Federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino calls the news that serial killer and rapist Paul Bernardo has been transferred to a medium-security penitentiary “shocking and incomprehensible.”
Citing union sources and the lawyer for the families of the victims, several media reported that Bernardo had been transferred without fuss to the establishment of La Macaza, in the Laurentians region, about 190 km northwest of Montreal.
After his conviction, he was imprisoned in Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario. He was then held for about a decade at Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security penitentiary in the Kingston area.
Photo: Greg Banning Archives The Canadian Press
A forensic sketch of rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo
Bernardo is serving a life sentence after being convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering two teenage girls in the early 1990s in the St. Catharines, Ontario area.
Mr. Mendicino says the Correctional Service of Canada needs to take a victim-based, trauma-informed approach to such cases. He intends to address “the transfer decision process directly with the commissioner [des Services correctionnels] Anne Kelly”.
The Canadian Press has contacted Correctional Services, but has yet to receive a response from them.
To see in video