Let's Talk

Commissioner’s Editorial

Our Leadership Agenda

Marking 30 years of publication, this issue of Let’s Talk is both timely and important. It centres on our role in the community and celebrates the excellence that our people and our partners demonstrate every day in serving Canadians through strong community corrections. It also marks one of the core elements of the Leadership Agenda that the executive group of the Service has accepted for the year ahead.

At the CSC Executive Development Symposium, May 10-12, I challenged our executives, and by extension the entire Service, to take up two critical initiatives. First, I challenged the Service to focus even more intensely on robust, safe re-entry for every offender. We must bolster our capacity to develop specific, precise plans for offenders’ re-entry, engage all necessary partners and community resources to ensure that the correctional plan is achievable, provide clinical intervention support throughout the sentence, assist offenders to put a roof over their heads, ensure that necessary, positive and appropriate relationships are in place in the community, and assist offenders to find a job and help them to structure their time.

Robust re-entry is our expertise, it is our profession, it is our vocation, and it is within our grasp to accomplish even more. We have the people, the skills, the knowledge, and the relationships needed to take up and meet the challenge I’ve put to you. The people and their stories featured in this issue are powerful testimony to this.

Second, I challenged the Service to renew and reinforce our commitment to a drug-free environment in all units and community correctional centres. We continue to emphasize that drugs are not compatible with rehabilitation, secure environments and effective, safe reintegration into communities. We must rigorously use every authority we have under law and policy to prevent drugs from entering our institutions, and we must ensure consistent application and implementation of all our technology and procedures to eliminate drugs from our institutions.

To move forward on this agenda, we rely directly and heavily on you and our partners. Achieving even better results on robust re-entry and drug-free environments will require all the energy, ingenuity and collaboration you and our partners can muster. I know I can count on you to meet these challenges because there are many more stories of excellence in the Service than could possibly be told in one issue of Let’s Talk.♦

Lucie McClung
Commissioner
Correctional Service of Canada