After months of negotiations, the Canadian Red Cross still has no agreement on access to federal immigration detainees held in Ontario jails.
Talks have been dragging on since October with no clear resolution, though both sides now say a deal is near.
Ontario jails hold about 230 federal immigration detainees, mostly male inmates held at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, about two hours northeast of Toronto.
The delay comes as Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) probes the death of a 39-year-old male immigration detainee early Thursday morning in hospital in Peterborough. The man, an inmate at Lindsay, was being guarded by Peterborough police and OPP officers when he became agitated, was restrained and subsequently died, the agency said in a release. Neither the SIU nor the Canada Border Services Agency has released the man’s name.
READ MORE: SIU investigating after man dies in CBSA custody at Peterborough hospital
In an interview in October of last year, Ontario corrections minister Yasir Naqvi told Global News that Ontario was “working on finalizing” an agreement with the Red Cross.
The Red Cross, for its part, has been raising the issue of access to Ontario jails for the better part of a decade.
The 2008-09 Red Cross report to the federal government on immigration detention describes access to the province’s jails as a “work in progress.”
The 2013 report said the Red Cross “remains concerned that it cannot currently fulfill its mandate to monitor the detention conditions of all places where immigration detainees are being held in Canada.”
Red Cross officials visited the Lindsay jail last week but left without speaking to detainees, which frustrated them.
Guards ordered detainees not to speak to the Red Cross team, said Pam Shiradini, whose partner Masoud Hajivand, a Iranian citizen, has been held in immigration detention in various jails since June of last year. Shiradini spoke to Hajivand after the Red Cross visit.
“They told them they are not allowed to pass the yellow line (two metres from the entrance to the range), they are not allowed to talk, there is no communication, nothing, they are just here for a visit,” she said.
“Nobody was allowed to talk or have any communication whatsoever.”
Ontario’s corrections ministry did not respond to questions about this version of events.
With no agreement in place, the team had no authority to talk to detainees, said Red Cross spokesperson Nathan Huculak.
“The visit that took place at the Lindsay facility was a tour of the facility, so part of the ongoing conversation around a more formal agreement for the Canadian Red Cross there. The group that went in was not on a monitoring visit.”
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“In other facilities, where we have a mandate, primarily it’s through a (memorandum of understanding) with the CBSA, there’s a set facility visit. One of those elements, in those other scenarios, involves meeting with individual detainees. We weren’t there in that capacity – we don’t have that agreement in place. The team that was there was there to receive a tour of the facility so they could see what it looks like.”
Both sides say an agreement is near, though neither will say what the deadlock was about.
READ MORE: Deaths in detention – CBSA’s fatal failure to learn from its mistakes
“The Ministry is in the final stages of completing an agreement with the Red Cross regarding enhanced access to immigration detainees,” Ontario corrections ministry spokesperson Lauren Callighen wrote in an email. “(The) discussions have been productive and the Ministry expects an agreement to be signed shortly.”
“We are very much committed to reaching an agreement – I think that’s a mutual feeling,” Huculak said.
Without Red Cross access, there is no independent scrutiny of conditions in the facility.
The Red Cross has been critical of the practice of putting immigration detainees, many of whom have no criminal background, and are detained because of an immigration officer’s judgement call that they may not show up to be deported, in maximum-security custody.
Jails “serve a largely punitive function,” the Red Cross report for 2012-13 reads.
“Mixing convicted criminals and people on remand with detainees presents a greater degree of risk to immigration detainees who are co-mingled with a volatile corrections population, some serving, or awaiting trial for violent or gang-affiliated crimes.”
The CBSA pays Ontario a daily rate to jail federal immigration detainees.
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