Bernardo transfer spurred CSC questions on whether Mendicino knew: emails

The public safety minister and his staff have been under heavy scrutiny over the past month as more details have emerged about the timeline of the prison transfer.

Days after Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino shared his outrage on social media over the transfer of notorious serial killer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison, the head of Canada’s federal prison system asked the department whether the politician had been told of the move.

Anne Kelly, the commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada, also reached out to Mendicino directly to let him know that she had seen the tweet in which he voiced his concern over the move and offered to arrange a meeting.

The back-and-forth emails between federal officials and Mendicino himself in the days leading up to and after Canadians learned of the transfer were released to The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act.

The public safety minister and his staff have been under heavy scrutiny over the past month as more details have emerged about the timeline of the prison transfer. Questions have also swirled around who knew what when, with the Opposition Conservatives demanding that Mendicino resign.

Bernardo, known as the “Schoolgirl Killer,” is serving a life sentence for the kidnapping, torture and murders of 15-year-old Kristen French and 14-year-old Leslie Mahaffy in the early 1990s near St. Catharines, Ont. He was also convicted of manslaughter in the December 1990 death of 15-year-old Tammy Homolka, the younger sister of his then-wife, Karla Homolka. Bernardo also ultimately admitted to sexually assaulting 14 other women.

Karla Homolka pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was released in 2005 after completing a 12-year sentence for her role in the crimes committed against French and Mahaffy.

On June 2, news leaked out that Bernardo had been quietly transferred three days earlier to the medium-security La Macaza Institution, about 190 kilometres northwest of Montreal. He was initially an inmate at the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario and later spent about a decade at the Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison just outside Kingston.

The day word of Bernardo’s transfer got out, Mendicino posted a statement on Twitter describing the correctional service’s “independent decision” as “shocking and incomprehensible.” He also said he planned to raise “the transfer decision process” with Kelly and expected the correctional service to “take a victim-centred and trauma-informed approach” in such cases.