The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is looking into the rates for phone calls at correctional facilities across the country, spurred by high long-distance charges that families of inmates at Ontario jails had to pay for years.
A proposed class-action lawsuit against the province and Bell, which ran the phone system in the province’s jails from 2013 to 2021, alleges that the charges were exorbitant, with a flat rate of $1 for local calls and about $1 per minute plus a $2.50 connection fee for long-distance calls.
One of the lead plaintiffs in the proposed class action had some monthly phone bills of over $1,000 from the collect calls he received while his son was in solitary confinement, he wrote in an affidavit.
Bell Canada made more than $64 million in gross revenues from such calls over that time period and gave nearly $39 million of that to the province as commission.
The lawsuit has been on a long journey through the courts, to the CRTC, and perhaps now back to the courts.
But while the CRTC decided in December that it does not have jurisdiction over that specific case, it is “concerned about the overall provision of telecommunications services in correctional facilities across Canada.”
“While the current proceeding has a narrow focus, it has highlighted broader concerns about the rates charged to inmates and their families, as well as the availability of calling options in correctional facilities,” the commission wrote in its decision.
“Accordingly, the Commission will undertake additional information gathering to assess whether further action, including potential regulatory intervention, may be required.”
Lawyer David Sterns said it has been frustrating trying to get the courts to hear and rule on the class action, but the CRTC has taken a positive step.
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“It’s an excellent idea,” he said. “It’s a little silver lining on this arduous journey that we’ve had.”
Catherine Latimer, the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada, said making it easy for inmates to maintain contact with their families is an effective way to make society safer.
“One of the factors that is instrumental in promoting pro-social conduct, or helping people rehabilitate and reintegrate successfully, is maintaining good connections with family and community,” she said.
In Ontario’s provincial correctional facilities, the vast majority of inmates – around 80 per cent – have not been convicted of an offence and are awaiting bail or trial. Those who are serving a sentence are there for a matter of months, as provincial facilities handle sentences of less than two years.
“The public is generally interested in seeing a reduction in crime, and providing for successful rehabilitation and reintegration results in a reduction in repeat crime,” Latimer said.
“So it’s going to, in the long run, keep communities safer if they’re not alienated, hardened and marginalized through the criminal justice and corrections experience, and the safeguard against that is the connection with family.”
The first days and weeks of being in jail can be the most fraught, said Farhat Rehman of Mothers Offering Mutual Support, an Ottawa-based support group for people whose loved ones are incarcerated.
“That’s when they suffer the most,” she said. “If they have had mental health issues…the continuum of their treatment, whatever treatment they were having, is broken because the doctors or the psychiatrists or their counsellors cannot access them right away. So this communication is so critical.”
Pauline Budd, another member of the group, kept track of the calls she received from her daughter when she was in the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre. She spent 30 days inside in 2014 awaiting bail and called home more than 200 times. In 2016, she spent another 13 days in jail for sentencing and awaiting bail pending appeal – her convictions were ultimately set aside – and called home in excess of 200 times again.
“It shows you the extent, somehow of people when they’re incarcerated, how often they have the need to speak to somebody,” she said.
“It could be their family member, it could be their lawyer, it could be medical professional, it could be friends. It’s their support system.”
Budd’s phone bills for those two periods totalled more than $700 – and would have been far higher if her daughter had to call long distance.
Sterns said he hopes the CRTC takes on the issue as the Federal Communications Commission has in the United States. An FCC order last year set caps on rates for jail and prison calls at between six and 12 cents a minute, depending on the size of the correctional facility.
“They recognized that this is an area where the prisoners are literally and figuratively captives of the telephone companies, and that there’s no incentive, there’s no competition force requiring the rates to be lower,” he said.
“There’s the ever-present temptation to make the prisoners pay for their stay.”
Bell has said that while it provided phone services in Ontario correctional facilities it always complied with a CRTC-approved Inmate Service Tariff, offering the same collect call rates in correctional facilities as those charged for other public telephones and for home phone services.
Ontario changed the inmate phone system in 2020 and it includes both the ability to make prepaid calls, instead of just collect, and long-distance rates of a few cents a minute.
Ontario has asked the CRTC to reconsider its decision that it has no jurisdiction in the specific case in the proposed class-action lawsuit, and is also seeking leave to appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal, Sterns said.
The provincial Appeal Court in 2023 put the class action on hold as the parties asked the CRTC to consider the issue, with Bell and Ontario arguing that was the more appropriate venue. If it is ultimately decided that the CRTC does not have jurisdiction, after appeals of the CRTC decision are exhausted, the case will go back to Ontario Superior Court for lawyers to argue that it should be certified as a class action, Sterns said.
