. Senator Carignan had intended to speak to this bill himself but has asked me to deliver his remarks in his place. These are his words. I now turn to his comments on this bill, entitled, “Providing Alternatives to Isolation and Ensuring Oversight and Remedies in the Correctional System Act (Tona’s Law)”:
At this stage, we are no longer debating the principle of the bill or its general intent. Many of you find those intentions commendable, and I can understand why. But that is not the question before us today.
At third reading, our role is no longer to assess intent, but to fully assume our legislative responsibility with respect to the text before us. We must examine the bill in its final form and ask whether it rests on solid legal foundations, whether it is workable in practice, and whether it fits coherently within the existing legislative framework.
In my view, the answer is no.
As I indicated at second reading, I cannot support this bill, even after the amendments adopted by the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.
Let me be clear: I recognize the work of the committee. The amendments adopted corrected a specific issue I had raised, namely the requirement to transfer any person convicted or transferred to a penitentiary who is suffering from disabling mental disorders to a hospital — an obligation whose feasibility raised serious concerns. The committee heard that argument during testimony and acted accordingly.
That said, the fact that this issue was corrected does not mean that the fundamental concerns have disappeared. In my view, they remain very much present.
I followed closely the committee’s work and the testimony heard. One conclusion was repeated again and again: The current regime of Structured Intervention Units, or SIUs, is not functioning as provided for in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.
I want to be very precise here. What is not working are not vague policy directions or mere administrative practices. These are clear legal obligations set out in the act itself. I am referring, for example, to meaningful human contact, the ability to participate in programs, and the right to receive services that respond to an inmate’s specific needs, as set out in paragraph 32(1)(b) of the act.
However, testimony demonstrated a persistent gap between the legal standard and reality — between what the law requires and what is actually happening in institutions.
That, for me, is the starting point. And that is precisely where I part ways with Bill S-205.
Rather than ensuring that existing law is properly applied, the proposed response to the problem is to layer on new mechanisms, new remedies and additional obligations.
In other words, more law is added where existing law is already not being consistently applied.
From a legal perspective, this approach concerns me.
I would now like to focus on two specific provisions of the bill that illustrate these concerns well: sections 5 and 11.
I will begin with section 5.
This section provides that the continued placement of a person in a Structured Intervention Unit beyond 48 hours must be authorized by a superior court, upon application by the Correctional Service of Canada.
In practical terms, this introduces judicial authorization into an area that is fundamentally correctional administration. Placement — or continued placement — of an inmate in an SIU is an administrative decision made under authority granted by the act.
At first glance, I acknowledge, the idea may appear appealing. An independent review by a superior court may seem reassuring. But when this mechanism is examined more closely, both legally and practically, significant difficulties arise.
First, it imposes additional jurisdiction on superior courts in a context where, as we all know, courts are already dealing with significant delays, complex dockets and limited resources.
Second, and perhaps more fundamentally, it judicializes decisions that are, by their very nature, operational. These are decisions made in specific contexts, sometimes urgent, and based on assessments of immediate risk.
Our administrative law is based precisely on the idea that specialized decision makers are best placed to make these types of decisions, and that courts exercise review after the fact, with the restraint appropriate to their institutional role.
Here, we do the exact opposite.
After 48 hours, decision-making authority is transferred to superior courts, in situations where rapid decisions are required, based on very concrete considerations of safety — the safety of the inmate, of other inmates and of correctional staff.
Finally, the bill raises a very practical issue on which it is entirely silent: What happens if judicial authorization is simply not obtained within the prescribed time frame?
The text does not say.
In law, this kind of silence is problematic. In reality, it will not be the courts dealing with this uncertainty but correctional services, in a context where every decision may have direct consequences for the safety of all.
This is not trivial.
I now turn to section 11.
This section allows a person who has been convicted, or subject to a period of parole ineligibility, to apply to the sentencing court for a reduction of their sentence where they allege there has been an injustice in the administration of that sentence.
Once again, the objective may appear laudable. But from a legal standpoint, I see real problems.
This provision conflicts with a fundamental principle of our justice system: the finality of judgments. This principle is essential. It ensures legal stability, predictability of decisions and coherence of the system.
Of course, this principle has exceptions. But those exceptions are carefully limited — appeals, judicial review and certain extraordinary remedies.
Section 11 adds something else. In effect, it creates an additional remedy that does not clearly fit within the existing legal architecture. It becomes a mechanism operating in parallel with those already in place.
And let us remember: Remedies already exist to challenge unlawful deprivation of liberty. Habeas corpus is a well-known example, rooted in the common law and enshrined in paragraph 10(c) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the importance of this remedy in Dorsey v. Canada (Attorney General). The court stated:
Despite its antiquity, habeas corpus remains the strongest tool for prisoners in ensuring that a deprivation of their residual liberty is not unlawful . . . .
In this context, it is fair to ask what clause 11 truly adds. In my view, it does not fill a demonstrated legal gap. Rather, it introduces real risks of overlap, inconsistency and procedural multiplication.
More broadly, Bill S-205 intervenes in an already complex ecosystem. It touches the balance between correctional administration, judicial jurisdiction and the protection of the fundamental rights of incarcerated persons. To alter this balance is to intervene directly in the day-to-day functioning of the correctional system with very concrete effects that we must fully acknowledge.
What I take from the testimony heard in committee is that the main problem with the current system is not the absence of legal standards. The standards exist. They are clear. The problem lies elsewhere: in the gap between the law as written and the law as applied.
In this context, adding new obligations and new remedies does not guarantee improvement. On the contrary, it risks further burdening an already strained system and making its operation more complex.
Honourable senators, at third reading, the questions before us are demanding but unavoidable: Does this text rest on solid legal foundations? Is it workable in practice? Does it fit coherently within the existing framework?
For my part, I am not convinced. Bill S-205, in its current form, contains too many uncertainties, too many risks of overlap and an implementation that appears unnecessarily complex. For all of these reasons, I cannot support it, and I urge my colleagues to vote against this bill.
Thank you.
Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?
Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.
An Hon. Senator: On division.
(Motion agreed to and bill, as amended, read third time and passed, on division.)
