Ontario Premier Doug Ford in front of an Armoured Combat Support Vehicle (ACSV) at the annual defence industry trade show CANSEC, in Ottawa, in May.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Mackenzie Plumb is a PhD candidate and Justin Piché is a Full Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. Both are members of the Coalition Against Proposed Prisons.
Shortly after taking office in June, 2018, Doug Ford’s Ontario government placed a series of jail infrastructure projects, which had been announced by the previous Liberal administration, under review. This included the 725-bed Ottawa Correctional Complex (OCC) and 325-bed Thunder Bay Correctional Complex (TBCC).
By 2019, the OCC was cancelled, and the Ford government began to look at other ways to expand jail capacity in eastern Ontario. It also publicly confirmed it would build the TBCC to replace the death trap officially known as the Thunder Bay Jail (built in 1928) and the aging Thunder Bay Correctional Centre (established in 1965, with original buildings used as a prison farm beginning in 1911). In 2022, it touted the revised 345-bed institution as “state-of-the-art,” and described the closure of older facilities as “part of Ontario’s plan to modernize corrections.”
Ontario plans massive expansion of jails over next few decades, documents show
Years later, and amid a surge in provincial prisoners stemming from the Ford government’s “jail, not bail” craze, the draconian status quo in Thunder Bay persists. And recent shifts in the plan for the future of jailing in the region certainly aren’t in line with a commitment to “modernize” imprisonment.
The TBCC is still under construction, and it is set to add another 117 beds through double-bunking, a practice that conflicts with the United Nations Minimum Standard Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, which Canada endorsed in 1975. The province also now plans to keep open the two existing Thunder Bay facilities for years to come, completely disregarding their previous commitments. Time will tell if the Ford government will reverse this decision following a recent coroner’s inquest that recommended the closure of the Thunder Bay Jail after examining the death of Kevin Mamakwa, a member of Kingfisher Lake First Nation who died by suicide at the notorious facility in 2020. And tragically – perhaps unsurprisingly – another person died suddenly in that jail this past Canada Day.
Meanwhile, other new jail infrastructure projects are several months or, more commonly, several years away from being completed. Policy alternatives such as permanent and supportive housing that could make communities safer and alleviate jail crowding more cheaply, quickly and effectively are being underutilized.
Donald Trump has recently pushed to re-open the decommissioned Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, which has been a world-famous national park and tourist destination for more than a half-century. The Ford government appears to be following the U.S. President’s lead in the name of bringing additional jail capacity online.
Birds fly above Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, Calif. U.S. President Donald Trump has recently pushed to re-open the decommissioned Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.Noah Berger/The Associated Press
Late last year, Solicitor-General Michael Kerzner ordered his ministry to explore the viability of re-opening pre-Confederation jails that were replaced by larger facilities in Toronto and Windsor by previous Liberal governments. Mr. Kerzner has since stated he will “work heaven and earth” to add more than “300 new spaces” by re-opening the Bruce County Gaol in Walkerton, Ont. (established in 1866) that had 50 beds when it closed in 2011, along with the Brant County Gaol in Brantford, Ont. (established in 1852), which had a capacity of 83 in the years before its closure in 2017.
Not only do those numbers not add up to 300, the Walkerton jail didn’t have a running plumbing system as of last August, while the Brantford jail was recently subject to a heritage assessment. This should raise doubts about the viability of both projects. Moreover, both the Walkerton and Brantford sites are located on small parcels of land in their respective downtowns, with little, if any, room for expansion.
With questions concerning the viability of re-opening these historic jails, we filed a freedom-of-information request to obtain the feasibility studies for these “new” infrastructure initiatives, which has since been denied. This raises the question: if this part of the Ford government’s jail expansion plan makes so much sense, why are they hiding these documents from the people they claim to represent?
In late May, Mr. Kerzner said, “I really want to see both of those jails re-opened. I’ve toured both of them… they shouldn’t have been closed in the first place. All you have to do is go and see it, and you’d ask somebody, ‘why did they close it?’”
If the Minister truly believes this, why not disclose the feasibility studies? Perhaps it is because, as with many other Ford government dealings amid an overhaul of the province’s transparency laws, he doesn’t want Ontarians to see the truth.