Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall is calling on the provincial and federal governments to expand addiction treatment inside correctional institutions, arguing that people struggling with substance use should have an opportunity to leave custody in better condition than when they entered.
The proposal is among the Ontario Big City Mayors’ latest asks as municipalities push senior levels of government for a broader response to homelessness, addiction and mental health crises playing out in communities across the province.
The mayors want addiction treatment and rehabilitation programming expanded in both provincial and federal correctional institutions, alongside stronger discharge planning to connect people leaving custody with treatment, supportive services and housing.
Nuttall, who serves as vice-chair of OBCM, said the request is not aimed only at Queen’s Park, saying that Ottawa also has responsibility for people serving sentences in federal institutions.
“Anybody who’s going into detention, especially those who are suffering from addictions, need to be able to have the opportunity to come out of detention in a better place than they’ve gone in,” Nuttall said.
For the mayors, the correctional system represents an opportunity to intervene in a cycle they say municipalities are increasingly dealing with after people return to their communities.
Nuttall argued that when someone enters custody struggling with an addiction but does not receive adequate treatment, releasing that person without addressing the underlying issue makes it more likely the same problems will continue outside the institution.
“The fact that we would have somebody go in with an addiction, not be able to treat that addiction while they’re in detention, then released out back into the community with that same addiction, well, we’re gonna get the same result if we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” he said.
“We need to break that cycle.”
Nuttall said the caucus has been looking outside Ontario for examples of how correctional institutions could incorporate rehabilitation more directly into their operations, pointing to programs the mayors observed in Alberta.
“What Alberta’s done is they’ve made the ability to get rehabilitative help at the fingertips of those who are currently detained,” he said.
Nuttall said the approaches OBCM members saw there stood out because similar options are not as readily available in Ontario.
“When you look at the types of things that are being offered in other places that we just don’t have here in Ontario, it is a no-brainer to each of us,” he said.
He said that there is a correctional program in Calgary where people who voluntarily choose rehabilitation can leave the institution’s general population and move into a progressively less restrictive setting.
“They no longer lock the prison cells at night,” Nuttall said. “They have an open forum and an opportunity to start moving back towards a life of opportunity and earning those freedoms back.”
Nuttall described this approach as “a very beautiful model” and said he would like to see similar programming adopted much more broadly.
That includes not only Ontario’s provincially operated correctional facilities, but federal institutions across the country.
“Hopefully [it will] be emulated here, and quite frankly, across every federal prison, not just in Ontario, but every federal prison across Canada,” Nuttall said.
The correctional-system proposal adds another element to OBCM’s argument: governments need to intervene earlier in the cycle of homelessness, addiction and mental health crises rather than leaving municipalities to deal with the consequences once people are back in the community.
By coupling rehabilitation behind bars with discharge planning, OBCM wants governments to create a more direct path from custody into addiction treatment and stable housing.
Nuttall said the goal is ultimately to use a period of incarceration as an opportunity for recovery rather than allowing it to become another stage in a repeating cycle.
“This is a huge opportunity to do so,” he said.
