Drone Delivers McNuggets to Canada's Most Secure Prison, Leaves Five-Star Review for Radar
The guards found the inmate full, cheerful and slightly drunk. The detection system found nothing.
Satire This article is fiction. Any resemblance to sane reality is coincidental.
SAINTE-ANNE-DES-PLAINES, Quebec. In a breakthrough for the Canadian hospitality sector, the country’s most secure prison has become the only maximum-security facility in North America with a working late-night drive-through, according to absolutely nobody official.
The delivery arrived at around 3 a.m., hovered politely at a cell window, and handed over chicken nuggets, fries, dipping sauce and something to wash it all down. The customer reportedly found the whole thing very funny by morning. The radar, meanwhile, has been asked to write a short reflective essay.
A delivery app for people who can’t leave the house, ever
Industry analysts we made up say the drop marks a turning point for the food-delivery business. “For years, the hardest customer to reach was someone in a top-security unit with no front door, no phone and a team of guards,” said Brenda Flapjack, a fictional consultant at the equally fictional firm Last Mile Partners. “Turns out you just need a window and a drone with confidence.”
Ms. Flapjack predicts tiered prison delivery plans within a year. The basic plan covers nuggets. The premium plan adds a milkshake and a file baked into an apple pie, “for the nostalgic customer.”
The radar’s side of the story
The detection system declined to comment, chiefly because it is a radar. Sources close to it, also invented, said it had been “watching the sky very hard” all night and simply did not expect a Happy Meal to be the threat.
Guards, by contrast, are not amused. Their union wants something far more low-tech: big nets over the yards. It is the first security upgrade in history that would also work on badminton.
What actually happened
Strip out the jokes and the facts are these. The union representing Canada’s federal correctional officers says a drone delivered McDonald’s chicken nuggets, fries with sauce and some alcohol straight to an inmate’s cell window at around 3 a.m. on Thursday. That cell was in the special handling unit at the federal penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, which CBC News describes as Canada’s most secure prison. TVA Nouvelles broke the story.
“The inmate found that really funny in the morning when the guards did their rounds,” Mike Bolduc, regional president of the UCCO-SACC-CSN union, told CBC. He said the unit’s drone-detection radar didn’t appear to pick up the drone, and that inmates probably send several drones to find blind spots. “It’s supposed to be the most secure jail in Canada and he’s eating McDonald’s,” he said.
The union’s real worry is what comes next. It says contraband from cellphones to knives has been arriving by drone, and it is pushing for physical netting “as fast as possible.” Correctional Service Canada told CBC the incident is under review and that it uses “a multi-layered approach” including searches and detection technologies, but would not discuss the case further.
The Snark take
Canada spends serious money on drone radar, and the system was beaten by a takeout order. Somewhere a delivery driver is wondering why their app still can’t find a block of flats, when a hobby drone managed to find one particular window in a maximum-security prison at 3 a.m.
The fix being proposed is netting, which is cheap, boring and annoyingly likely to work. That is usually how you know a security fix is a good one.
This piece is satire. The consultant and her firm are invented. The facts in “What actually happened” come from CBC News and TVA Nouvelles, linked below.