Mr. Chair, at this point, we don’t actually anticipate having to do these types of fences at other facilities in the Northwest Territories because they pretty much already exist. If you go to Hay River and you look at the facility we have there, there is a large fence that is available, but the inmates there are also significantly lower-risk inmates. The one in Fort Smith has one as well. The female facility, we will likely have to put an area with a bit of a fence, a
security fence, because we will likely have female inmates on remand in that facility unless we end up sending them to other institutions. But it comes back to security is the bottom line.
Just going back one step first, when the developer came forward and wanted to develop that property out there, the development permit required them to put in an honour fence. They are responsible for paying for the honour fence. It is their dime, not our dime. That will follow the property line. But it’s not a security fence; it’s more of an honour fence between the property holders of our facility. So we’re really happy that they’re doing that.
What we’re talking about is a security fence on a facility that has changed its security rating. We house a significant number of higher-risk inmates. The Member will remember that we completed some Aboriginal spiritual healing program area on the site of the North Slave Correctional Facility. That was actually done at the same time that we turned down the fence six years ago. The intention of the programming space was to allow as many offenders as possible to access these facilities and get healing where possible, but without the fence, the high-risk offenders in that facility who were in remand can’t utilize any of those facilities because we can’t allow them out of the building into our program area.
If we want our remand offenders, the high-risk remand offenders to utilize these programming spaces, we need the security fence. This is a direction that was also given and confirmed by Corrections Canada as well. Without it, programming is limited for some of our offenders, plus, on top of that, we now have the development beside us which did not exist before, and there was not any belief that that was going to end up in that place, that location, at that time.