'Not nearly enough': new corrections officer hires won't fill gaps in northwestern Ontario jails

A recently-announced round of hiring for new correctional officers is just a "drop in the bucket" when it comes to addressing staffing shortfalls at northwestern Ontario facilities, a union representative said.

Earlier this month, the province announced it had hired 107 new correctional officers, with 27 of those slated to work in northern Ontario (specifically, they'd be split among the Kenora Jail, Monteith Correctional Complex, North Bay Jail, Sudbury Jail, Thunder Bay Correctional Centre and Thunder Bay Jail.

Bill Hayes, a correctional officer at the Thunder Bay jail, and president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 737 — which represents staff at the facility — said 10 of the 27 new officers started at the jail last week.

That, he said, was good news, but overall, it's "a drop in the bucket."

"We are making progress in regards to the new hires and new recruits, but there's still a ways to go," Hayes told CBC news.

"The staff make the jail work, so if we don't want to go back to just warehousing inmates, and we want to continue with programming, continue with yards, continue of basically getting the inmates their basic human rights, we need to keep hiring staff and and have a full complement working at all times in there," he said.

Hayes said the province implemented a hiring freeze for correctional officers in 2014, and staffing levels have yet to fully recover from that.

In addition, the new correctional officers are still undergoing their required eight weeks of training.

The situation is similar in Kenora, said Wade Sutherland, a correctional officer and union local president at the jail there.

"They're not hiring nearly enough for us," he said, adding the latest round of hires saw 13 new correctional officers join the ranks at the Kenora jail.

However, they're still 25 correctional officers short of a full complement of 73.

The shortages, Sutherland said, mean it's very difficult to offer much in the way of programming, such as literacy programs, to inmates.

Hiring to continue

"We don't have the front-line staff to bring the inmates to programming, if there is any programming," he said. "We're constantly turning away volunteers because of the lockdowns. It's just it's very difficult to get them any kind of programming."

Sutherland said occasionally, correctional officers will transfer from other parts of Ontario to work at the Kenora jail for a time ranging from two weeks to a few months. But, he said, that isn't a long-term solution.

Training, too, is proving challenging, since most of the correctional officers at the Kenora Jail were hired within the last five years.

"We've got inexperienced officers training other inexperienced officers, and makes it difficult," he said.

Hayes said the province is making efforts to hire more correctional officers (there's a focus on hiring officers from the community they'll work in, which addresses some concerns that they'll transfer to other areas of the province). In addition, recruits are now being paid for training, which is new.

"At least you're not going eight weeks without pay," he said. "You can attract some quality candidates like that."

In a statement to CBC News, Ontario's Office of the Solicitor General said it's planning to hire more than 500 new corrections officers in Ontario, funding for which was included in the 2020 provincial budget.