UPDATED OCT. 15: This post has sparked a national letter-writing campaign – and media attention – spearheaded by a British Columbia woman, Sandra Martins-Toner, whose 16-year-old son Matthew was murdered. Martins-Toner, who started a victims’ rights group to press for changes to the justice system, says it’s an outrage that convicts get ice cream. She’s appealing through Facebook for help.
Corrections Canada is scrambling to build more prison cells to house thousands more inmates who’ll be imprisoned because of the Tory tough-on-crime agenda, but they’re mindful of appeasing those convicts with frozen treats. It’s all there on the government’s contracting website, MERX, where Corrections has hastily issued an appeal for bidders to plan and supervise the construction of spaces for 192 more inmates at Bath Institution, a medium-security prison near Kingston, Ontario. On the same website, you can find a Corrections call for proposals to deliver ice cream to several federal pens in Quebec, including the prison where serial child killer Clifford Olson is housed. The ice cream deal is worth a cool $43,000.
In just 3 days we’ll find out if Tory cabinet minister Stockwell Day was fibbing, or perhaps ad-libbing, or perhaps he’s prescient – when he 
The federal Tories have politicized a prison space crisis in a bid to make emergency spending look like economic development, charges a Liberal MP. Conservative MPs and ministers have begun criss-crossing the country, making campaign-style announcements at each one of 35 federal penitentiaries where new cells will be built to accommodate an exploding inmate population. “The Conservatives don’t miss an opportunity to try to turn anything into pork barrelling and so what they’re doing of course is masquerade this outrageous and outlandish prison spending as somehow being a stimulus to the economy,” Ajax-Pickering MP Mark Holland told me Wednesday. Holland is the party’s critic on corrections issues.
