Alberta’s new parole board a costly endeavour

Dear editor,

Mr. Kenney and Justice Minister Madu proudly announced their new parole board (Thursday.) I urge you to read the Jan. 29 News article. This new board will deal with parole applications from prisoners serving jail sentences under two years, i.e. sentences served in a provincial jail. Alberta has nothing to do with parole for prisoners serving two years-plus. That is a federal matter, nationwide.

The federal parole board deals with 16,000 applications per year from federal inmates and from provincial inmates in provinces which have no parole board. It has, until now, dealt with parole applications from Alberta sentences. There are 83 applications per year (2018-2019 numbers) from Alberta sentences out of the 16,000. In other words, Alberta’s new parole board exists to process about 83 applications annually. The new board will cost you and I $510,000 annually. Dividing that sum by the 83 applications it will be spent on shows that each application to the new parole board will cost us $6,144 per year, to buy services currently being provided to us by the federal board. Minister Madu gamely suggests talks are ongoing with Ottawa on cost sharing. That would be funny if it weren’t so sad. How much of the cost of the new parole board do you think the federal government will agree to cover, considering the cost involved is for 83 of 16,000 cases?

This is an example of the UCP playing to their inferiority complex by wasting our tax dollars, putting on a show for those who do not know. It’s called grandstanding, and it’s being done, in part, so they can supposedly show Albertans they are getting a “fair deal” for us.

There is another reason Mr. Kenney and company are wasting our tax dollars this way. They have seen the parole boards the big kids (federal government, Ontario and Québec) have and they want one too. Psychologists call it “penal envy.”

Gregory R. Côté Irvine