Indigenous bail support program has big impact
The provincial government is spending millions to make Ottawa’s courts work better, Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said at his old University of Ottawa law school this week, and the smallest piece of it might be the most important: a tiny program for helping Indigenous people get bail when they have nobody to stand up in court and help them.
Naqvi pledged $7 million for renovations to the Ottawa courthouse (most of it’s for security, which is only about making the courts work better in the most tenuous sense, but also there’s about $2 million for better conference facilities, space for more judges to work on more cases, and improved video links to the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre).
There’s a new provincial advisory committee on Frenchlanguage services, being chaired by esteemed Judge Paul Rouleau of the Ontario Court of Appeal. And there’s Greg Meekis.
To be precise, there’s continued funding for the Indigenous Bail Verification and Supervision Program run by the Odawa Native Friendship Centre. But that’s just another way of saying Greg Meekis, because he’s it.
Meekis meets new prisoners; works with prosecutors, defence lawyers and judges; writes reports for court; does detailed interviews with people who get bail to figure out exactly what they need; sets them up with support and treatment programs across the city; and checks in with them after.
Sometimes Meekis’s people are homeless in Ottawa, sometimes they’re visiting — far from home, far from people who might promise a judge they’ll watch their troubled family member.
“People from isolated communities up North, whether they come for medical reasons or for Christmas shopping and whatnot, they can get in trouble,” he says. “Sometimes you have to show the court, things that go on in communities in the North, they get dealt with at the community level. But when they come down here in the urban state you have concerned neighbours calling 911, and the police come and charges are laid and whatnot. There can be a difference in the mentality and the norms, and how these problems get handled. When those two mix together, it doesn’t always come together in a good way.”
Accused criminals are supposed to get bail unless there are good reasons not to give it, but it helps if the person seeking to be released has a support system — a place to sleep, a job to keep, loved ones to stick by them.
If you can’t get bail on charges stemming from getting drunk and making a nuisance of yourself, say, you could serve more time in jail waiting for the justice system to do its thing than you’d get in a sentence. Miss appointments, lose your job, stay apart from family. That cascade can turn a bad night into something that destroys an already fragile life, filling our overcrowded jail with people who don’t really need to be there, and virtually guaranteeing returns to jail.
“The measure of success is a lot different in the Indigenous community as opposed to the mainstream system. If we’re dealing with an addictions issue, let’s say, if an Indigenous person is heavily addicted to alcohol, and you put a condition on (their bail) that says they have to abstain from alcohol, you’re guaranteed to set them up for a breach,” Meekis says. “So we have to look for a way to address the alcoholism without taking that away, so we don’t want to put more breaches on someone because it’s not going to do any good.”
Breaching bail conditions is a fresh charge and obviously a factor in being refused bail in the future, part of perpetuating a cycle of pointless imprisonment. Some kind of treatment is usually preferable, but somebody has to stand up and say they’re going to help the accused get it.
“Community hours, treatment, getting them set up or connected with the Indigenous community, whether they’re Inuit, Métis or First Nations, that’s what I do,” Meekis says.
Meekis is from Sandy Lake, a tiny Oji-Cree reserve in far northwestern Ontario near the Manitoba border. He came to Ottawa in 1995 to pursue Aboriginal studies but didn’t stick with it. He did stick with volunteer work at the Odawa centre. More recently, he took a paralegal course. He has run Odawa’s diversion program for Indigenous people charged with minor offences, and a drop-in centre for homeless Indigenous people on Rideau Street, a job he really liked.
“(But) serving soup and sandwiches and inviting people in wasn’t really applying my legal training,” he says.
When Odawa got funding for the bail program, the executive director tapped Meekis for it.
He has about 25 cases on the go, a significant number considering the Ottawa jail is built to hold only about 650.
“That’s quite a lot. It’s adding up by the day,” Meekis says.
Especially because there’s only him.
“There should be at least a couple more,” he says, a second person at the minimum. “There should be at least one to be on call to do the interviews in the cells and one to do the casework.”
For now, though, even with the provincial funding, it’s just him, and that’s better than nobody. So Meekis checks in with the Crown attorney handling bail hearings each day, goes down to the cells, and sees who he can help.