[LINK] "CBSA learned of its own detainee’s death by accident – three weeks later"

[rfmcdonald]

Patrick Cain linked to a Global News report of his observing how the Canada Border Services Agency completely lost track of a man in their custody. How did he fall through the cracks? None of the answers Cain provides are reassuring.

On January 14 2013, Canada Border Service Agency officials showed up at a detention hearing for a dead man.

Shawn Dwight Cole, a Jamaican national with a lengthy criminal record who’d been held in the Toronto East Detention Centre for 106 days awaiting deportation, died on Boxing Day, 2012. Ontario’s corrections ministry records attribute his death to “natural causes.” He had a history of seizures.

But when he died no one thought to tell the the CBSA, on whose behalf the provincial jail had been incarcerating him.

And no one told the Jamaican government until 87 days after Cole’s death, in apparent contravention of a treaty requiring Canada to inform other countries of their citizen’s deaths “without delay.”

Cole’s death also came as a surprise to the immigration consultant hired to represent him.