by Mackenzie Plumb and Justin Piché
Times are tough for many living in Ontario today. Housing remains outrageously expensive and in short supply, with emergency shelters full and encampments dotting city landscapes. Food insecurity and food bank use are at record levels. Timely access to healthcare, whether via a family doctor, specialist or in emergency rooms, remains largely aspirational. Elementary, secondary, college, and university classrooms are underfunded and often bursting at the seams, resulting in the needs of many students going unmet. Employment in the manufacturing sector and in municipalities heavily reliant on industrial plants like Sault Ste. Marie is increasingly precarious as tariffs imposed on Canada by the United States over the past several months persist. There’s seemingly little relief from the unease, uncertainty, and insecurity many feel in this time characterized by profound disruptions causing havoc and harm near and far.
Amidst all this chaos, and for all the talk by Premier Ford that “Canada is not for sale” and will “never become the 51st state”, last month his government tabled a bill that would see the introduction of an American-style cash bail system (that even some U.S. states have recently abandoned), which Shakir Rahim from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) notes will create “two tiers of justice: one for the rich, and the other for the rest of us”. The CCLA’s Executive Director Howard Sapers added that this move “will sharply increase the number of people sent to overcrowded provincial jails with inhumane conditions, where a record number of people are already behind bars awaiting trial”.
With (a) his jails already crowded with 3,000 more prisoners “than three years ago… as of last summer” and (b) pre-trial detainees who were denied bail accounting for more than 82% of people provincially incarcerated in Ontario in 2024 according to a recent CBC data journalism investigation, while (c) also likely anticipating that concerns about conditions of confinement would arise during the press conference announcing the Ford government’s cash bail measures, Solicitor General Michael Kerzner noted that his ministry recently completed 50-bed modular additions at both the Kenora Jail and Thunder Bay Correctional Centre. He also pointed to the reopening and retrofit of the 110-bed Regional Intermittent Centre at the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre in London and the soon to be reopened and retrofitted 320-bed Intermittent Centre on the grounds of the Toronto South Detention Centre as evidence of the provincial government being “very proactive” in expanding jail capacity. He declined to mention that his ministry shuttered both intermittent centres where people previously served weekend sentences in favour of electronic monitoring years earlier.
In addition to these projects, Solicitor General Kerzner noted that “[w]e said we would complete” the 345-bed Thunder Bay Correctional Complex “on time”, which is a perplexing statement given that the project was first announced by the Wynne government in May 2017. By the time the current projected fall 2026 completion target comes, this “on time” project will have taken the Ministry of the Solicitor General over 9 years to build.
Other jail infrastructure plans underway underscored by Solicitor General Kerzner at the cash bail press conference, included the construction of new 50-bed modular units at the Niagara Detention Centre in Thorold and the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton. Both projects are scheduled to be completed roughly two years from now in fall 2027 and winter 2028 respectively. The Solicitor General also discussed the 50 beds planned for the Cecil Facer Youth Centre in Sudbury, which is being converted into a women’s jail and was one of 26 youth detention centres designated for closure by the Ford government as a cost-saving measure in 2021. That conversion project is slated for completion in 2028 and is taking place at a time when youth detention centres have recently become packed to the rafters with underaged children who are frequently subject to mistreatment.
Left unmentioned by the Solicitor General in his attempt to neutralize concerns about the province’s current capacity to imprison people was the decision by the Ford government to abandon a plan to build a new 725-bed Ottawa Correctional Complex to replace the 585-bed Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre that was announced by the Wynne government in May 2017. In its place is the so-called Eastern Regional Strategy (ERS) that was announced by Premier Ford himself in August 2020, comprised of jail infrastructure projects located in ridings long held by Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives. One of these ridings is represented by Steve Clark, who was the Ford-appointed cabinet minister in charge of municipal affairs during the Greenbelt land swap scandal that’s the focus of an on-going police investigation.
The ERS, which is already more than five years in the making and has been revised on several occasions, includes plans to build 91 beds for women at the Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee by May 2029 and the construction of a new 235-bed Eastern Ontario Correctional Complex, now scheduled to open in 2032 on the grounds of the former Kemptville Agricultural College. The site features arable farmland, floodplain and a Rideau River watershed creek, which several Kemptville residents have fought for years to prevent from being paved over in the midst of farmland loss of more than 300 acres a day in Ontario, growing food insecurity and climate catastrophe. The ERS also includes the replacement of the Brockville Jail, which opened in 1842, with a new 250-bed Brockville Correctional Complex to be located on the grounds of the St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre that’s slated for a 25-bed expansion to its’ women’s mental health unit. Both projects are projected to be completed by May 2031.
If one is skeptical that the aforementioned jail expansion projects will be “on time” and that the additional 1,626 beds they plan to add at a cost of up to $2.67 billion for construction alone will be enough to offset the Ford government’s push to imprison more people as some journalists attending the province’s recent spate of ‘law and order’ announcements are, not to worry officials say. Why?
In an effort to “leave no stone unturned” in the search to expand the province’s human warehousing capacity to address a crowding crisis Premier Ford’s “jail, not bail” frenzy has created, he’s now in the midst of his own Trumpian Alcatraz moment by having his Solicitor General tour decommissioned jails across Ontario to determine whether some of them could be reopened.
Lamenting the closure of jails by the McGuinty and Wynne governments that the Solicitor General claims “had the net effect of taking 2,000 beds offline” (the actual amount of decommissioned beds resulting from the eight jail closures the Liberals announced from 2003 to 2017 was 2,118), Kerzner ignored the fact that recent Liberal governments also added 2,397 new jails beds. When taking into account the construction and opening of the South West Detention Centre in Windsor (315 beds) and the Toronto South Detention Centre (1,650 beds) in 2014, along with the Toronto Intermittent Centre (320 beds) in 2011 and Regional Intermittent Centre in London (112 beds) in 2016, the net capacity gain during this period was 279 jail beds. Facts aside (those don’t seem to matter to the Solicitor General anyway), Kerzner noted that the Ford government was “seriously exploring reopening the jails” in Walkerton that operated from 1866 to 2011, and in Brantford, which was open from 1852 to 2017.
While one could ignore that Ford government officials have spent years arguing that billions of dollars’ worth of new infrastructure was needed for “modernizing” Ontario’s provincial jail system to improve conditions for both imprisoned people and staff, it’s impossible to ignore the state of these decommissioned jails. The jail in Walkerton currently doesn’t have plumbing, while the one in Brantford has recently been the focus of a provincial heritage assessment and would thus likely face significant hurdles to recommission it into an operating site of confinement. Whether reopening pre-Confederation jails is actually part of the Ford government’s plan to “protect Ontario” or just misdirection in the face of well-founded questions and critiques, it ought to be clear to any objective observer that their overall jail expansion strategy amounts to “n’importe quoi”.
Meanwhile, CBC Investigates found that 85% of women in Ontario’s jails in 2024 were presumed innocent pending their day in court (which is “a 38 per cent jump in the average number of women incarcerated from 2019 to 2024”). The same data journalism investigation found that, in 2024, 81% of men in Ontario's jails were in pre-trial detention. As noted by criminologist and Queen’s University professor Nicole Myers, most provincial prisoners in Ontario are charged with non-violent offences. Many of them will either have their charges dropped, proceedings stayed or will be found not guilty at the conclusion of their legal ordeals.
One such is example is the recent decision by Ontario Superior Court Justice Clayton Conlan to stay “the charges against three men accused of committing an execution-style killing after hearing a month’s worth of evidence about the mass strip search of nearly 200 inmates at the Maplehurst Correctional Complex in December 2023” following the assault of a jail officer by a single prisoner. Likening their treatment to being “akin to torture”, the judge tossed the case. While the Ford government is appealing the decision, the losses they’ve been incurring in courts associated with violations of the human rights of imprisoned people under the province’s supposed care have been extremely costly. For instance, the provincial government recently entered into a $59 million settlement over lockdowns between August 2014 and November 2017 when Ontario’s jail population was on average below 8,000, which is significantly lower than the average documented by CBC Investigates journalists Julie Ireton and Valérie Ouellet of “10,800 prisoners” it has been “[i]n the first six months of 2025”.
With the new federal government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney cynically tabling its new pre-trial punishment and sentencing bill at the behest of premiers from coast-to-coast, including Premier Ford, and their police association sycophants, things will likely get worse on this score from here. And who’ll pay? Taxpayers of course.
Returning to the state of imprisonment in Ontario, the Ford government’s “jail, not bail” push is also taking place in a context where human caging is increasingly being used as an all-encompassing response to manage people pushed to the margins. Notably, thousands of people are cycling between shelters or encampments and jails in this province according to a recent report by the John Howard Society of Ontario. When he was the minister responsible for imprisonment, Yasir Naqvi acknowledged in 2015 that “25% of people coming into our care and custody” self-reported living with mental health issues and that the actual number “is higher”. That was a decade ago. The criminalization and incarceration of people living with mental health conditions has only increased since then.
Armed with the provisions from the so-called Safer Municipalities Act rushed into law last spring by the Ford government while it closed overdose prevention sites that allowed people to use drugs behind closed doors in medically supervised settings, the scope of jailing is only growing in Ontario. Now a person who’s suspected of using drugs in public and refuses to comply with directions by a police officer can be “liable to a fine” of up to “$10,000 or to imprisonment” for up to “six months, or both”.
As it’s well established that imprisonment is a failure where deterrence and rehabilitation is concerned, and that its use often undermines community safety in the long-term, more than 60 groups and organizations have endorsed the No Ontario Prison Expansion | #NOPE campaign launched by the Coalition Against Proposed Prisons (CAPP). NOPE signatories are urging the Ford government to build communities now, not cages that’ll open years from now to address the pressing social issues we face in a more cost-effective, humane and just manner.
Among the alternatives being championed by the campaign is permanent and supportive housing with wrap around services to address various issues previously unhoused residents may face in their lives, including health concerns like substance dependency and mental health conditions. The approach has proven to not only reduce the demand for overstretched and expensive services such as paramedic calls and emergency room visits, but also costly encounters with cops, courts and ‘corrections’.
As campaigners point out, for literally a fraction of the up to $2.67 billion the Ford government has earmarked for the construction of 1,626 additional jail beds (at an average cost of close to $1.7 million a bed) it has announced (or re-announced in the case of the Thunder Bay Correctional Complex) since taking office in 2018, it could’ve built 1,626 permanent and supportive housing units for less than $450 million at roughly $275,000 a unit. Where operational costs are concerned, for the $211.9 million it cost on average to run 1,626 jail beds (each costing $357 per day, $10,859 per month or $130,305 a year) in 2023-2024, the province could fund the operation of permanent and supportive housing units for 4,414 people on an annual basis (at a per person cost of $131.50 per day, $4,000 per month or $48,000 per year).
When such concerns or alternatives are raised, Solicitor General Kerzner proudly exclaims variations of the following words he uttered during last month’s cash bail press conference: “When others in the province told us to stop, we didn’t listen to them. We just kept going. Something that we’re doing again today… My mission is simple. We will always protect Ontario”. But is he really? Who benefits from jail expansion other than prison industrial complex profiteers in the lucrative human misery business of prison construction and services?
Listening to the Solicitor General champion the jail expansion plans he’s presiding over, one wonder’s what’s next? Is an Alligator Alcatraz style pop-up jail on the site of the decommissioned and demolished 631-bed Toronto West Detention Centre on Disco Road near Pearson International Airport next? Our posing of the question might be read by some as ridiculous, but here we are – in the realm of the ridiculous – courtesy of the Ford government where the prospects of absurd ideas like reopening a pre-Confederation era jail in Walkerton that currently doesn’t have a functioning plumbing system is being “seriously” explored. Even if just a trial ballon, this idea is a deeply unserious one being floated around in deeply serious times where the best ideas rooted in human rights principles and informed by evidence should be championed by our political leaders at this critical juncture in history where the future is accelerating before our eyes.
In the meantime, if you’re poor, unhoused, living with mental health conditions, use illegalized drugs in public or all of the above and are accused of lawbreaking, not to worry – we’re all being told that the Ford government has a jail bed waiting for you, whether it be on a bunk or a mattress on the floor beside the toilet in a cell originally designed to imprison fewer people. Again, it’s worth mentioning that this is occurring in the name of warehousing those accused of violent offences in a moment when they represent less than half of Ontario’s provincial jail population.
Enhancing community well-being and safety is a goal everyone shares. Building more jail beds – which takes at least two years when erected on the grounds of existing jails and several years more when erected as part of new human caging sites – does nothing to work towards this goal or to reduce the crowding that imprisoned people and jail officers are subject to now. Make no mistake, the number of people warehoused in our jails is the result of policy choices and, while the Ford government is currently committed to expanding the province’s capacity to lock people up, the province still can and still should change course.
The choices for the Ford government, which doesn’t run risk of being outflanked on this file by its political opponents, are clear. It can chose to be fiscally responsible and actually work towards enhancing the collective safety of Ontario residents by investing in more cost-effective measures upstream of the punitive injustice system that can both address the needs of people pushed to the margins and prevent violence, or it can continue with jail expansion by any means, which will – if the track record and shelf life of past sites of confinement are any indication – have negative repercussions for generations to come.
Mackenzie Plumb, ABD is a PhD Candidate and Justin Piché, PhD is a Full Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. As members of the Carceral Geography (Col)laboratory, their respective research projects examine how prison infrastructure projects in Ontario and across Canada shape and are shaped by broader socio-economic restructuring. They’ve also been involved in campaigns to stop the construction of new jails as members of the Criminalization and Punishment Education Project and the Coalition Against Proposed Prisons.
