IQALUIT - Maliiganik Tukisiiniakvik lawyer Scott Wheildon says potential changes to Canada's laws would force judges to hand down longer sentences, stressing Nunavut's already overcrowded justice system.

"Year after year, we have over 6,000 charges being laid in this territory," said Wheildon. That's the number of charges per year, not the number of people charged, he noted.

The Baffin Correctional Centre in Iqaluit has an official capacity of 65 beds but often houses more than 90 prisoners. The Ilavut Correctional Healing Centre in Kugluktuk can house up to 12 in a minimum-security environment. The tentatively-named Rankin Inlet Healing Facility will have room for 46 prisoners and is scheduled to open in 2011, according to Nunavut's assistant deputy attorney general Doug Garson.

One of the bills the Senate is looking at is C-25, which would limit the extra credit people commonly receive for time spent in custody before trial. When they hand down sentences, judges often give double or time-and-a-half credit for pre-trial custody, or "remand." For example, someone who was in remand for three months waiting for trial may have six months taken off their sentence.

The C-25 bill would make time-and-a-half the maximum remand credit, and would limit the credit to one-for-one in most cases.

Doug Strader, manager of corrections, said usually more than half of the people in custody are on remand rather than serving sentences. This is true nationwide, not just in Nunavut, he said.

Across Canada and Nunavut, the proportion of people in custody who are on remand versus serving sentences has been increasing for years. Garson said it's not clear why that's happening.

Garson said one of the reasons he had heard from the south for the C-25 bill was that it would stop people from drawing out the wait for their trials so they can shave time off their sentences.

Another bill, C-15, would revise the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. Among other things, it would establish mandatory minimum sentences for several drug offences including those for marijuana smuggling and trafficking, both of which are frequent in Nunavut.

C-15 would mandate minimum sentences of a year to two years under certain conditions, such as dealing drugs near a school, for example.

Wheildon is concerned mandatory minimum jail sentences would restrict judges' options in sentencing.

"They take away the discretion of judges to put in an appropriate sentence in each case," he said. "In my mind, the trial judge is the appropriate person to assign a sentence, not the legislature."

Judges wouldn't be able to assign house arrests or conditional sentences in such cases, he said, leaving them no alternative but to send offenders into an already overcrowded penal system.

Nunavut's correctional system is chronically overcrowded and prisoners are sometimes temporarily housed in RCMP holding cells which aren't designed to hold people for more than a day or two. Wheildon said the conditions in the RCMP cells don't meet the minimum basic standards of the treatment of prisoners required under Canadian and international law.

Garson said C-15 would not only stress Nunavut's correctional system.

"Certainly, adding new mandatory minimum penalties for certain offences can lead to more offenders being incarcerated and that could potentially lead to an increased strain on our correctional facilities," he said. "But it should be noted that this is an issue that we'll be confronting, all provinces and territories as a result of the new legislation coming into force."

There are nearly a hundred Nunavummiut in custody outside Nunavut, in Ontario and the NWT.