The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that Bell Canada made more than $64-million in gross revenues from calls made by prisoners in Ontario jails -- at "exorbitant" rates, lawyers allege in a lawsuit -- and gave nearly $39-million of that to the province as commission. A Canadian Press dispatch to The Globe says that Bell charged $1 a minute plus a $2.50 connection fee for long-distance calls through the Offender Telephone Management System that it operated in Ontario jails from 2013 to 2021. The phone system only allowed inmates to place collect calls, and lawyers are seeking compensation for the families who had to foot for those calls. More than 80 per cent of the people in Ontario's prisons are awaiting trial and are presumptively innocent. One of the representative plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit against Bell and Ontario -- an indigenous man in Northern Ontario -- had phone bills between $250 and $500, and some more than $1,000. He said he had to take on extra work such as chopping firewood to pay the bills. Bell and the province of Ontario have previously refused to disclose how much they benefited from those calls, but Bell was recently ordered by the CRTC to reveal the amounts.