Ottawa may review parties' use of Canadians’ private data

File photo

A House of Commons committee plans to study whether political parties should have some basic rules for collecting — and protecting — private information from millions of citizens.

OTTAWA—As Parliament considers peering into political parties’ collection and use of sensitive personal information about citizens, those parties are busy developing more powerful and sophisticated tools to track voter data.

Canada has virtually no rules governing how political parties collect, use and share information about voters they meet on the doorstep, hear from on issues, or observe on social media.

In fact, Canadians are largely in the dark about what kinds of information parties collect and how they use it.

But a House of Commons committee plans to study whether parties should have some basic rules for collecting — and protecting — private information like political beliefs, financial information, family makeup, and contact information from millions of citizens.

Daniel Blaikie, the New Democrat MP who suggested the study, said multiple witnesses brought the issue to the Access to Information and Ethics committee during a review of the Privacy Act this year.

“Witnesses had expressed a lack of knowledge of where exactly (the data) goes.” Blaikie said in an interview Thursday. “So the idea was really just to get a better idea, if there was going to be regulation, where would you put it and how would it work.”

How much of an appetite Parliament has to debate the issue, however, remains to be seen. All three major parties have a strong interest in keeping secret the specifics of their data operations.

The Star asked the three parties to outline exactly what types of data they were collecting and what steps they take to protect that data from both outside intrusion, such as hackers, or internal misuse.

Liberal party spokesperson Braeden Caley did not get into specifics about what sorts of information the party collects — although he did point to the party’s privacy policy, which states they collect any “information you choose to give (them).”

Caley said that in 2015, 80,000 Liberal volunteers had an estimated 4 million conversations with voters.

“We engage with Canadians from coast to coast to coast on a daily basis and we are committed to protecting information assets and any personal data we collect in the process,” Caley said. “The party also does not sell personal information under any circumstances.”

The Conservatives use an in-house database known as CIMS, short for the Constituent Information Management System. Party spokesperson Cory Hann said it would be difficult to list all the types of data that go into CIMS, as 338 local campaigns upload information into the central database.

However, he said in a statement, “I’d say you want to know if the household is voting Conservative.”

“That’s the minimum, in my opinion, to make going door-to-door worthwhile.”

According to reported accounts from former party officials, CIMS also keeps track of donors, people who request election signs, and supports both electronic and on-the-ground outreach efforts. In 2007, one former Conservative politician even accused the party of logging the concerns citizens brought to their local MPs into the party’s central database.

Hann added the party takes “every precaution” to ensure the CIMS data is secure.

The NDP used a new voter database in the 2015 election called “Populous.” According to Dave Hare, the party’s director of operations, the database can track demographics, party membership, even specific issues of concern for individual voters.

“The information is primarily used to direct our ground efforts (mobilizing supporters and talking to persuadable voters) during and in-between elections,” Hare wrote on Friday.

He said the NDP hired an independent firm to conduct a security audit of the database before the party used it, and even commissioned “white hat” hackers to test the limits of its security.

It’s not clear when the parliamentary committee will begin the study into this issue. The committee has committed to just two studies ahead of it — on private sector privacy and on the Security of __canada Information Sharing Act — but other business could push the examination of parties’ data practices further down the line.

Conjugal visits increase public safety, help offenders reintegrate, experts say

The Canadian Press

Lee Chapelle poses for a photo in Toronto on Friday, October 28, 2016. Chapelle who runs Prison Consulting Services __canada and spent a number of years behind bars, during which time he got married and conceived a child.

VANCOUVER — Lee Chapelle has fond memories of spending afternoons with his wife in the mid-1990s, barbecuing in a small yard while his young children played in the grass and mimicked the cows' moos as the animals grazed in a nearby field.

Were it not for the five-metre, barbed-wire penitentiary fence interrupting the view, the scene could easily have been mistaken as an everyday family experience.

Between 1991 and 2010, Chapelle spent about 15 years behind bars for property theft. On more than a dozen occasions over that period, his young family was able to spend as many as three days at a time living with him.

The stays, which remain a part of the Canadian correctional system, are linked to a long-standing program aimed at increasing the chances of inmates successfully reintegrating into society after their release.

"It was a really big motivation to come home to my family to be able to spend time with my newborn baby and realize just how much was out there and just how much I wanted to be with them," Chapelle said.

"I had a family that needed me and that I loved and that I wanted to be with."

Some experts say Canada's so-called private family visit program, which began in 1980 as a pilot project, plays an important role in rehabilitating offenders, and also provides corrections officers with a useful tool for encouraging good behaviour from inmates.

The program has received recent attention after a media report that Kelly Ellard, a notorious killer in British Columbia, is eight-months pregnant following a conjugal visit from her boyfriend.

Lisa Kerr, a law professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., said the program recognizes that the majority of federal inmates will be released and that it is in society's best interest to make that process as successful as possible.

"Close personal relationships are part of what makes people have hope about their future and gives them reason to invest in their correctional programming and move towards a release plan," she said.

Canada's longtime correctional investigator, Howard Sapers, said conjugal visits have been around for as long as he can remember. He cited research showing inmates who are allowed to maintain close family bonds have a lower likelihood of reoffending.

There is nothing in Canada's private family visit legislation that discriminates between gender or sexual orientation.

The stays typically happen in a more private section of the prison within small living units complete with kitchens and a yard, which Chapelle said inmates commonly refer to as "trailers." There are strict guidelines around who qualifies, both as an inmate and a visitor, and families pay for any food during the stay, which can last up to three days.

The program is only in place in federal institutions.

Prisons were a longtime fixture in Chapelle's family life. His wedding took place inside Kingston's medium-security Joyceville Institution and he said he consummated the marriage during his first private family visit.

The woman who would become Chapelle's wife was pregnant at the time of his incarceration, and the couple conceived another child during a later prison visit. Those experiences were crucial in developing the close relationship he now has with his children, he said.

"When it comes to your wife, it gives you a fighting chance of being able to keep your family," Chapelle said, adding that people underestimate the importance of human touch that conjugal visits allow.

One woman who makes frequent private family visits attributes the close connection between her partner and their two-year-old son in large part to the extended visits they have had while he serves time for home invasion.

"My son and his father have the sweetest little bond," said Jennifer, whose last name isn't being included because her employer isn't aware of her personal circumstances.

"He is at the age where he knows who his dada is. When my phone rings he thinks it's his dada. When we're in (the prison) waiting for him to come down he runs to him."

She described staying at the private-visit facilities at Fenbrook Institution in Kingston. Correctional officers would deliver four sets of utensils at the beginning of the stay, and there was only one steak knife on hand, which was attached to the wall with a 25-centimetre chain, she said.

An official with the Canadian Correctional Service said private family visits are part of a system of treating inmates humanely, and help connect them to the community.

"The goal of corrections goes beyond punishment and goes beyond custody," said Michael Bettman, head of offender programs and reintegration.

"The majority of offenders are going to return to Canadian society and our job in the correctional service is to prepare them and to mitigate any risk that they might pose."

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Adults shamed from speaking indigenous languages hold key to revival, survival

Dr. Onowa McIvor, an assistant professor in Indigenous Education, is photographed on campus at the University of Victoria in Victoria, B.C. Friday, October 28, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

VICTORIA — There's a generation of indigenous people across __canada who were once shamed for speaking their own language.

Now, people who didn't learn their mother tongue from their parents are key to saving and revitalizing the languages, British Columbia researchers say.

Two University of Victoria indigenous languages experts whose own parents did not speak their aboriginal languages at home are moving to bridge the language gap with a mentor-apprentice program that teaches adults.

"There were generations of people, my parents and grandparents, who were sent to residential school and forbidden to speak their language and beaten and shamed and ridiculed and punished in all sorts of awful ways for speaking the language," said Peter Jacobs, a UVic linguist and fluent speaker of his Squamish Nation language.

"A lot of those people who came out of that school system chose not to teach their children the language," he said. "My dad doesn't speak Squamish as his first language for that very reason even though both his parents were fluent speakers. That caused a big disruption."

There are almost 60 indigenous languages spoken in Canada, with B.C. leading the country with 34 languages.

A November 2014 report by British Columbia's First Peoples' Cultural Council found a decline in fluent indigenous language speakers but an increase in semi-fluent speakers. The study looked at 129,000 people in B.C. who speak an indigenous language and found 60 per cent of fluent speakers are aged 65 and older, while one in three semi-fluent speakers are under the age of 25.

The program focuses on adults learning an indigenous language by being paired with a fluent speaker who is a mentor. The teacher and student are immersed in a curriculum where classes could involve hunting expeditions or family chores but are conducted entirely in the indigenous language.

Onowa McIvor, director of UVic's indigenous education department, said she and Jacobs are compiling three years of data from 67 participants in the mentor-apprentice program. The participants range in age from young adults who recently completed high school to people in their 50s, she said.

"These are the people, the first generation, their parents didn't teach the language to them," said McIvor, a Cree from Norway House, Man., who completed the mentor-apprentice program as an apprentice.

"Their parents were growing up in a Canada where it wasn't cool to be Indian," she said. "In fact, most indigenous people thought they were doing right by their kids and doing better for their kids by not teaching them the language."

McIvor said she believes the researchers' work is "a tangible example of reconciliation in action."

Participants have noticed their connections with relatives and their traditions have strengthened along with their language skills, she said.

"We are seeing what's happening on the ground and we are watching in our lifetimes, in the last 10 or 15 years that Peter and I have worked in the field, we've witnessed new speakers, new adult speakers of the language."

Elisha Elliott is a graduate of the program and is an indigenous languages teacher at Lau Welnew Tribal School at Brentwood Bay, about 20 kilometres northwest of Victoria.

Elliott, 29, known by her indigenous name Menetiye, pronounced Monethia, said her first language lessons with elders from the Tsartlip First Nation involved playing with dolls to learn the Sencoten language of southern Vancouver Island. She's now teaching elementary students.

She said the time is right for indigenous languages even though many fluent elders have died in recent years.

"What we're doing now, I don't think could have been done back then. It's come at a time when there's been enough healing."

Elliott said her students are reading, writing and solving math problems using their indigenous language.

Earlier this month, a Vancouver Island Grade 8 student stunned a gathering of national aboriginal leaders and federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett by saying he volunteered to become his school's indigenous language teacher.

Tim Masso, 13, said he volunteered to help teach the indigenous studies course at Ucluelet Secondary School on British Columbia's west coast even though he is still learning the Nuu-chah-nulth language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Facing charges nothing new for accused diamond thieves

The Canadian Press

Charlottetown Police Services issued this handout photo of a couple suspected of involvement in an Oct. 12 robbery in Charlottetown.

A year to the day before Natalia Feldman, 44, wound up in handcuffs outside of her Thornhill condo, York Regional Police allege, she was assaulting her partner, 70-year-old Grigori Zaharov, with an ashtray.

Feldman and Zaharov, the alleged diamond thieves suspected in a spree of high-value heists across the country, are each facing one count of theft over $5,000 in New Brunswick and one count of theft over $5,000 in Prince Edward Island. They were arrested on a nationwide warrant outside their condo in the early hours of Oct. 20.

Exactly a year earlier, Feldman was charged with assault with a weapon and wilfully damaging Zaharov’s property — specifically a door and television, whose value exceeded $5,000. She was also charged with an assault against Zaharov that allegedly occurred 10 days prior to that, using a mug as a weapon. All of the charges were withdrawn, but court documents indicate Feldman received two years of probation and had to pay a $200 fine within six months.

Feldman faced assault charges in 2008, 2009 and 2010 — all of which were withdrawn. Torstar News Service could not ascertain who these assaults were allegedly against.

Zaharov’s own history with legal trouble goes back to the early ’90s.

In 1992, he was convicted of possession of housebreaking instruments. Court records show police found six pairs of surgical gloves, a “jimmy” tool, lock picks, a bent clothes hanger, two bolt cutters, a wire cutter, a mini-crowbar, a pry-bar, a 14-inch spike, a screw head and fencing pliers in a car belonging to Zaharov.

They also found a map with X's on both a hotel where Zaharov had stayed and the Radio Shack store where a robbery had taken place.

In 1999, court records indicate he was charged with theft under $5,000. He pled guilty to a lesser charge, served one day in jail and got a year of probation.

In 2000, he was charged with theft, breach of probation and possessing the tools of a break-in artist, according to court records. Those charges were withdrawn, but he was convicted in Ottawa in 2003 of theft under $5,000 and was fined $500.

In Toronto of the same year, Zaharov was charged with theft and assaulting a peace officer. Records show he was fined $3,000 and got a year of probation for the theft. The assault charge was withdrawn.

Real estate records indicate the pair also has a complex marital history.

Torstar News Service

The condo building at 1 Maison Parc Court in Thornhill where Natalia Feldman purchased a penthouse suite for $453,899 in 2005. Feldman and Zaharov are each facing one count of theft over $5,000 in New Brunswick and one count of theft over $5,000 in P.E.I.

According to public records, Feldman purchased her Thornhill condo in 2005 for $452,899. By 2010, there was nearly $50,000 worth of writs against the property.

The couple lives on the penthouse floor of the eight-storey building. The off-white building, with its clean lines, archways and a fountain out front, is unassuming. But it boasts a number of amenities including 24-hour security, a recreation room, gym, indoor pool and sauna.

In 2007, the Thornhill condo was designated as the couple’s “matrimonial home.” In July 2011, Zaharov made an application to the Ontario Superior Court to that designation removed, claiming the couple were divorced. That record of the application was subsequently deleted from the file.

But just three months later, Feldman applied to the Land Registrar to have Zaharov added to the property title as 50-per-cent owner, listing him as “spouse.”

Most recently, this year Zaharov and Feldman were identified after video footage appeared to show a couple swapping a fake diamond for a $10,000 real one on Oct. 7 at a jewelry store in Saint John, N.B. Police in Charlottetown, P.E.I., allege they pulled the same sleight-of-hand at a store there, making off with another $20,000 in precious stones.

So far the couple is only facing charges regarding the alleged heists in Saint John and Charlottetown. But Nicole Shannon, co-owner of Kier Fine Jewelers in Whistler, B.C. said she’s convinced the pair also pulled off a bait-and-switch at her store back in August.

“Basically it was the same situation. We found that diamonds had been swapped out,” Shannon said. “We’re fairly confident it’s the same couple.”

Shannon said protecting against sleight-of-hand thefts like the one Feldman and Zaharov are accused of is difficult.

Sales employees have to strike a balance, being vigilant without alienating customers by treating them like potential thieves.

“It is absolutely a fine line,” Shannon said. “Our business is built on trust. You want people to feel comfortable, and you want to treat them like family.”

Shannon said the jewelry industry is often reluctant to report thefts because of fears that reports will undermine customer trust, but she and Smith both decided to speak out, hoping to change that attitude.

“I think that it’s the other way around. If you talk about it, it makes them realize that you are onto it and are not an easy target,” she said.

Saint John police Sgt. Charles Breen said the missing stone from Smith’s store has not yet been recovered.

Both Smith and Shannon said their stones were laser-etched with unique identifying markers. If they’re found, they can be matched with and returned to their rightful owners.

Zaharov and Feldman will appear for a bail hearing in a New Brunswick court on Monday.

Murder and segregation: the story of Adam Capay and Sherman Quisses

Sherman Quisses, left, was 35 when he was in an altercation with Adam Capay, right, and was allegedly stabbed in the neck at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre. (SUBMITTED IMAGES)

THUNDER BAY, ONT.—Their lives, in many ways, ran on parallel tracks. Two men from reserves in northern Ontario, each with a spotted history of run ins with the law.

But it was jail that brought Adam Capay and Sherman Quisses together. Their lives intersected in the most sinister way.

One of them is now dead, and the other has risen to national prominence as the poster boy for the cruelties of solitary confinement. Capay has languished in segregation at a Thunder Bay prison for four years as he waits to go on trial, a revelation that has provoked shock and outrage across the country. Yet he also stands accused of murdering Quisses in a jailhouse spat on June 3, 2012.

Quisses’s aunt Zelda, who lives in the remote community of Fort Hope, feels a mix of sympathy and anger at the sudden attention paid to her nephew’s accused killer.

“To be honest, I feel he deserved the treatment that he got. But as a caring person, I do feel sorry for him too,” she said. “I guess when you do something, you have to face the consequences of whatever you did to a person, the crime you committed. You have to face it.”

What actually transpired is up for dispute, but what’s known for sure is that Quisses died and Capay was charged with first degree murder. The day it happened, a bunch of inmates dared Capay to eat a fat beetle that was scuttling around, according to one prisoner who was at the Thunder Bay Correctional Centre that night.

“He ate it,” recalled the prisoner, who was listed as a witness on court documents. “I guess something in that spider juice made him go crazy.”

Later, at around 1 a.m., the prisoner woke in his bunk in an open range dormitory. He asked that Torstar News Service protect his identity, for fear of reprisal over what he saw: Capay scuffling with Quisses, who lay in his bunk a few beds down. “It all happened really fast,” said the prisoner. “I thought they was just fighting.”

The Crown alleges that Capay, who was weeks shy of turning 20, used some sort of “instrument” to “attack and puncture” Quisses’s carotid artery, according to court documents. The 35-year-old man bled out through his neck and died.

From that gruesome scene, suffering has spun out in all directions. Quisses died just a week before his release, his family says. He left behind a young son, Tristan, and a host of other grieving relatives.

Meanwhile, Capay was transferred to the Thunder Bay Jail, a maximum security prison in an ashlar sandstone fortress where an estimated 90 per cent of inmates identify as indigenous. Earlier this month, Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Renu Mandhane toured the jail and witnessed Capay’s condition, after the local union president and corrections officer Mike Lundy told her “she had to know.” She learned that Capay has been in segregation since 2012; 23 hours a day, alone beneath glaring lights in a plexiglass cell. Mandhane told Torstar last week that she spoke with Capay, who is now 24. He told her he couldn’t tell night from day, and showed her scars from his attempts at self-harm.

The story has summoned calls from Mandhane and others to put an end to solitary confinement at provincial jails. Breese Davies, a criminal defence lawyer in Toronto, called Capay’s treatment “unconscionable” in light of how the United Nations has deemed solitary confinement for 15 straight days to be a form of torture. On Friday, Ontario Regional Chief Isadore Day posted a statement on Facebook describing how he visited Capay this week. “I'm so pissed off at the system and what it has done to so many of our people and what it continues to do today,” he wrote. “There is no rhyme or reason for what Adam Capay is going through.”

In response to the revelations, Ontario’s corrections minister, David Orazietti, pledged an external review “of the corrections system as a whole” and insisted this week that the province’s goal is to use segregation only as a last resort. That’s on top of the review announced earlier in October, scheduled to be finished by next spring, that will aim to find ways to reduce the use of segregation at provincial jails. It also comes 19 months after another solitary confinement review was called by Orazietti’s predecessor, current-Attorney General Yasir Naqvi, whom Lundy claimed to have told about Capay last January, when he visited the jail. Naqvi’s review, concluded this month, was done internally and resulted in a new rule to cap consecutive days in segregation at 15 instead of 30.

On Wednesday, Orazietti put out a statement saying Capay had been moved to a different cell, which has lights that can be dimmed and access to showers and a television. Lundy told Torstar that, contrary to Orazietti’s statement, Capay remains in segregation and was only moved due to construction in the prison. “What’s going to happen when construction’s finished—he’s going right back to where he was,” Lundy said on Friday.

Capay’s parents and siblings, who live on the Lac Seul First Nation near Sioux Lookout, did not want to speak with Torstar, on instructions from Capay’s lawyer. He is still accused of killing Quisses, and they don’t want to say something that could harm his case. The trial has been postponed three times since he was charged in June 2012: once for a psychiatric assessment, which deemed Capay fit to stand trial; again when he challenged the makeup of his jury as unconstitutional for a lack of diversity, a motion he lost; and then when he fired his first lawyer just before proceedings were to begin again this fall.

His new lawyer, Tony Bryant, told Torstar: “We are doing our upmost to represent Mr. Capay in the defence of his first degree murder charge and to take all possible steps to ensure that his rights are protected.”

Rob Sakamoto was one of Capay’s teachers at the Queen Elizabeth District High School in Sioux Lookout. He said that Capay was “in and out of youth detention centres” over the years, but that is not uncommon for many young people in the communities around that town. “We as a society, like Adam, need to own the role we have played in the past, what we are doing in the present, and our responsibility to support First Nations communities on their path to healing in the future,” he said. “Youth like Adam deserve better.”

For Quisses’s family, the massive profile of Capay’s confinement has brought up complicated feelings. “I don’t know why so many feel sorry for him. He took my nephew away from me,” said his aunt, Jessie during an interview at her Thunder Bay apartment. “I loved Sherman, my boy, so much. I raised him when was a baby,” she said, tightly clasping her hands with tears in her eyes.

Speaking with Torstar in downtown Thunder Bay, Quisses’s son Tristan, now 18, said he remembers every detail from the day his father died. He was playing video games back home in Neskantaga First Nation when his aunt called for him upstairs to tell him his dad was stabbed in jail. Tristan and his mother rushed to take the next flight to Thunder Bay. Hours later, he was standing over his father, who was now hooked up to life support at the hospital with bloodstained bandages wrapped around his neck. “I touched his cold hand and said farewell dad,” Tristan said.

Four years later, the grade 12 student is on track to graduate next June. He plans to become a police officer—“cops and robbers” was one of the favourite games he used to play with his dad — and ultimately, one day, leave Thunder Bay.

“Life is hard on the reserve, you know, life is hard being First Nation,” he said. “To work as a police officer in Toronto or Ottawa—that’s my dream because that society is peaceful compared to life on the reserve.”

Four years after Quisses’s death, his alleged killer is still waiting to go on trial in the Thunder Bay Jail. Earlier in October, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a report that concluded there is an “alarming and systemic overuse of segregation” at Ontario jails. Between October and December 2015, more than 4,100 inmates spent at least one day in segregation; more than 1,500 of them—38.2 per cent—had a “mental health alert” on file. Nearly a quarter of segregation placements in the report exceeded two weeks—with 15 days being the UN threshold for torture.

In 2013, a ruling from the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered that inmates put into segregation receive a handout that spells out their rights while in solitary confinement. The handout stipulates that a review of their segregation must be done every five days, while another review that includes the inmate’s mental health needs and explores any alternatives to solitary confinement, must be done for every 30 days of continuous segregation. For each 30-day review, the prison superintendent must report on an inmate’s segregation to the Assistant Deputy Minister of Institutional Services.

In Capay’s case, this would mean that the assistant deputy minister should have received dozens of reports on his segregation.

The Thunder Bay Jail superintendent, Bill Wheeler, and the acting superintendent Deborah McKay, did not respond to questions about Capay’s confinement, or whether the handout protocols were followed in Capay’s case. The assistant deputy minister, Christina Danylchenko, did not return calls or emails from Torstar, either.

Spokespeople for the corrections ministry and Minister Orazietti also did not respond to questions about solitary confinement, Capay’s case, and the segregation protocol.