Report slams Alberta for hiding Indigenous incarceration rates

The government of Alberta is being lambasted in a review of Canada’s justice system as the only province to keep secret the number of Indigenous people it has locked up over the last five years.

The criticism comes as part of an annual report card released Monday by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute that ranks the provinces and territories in terms of access to justice, efficiency, cost, public safety and support for victims.

Alberta is the only province that doesn’t make public its disproportionately high Indigenous incarceration rate, said report co-author Benjamin Perrin.

“It’s unconscionable to keep secret the number of Indigenous people who are being sent to jail in that province every year,” said Perrin, who is a law professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

“We flagged this as a problem in our first report in the fall of 2016. We expected (Alberta) would start giving this data, but it hasn’t.”

Alberta’s Justice Department did not respond immediately to a request for comment, but the Edmonton Journal quoted a government statement saying it had missed last year’s Statistics Canada deadline because of a software turnover and would provide the information moving forward.

“That’s a bit like ‘the dog ate my homework’ kind of excuse,” Perrin noted, saying it failed to explain why the government has neglected to release the information since 2012.

“This comes at a time of very serious concern about the treatment of Indigenous people by the justice system. People have a right to know.”

While Indigenous incarceration rates are disproportionately high everywhere in Canada, they are especially high in Alberta, B.C., Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the report noted.