The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) condemns the recent announcement from the Ford government on making Ontario a cash bail province. The move to cash bail is a further escalation of Ford’s so-called “Protect Ontario” campaign – a cynical rebrand of the pro-corporate and anti-democratic war his government has waged since it was elected in 2018.
Cash bail systems are notorious for discriminating against lower income people, who don’t have the money to pay so end up languishing in jails. Ford’s announcement is already the subject of a court challenge by the Civil Liberties Association of Canada and the Criminal Lawyers’ Association, who argue that it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and oversteps provincial jurisdiction.
In an attempt to distract working people from the intensifying crises that he has created, Ford has doubled down on his reactionary crusade against crime through the expansion of his “Protect Ontario” campaign, adding the slogan “A Safer Ontario.” The ads run as part of the campaign lay out in explicit terms Ford’s “jail, not bail” approach to addressing social issues, including homelessness and drug addiction, and promises an expanded police and prison apparatus to “clean up the streets.”
A major component of Ford’s “A Safer Ontario” campaign will be a massive expansion of the Ontario prison system. Since his election in 2018, Ford has made announcements or broken ground on new prisons which would increase Ontario’s prison system capacity by just over 1,600 beds. This is to address the extreme overcrowding in Ontario jails, which have reached 120% capacity under Ford’s Tories – an overcrowding crisis which is exacerbated by the Conservatives’ own policies which criminalize poverty and homelessness.
Adding just these 1,600 beds comes at a high cost to working people, with the province having to shell out more than $5 billion in capital investments to have them built, and further pay another $210 million per year in operational costs once they come online. Despite the high price tag, Ford has come under fire from the province’s ombudsman and human rights groups, who have deplored the abominable conditions of Ontario jails and of the planned expansions, which could see prisoners stacked in bunk beds three-people high. Ford has responded — in his typical chauvinistic style — by asserting the province is not “building Four Seasons hotels for these people, they’re going to jail, and again, I don’t care if you stack them 10 high.”
But this 1,600-bed expansion barely scratches the surface on what the province really has planned, with leaked internal documents revealing that the planned capacity increase is to have an additional 6,000 beds online by 2050. In today’s dollars, operating just these new beds would cost more than $780 million annually — not to mention the billions in capital investment to build the jails themselves.
While Ford’s “tough on crime” approach claims this massive expansion of the carceral system in Ontario is needed, it’s worth noting that 80% of those held in Ontario’s jails — around 8,000 individuals — are awaiting trial and presumed innocent. Independent audits of the province’s justice system have found that the gap in funding is not in jails themselves, but in the courts system, which are so backlogged that it can take years to see a judge. Years which for many are spent behind bars.
Further, because the justice system in Canada remains deeply discriminatory, changes to bail conditions will disproportionately impact racialized, indigenous, women, and minorities who will be locked up in pre-trial detention. Despite their higher rates of pre-trial detention, Statistics Canada data reveals that Indigenous, Black, and racialized people are more likely to have their cases withdrawn, dropped, or dismissed – even though their cases on average take up to 2 months longer to process. This means marginalized communities are more likely to be unjustly held in pre-trial detention, and are held for longer.
Ford’s approach to prison expansion stands to make some of his closest allies incredibly rich, however, as billions are shoveled into the development industry to construct the prisons, and millions more are funnelled to private companies for services provided to and in the jails. Changes to the bail system increasing prison populations will make them even richer.
Siphoning billions of public dollars into private profits through prison expansion will do nothing to address the true cause of the social problems Ford is so eager to criminalize. Instead of expanding the detention of those who have been convicted of no crime, Ford could, for dramatically less money, expand the courts system to ensure everyone’s right to a speedy trial is upheld, and that innocent people do not languish away in the province’s jails awaiting their day in court.
Better still, with the annual operational funding of his planned 6,000 bed prison expansion, Ford could instead: hire over 8,000 school teachers, operate over 16,000 units of public housing, or address the youth unemployment crisis by creating nearly 50,000 full-time summer jobs paying $25 per hour. Instead of spending billions in capital costs to build prisons, he could construct more than 30,000 units of publicly owned social housing. These are the real solutions to address the public safety concerns Ford is so eager to cynically weaponize.
The Communist Party calls for:
- The abolition of cash bail in Ontario
- Ending prison expansion in Ontario
- Stopping the criminalization of drug users and abolishing police drug squads, and replacing them with adequately funded health and social programs
- Banning racial profiling by police, investigating and prosecuting police violence against civilians, especially racialized people, people with mental illness and people experiencing homelessness
- Decriminalizing drug use and treating it as a health issue
- Sharply reducing police funding, demilitarizing the police, disarming most police units, eliminating tasers, and introducing de-escalation tactics and training
- Build 200,000 units of rent-geared-to-income social housing units immediately
- Reinstate and expand funding for legal aid
