Ontario’s ‘secrecy’ when closing youth jails hurt Indigenous teens, ombud finds (The Star)

Brendan Kennedy
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April 26, 2022

Provincial government officials “deliberately avoided transparency” when they abruptly closed two youth jails in northern Ontario last year, leaving staff in the dark while failing to consider the best interests of the Indigenous youth who had to be suddenly transferred, Ontario’s Ombudsman concluded on Tuesday.

“The Ministry’s failure to fully consider the individual circumstances of the affected youths in these cases appears to have been a casualty of the Ministry’s overriding commitment to secrecy,” Paul Dubé wrote in his 60-page report.

Dubé’s report follows a yearlong investigation into the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Service’s decision to simultaneously close 25 little-used youth custody and detention programs across the province on March 1, 2021. The closures, which had been recommended in multiple auditor-general reports going back to 2012, would save the government $40 million.

The Ombudsman’s investigation focused solely on how the ministry carried out the closures of two jails — the Creighton Youth Centre in Kenora and the J.J. Kelso Youth Centre in Thunder Bay — which affected four Indigenous youth. The jails were funded by the ministry but operated by independent organizations. (The investigation did not review the overall decision to close the facilities.)

Dubé’s investigators found the ministry’s planning for the closures was “shrouded in secrecy” and this led to several problems, ranging from a “complete failure” to inform affected Indigenous communities, to not adequately considering the placement preference of a youth undergoing gender transition.

Ministry officials said strict confidentiality was required to ensure the closures went smoothly. They wanted to avoid leaks to news media and the potential for staff to misbehave after learning they had lost their jobs, they said.

“Unfortunately, the Ministry’s blinkered approach left it without valuable insight into the unique nature of these centres and the Indigenous youth they served,” Dubé wrote in his report. “It also had limited appreciation for how some of its actions would be perceived by affected Indigenous communities.”

Staff at the two jails and the youth themselves were informed of the closures only a couple of hours before the youth were to be transferred — in some cases, hundreds of kilometres away.
 
Staff described the situation to Dubé’s investigators as “chaotic.”

At the time, the grand chiefs of both the Nishnawbe Aski Nation and Grand Council Treaty #3 wrote an open letter to Premier Doug Ford, expressing their “collective horror” at how the closures were carried out.

Dubé’s report notes that the ministry was “caught off guard” by the criticism of shackling and handcuffing the youths during their transfer. It was standard practice for the ministry when moving youth from one ministry-run jail to another, but it was not standard practice for the two facilities they were closing.

“(The ministry) did not realize how shocking this might be to staff and Indigenous youth coming from facilities that did not even possess leg irons, let alone the horrific impression it would leave with the affected Indigenous communities.”

In all, Dubé concluded that the ministry’s conduct was “unreasonable and wrong,” and he made 16 recommendations to avoid similar situations in the future.

A spokesperson for Minister Merrilee Fullerton did not answer any questions about Dubé’s report, but sent a statement defending the decision to close the facilities.

Dubé was also critical of the ministry’s lack of consideration for how the closures would affect the individual youth.

In one case, a youth, identified in the report by the pseudonym “Jamie,” who was in the process of gender transition, was initially going to be transferred to a facility based on the gender they were assigned at birth. That transfer didn’t go through, not because any ministry official flagged the gender issue, but because the facility was deemed too far from the youth’s home community. The facility the youth was eventually transferred to accommodates both genders, but a security screening was only done for the gender “Jamie” was assigned at birth.

“The Ministry did not sufficiently consider Jamie’s experience as a youth going through the process of transition when planning the transfer,” Dubé concludes.

Another youth, identified as “Quinn,” was transferred to a facility where another youth with whom they had previous conflict was already being detained. The two clashed again and the second youth, who had been doing well before Quinn’s arrival, had to be transferred to another facility.

Dubé also pointed out that British Columbia took a very different approach in how it recently closed a number of its youth jails, giving ample notice to all those who would be affected.

They avoided many of the problems encountered by Ontario.