Less than a quarter of the federal immigration detainees held in maximum-security Ontario jails pose a danger to public safety, a document released by the Canada Border Services Agency shows.
Federal immigration authorities rent jail space in Ontario to incarcerate 113 detainees, the province’s correctional ministry told Global News Tuesday. But only 27 of them are seen as a danger to the public, the Canada Border Services Agency said this week in answers to written questions filed in April by Matthew Dubé, a Quebec MP.
The CBSA rents provincial jail space across Canada for immigration detainees. The prices vary from $184 per day in Quebec to $448.69 for women in New Brunswick.
Ontario charges the CBSA $258 per inmate per day, so jailing the 88 detainees who aren’t seen as a danger to the public comes to $22,188 a day. The total for May comes to over $687,000.
About half of the 113 Ontario detainees are held at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont., with the rest in jails all over the province.
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Foreign citizens ordered deported from Canada can be held if an Immigration and Refugee Board hearing finds them to be a risk to public safety, if they’re seen as unlikely to appear for deportation, or if their identity can’t be determined.
Last June, public safety minister Ralph Goodale said that the federal government planned to largely phase out holding detainees in provincial jails, and in fact the number has been going down. As recently as 2014, there were over 220 CBSA detainees in Ontario jails, 130 of them in Lindsay.
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Immigration detention can become indefinite if there is a problem with deporting the person, and the IRB refuses to release them. Michael Mvogo, ordered deported to his native Cameroon, spent eight years in Lindsay owing to disagreements about his identity.
Alvin Brown, a Jamaican man at the centre of a constitutional challenge to indefinite detention, spent five years in jail as an immigration detainee before being deported in 2016.
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“It’s ridiculous, and it’s something the public doesn’t know about,” says immigration detention activist Nisha Toomey. “It’s been one of those societal issues that haven’t really been tackled yet.”
“I’m not sure if it’s a strategy to try to have someone be deported, as much as literally not figuring out what else to do with them. I think the idea is, when you don’t know what to do with these bodies, you decide to lock them up.”
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“Provincial facilities are sometimes used because that’s just the facility available,” said Scott Bardsley, a spokesperson in Goodale’s office.
In an e-mail, he said that the Liberals have budgeted $138-million to, among other things, expand alternatives to detention, improve immigration holding centres, and “sharply reduc(e) reliance on provincial facilities.”
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