Stony drug-detection cuts threaten safety

It’s a pressure every federal and provincial department faces during budget cycles, particularly after a change in government brings promises of belt-tightening and eliminating the wasteful excesses of the previous administration:

How much can be cut and how quickly can it be done?

The choices are seldom easy and they are always met by cries that budget reductions which eliminate programs and/or the people who deliver them will make it impossible to get the job done properly.

In many cases, it’s actually difficult to discern the direct impact of budget cuts within the nuanced layers of public-service delivery systems. Occasionally, though, the blunt-force consequences of enforced austerity seem both clear and questionable.

Such is the case with recent department-wide budget cuts at the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), which has committed to reducing its spending by $132 million by 2028-29 in response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s demand for reduced spending by all federal departments.

CSC has an annual budget of nearly $3.8 billion, with $2.6 billion dedicated to “care and custody” considerations focused on ensuring institutions are kept safe and secure — including from the flow of contraband drugs that threaten the health and safety of inmate populations.

As reported last week by the Free Press, in a story focused on an inmate at Stony Mountain Institution being sentenced to eight additional years after being caught with an illicit drug cache worth more than $1.2 million, it appears CSC institutions’ ability to interrupt the increasingly sophisticated flow of illegal drugs is being hamstrung by the aforementioned budget reductions.

The Union of Canadian Correctional Officers (UCCO) says Manitoba’s only federal prison has seen the elimination of two of its four detector-dog handler positions, two of its dogs and one of the two mobile patrol vehicles that circled the prison walls 24 hours a day. Several multi-function corrections officer positions have also been eliminated.

“We have a situation where drugs and violence are escalating anyway and then we’re cutting off our most effective detection tools and the people that we have within the institution that are set to respond to these (issues),” said UCCO prairie region president Jake Suelzle.

While there’s a certain inevitability to a public-service union objecting to cuts that might affect its members’ jobs, in this case it seems difficult to argue with the concerns raised. Drug smuggling, and the addiction and violence it feeds, have forever been a problem within correctional institutions. It seems penny-wise and pound-foolish to impose austerity measures on efforts to stop the flow of illicit drugs at a time when those efforts are becoming more aggressive, ambitious and profitable than ever.

For its part, CSC maintains its priority is to use all its available resources in the most effective way possible to keep prisons and the public safe.

The union argues that’s hard to do at Stony Mountain when the drug detector dog program — the “bread and butter” of the narcotics control program — has been cut in half and the loss of a mobile patrol unit and an officer stationed in a tower above the prison yard will make it more difficult to spot and intercept drones, which have become the preferred method of smuggling drugs into the facility.

CSC’s annual report states its most effective strategy against contraband introduction involves “conventional, robust security practices … infrastructure enhancements and technological approaches,” but given the current reality that it’s possible for one inmate to amass a million-dollar, drone-delivered drug cache, it’s hard to envision how demanding prison staff do more with less is an effective solution to an escalating problem.