Health care at jail badly needs upgrade

Re: Mentally ill prisoner on life support after suicide attempt, Dec. 5.

Our hearts go out to the mother of Justin St-Amour, who has lost her son to the bungling of health care at the Ottawa jail. We want Laureen St-Amour to get the answers she deserves, but we want more than that. We want action that is long overdue.

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services has been sitting on mountains of reports and recommendations about health care at Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre for years, including its own internal report after Julie Bilotta gave birth on the floor of her jail cell on Sept. 29, 2012 (a breech birth from which her baby boy would suffer complications and so not live to see his second birthday). More recently, the OCDC task force made recommendations on June 1, 2016, that particularly detailed the changes urgently needed for the care of prisoners with mental illness.

The ministry has done the square root of nothing with all of this. At best, it is moving at glacial speed to review and repackage recommendations, or throw an occasional crumb at the problem. Enough! Now is the time to fix the health care at this shameful institution. Not next week or next year.

It is not, however, time for the ministry to make a scapegoat out of a staff member, as they did last year to cover up their bungling of the shower-cell scandal. Now it is time for the minister himself, David Orazietti, to take responsibility for what has happened to Justin St-Amour, and either take decisive and immediate action to fix health care at OCDC, or resign. Irene Mathias, MOMS Ottawa spokesperson, member of the OCDC task force