Public Safety Committee on Oct. 25th, 2010

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

No, let me finish, Mr. Holland. You've gone on for some time.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

You're missing my point, and I only have about a minute left.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

So we have said that all contractors will submit their bills by December 1 of this year. At that point, all of those bills will be examined to ensure that the services claimed for have been provided...and that will be done. This will then be audited, and it will also be audited by the Auditor General.

If you submit that we should just pay what we think the service is—

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

No, let me be clear, because—

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

No, that's what you said.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

No, you're putting words in my mouth.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

You have said—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Would you both please go through the chair?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Let me put it to you this way, Minister, because you're misunderstanding this.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

No, let me finish.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Mr. Holland, I'll give you the time to come back on this.

Continue, Mr. Toews.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Okay, because you're misunderstanding this.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

You have indicated that we should be paying the bills before they arrive. I disagree.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

No, let me be clear, and maybe this will help. If I hire somebody to do a job, they tell me how much that job is going to be. Before I enter into a contract I know its cost. But you don't say, “Do the work and come back with whatever the reasonable costs are, and we'll fill in the blank cheque later on.”

So I'm saying to you that when you engaged all those different contracts you knew what the costs were supposed to be, and you entered into some assurance that the costs would be lower to a certain value, with a contingency. You could pay those later if you liked, but why on earth could you not submit today--or four months ago when the excuse of security disappeared--the estimate of those costs? Surely you've built in some kind of contingency. Surely you got some kind of assurance of what those costs would be and could provide them.

The notion that you just don't know because you have to wait for those bills to come in to find out what the dollar figure is--to be frank, if that's how you do business, no wonder you have the biggest deficit in Canadian history.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Holland.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

On what you're proposing, let's use your example of a contract. The contractor comes to you and says, “I'm going to do a driveway for you in a house that you're building, and that bill will be $30,000”, let's assume, more or less. You are saying to just pay the $30,000 before you even see the driveway, whether it's done or not. That's not the way we do business. The service has to be provided before we can confirm whether or not we're actually going to pay the money.

So you and I see our business responsibilities differently. I would not consent to the payment prior to the officials being satisfied that the service has actually been provided, but you would.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

But you'd certainly know what the contract cost was.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Minister Toews.

Madame Mourani.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Minister, ladies and gentlemen, good day.

I would like to start by addressing an issue other than costs, that of human rights. I would like to give you a quick picture of the situation, Minister. Over 1,000 people, approximately, were arrested during protests related to the G20 Summit. According to estimates 800 of them were released without charges. The majority of those that were charged were cleared of their charges. On October 14, 2010, the Civil Liberties Union issued a report indicating that approximately 6 people were convicted and 40 to 100 people are still waiting for a court decision.

I should also say that I have met with people. Some sent me their statements by email. The following facts were reported to me. The police used insulting, racist, heinous, homophobic and sexist comments. They referred to protesters as terrorists, criminals come to destroy the city and “French shits.” There are also allegations according to which the following was said to homosexuals: “You're fucking disgusting.”

Journalists were singled out. Some were incarcerated, others beaten. There have been reports of strip-searching, intimidation, humiliation, hunger, fear, cold, of people being treated like rats and of women having their pills taken away from them. People with diabetes were not given access to their drugs and men were vaccinated without their consent, not knowing what was being injected into them. There was the issue of sanitary napkins. Women who had their pills taken away from them were all getting their period. Sanitary napkins and toilet paper were being rationed, people were sleeping in the cold, crammed into cages. There were between 15 and 30 people there.

There were reports of people who had to wait close to 24 hours before having the right to counsel and access to a phone. These people experienced fear and were traumatized. Many young people between the ages of 20 and 25, even one minor, ended up in one of your famous cages. There are reports of naked strip-searches, sometimes four times on the same person. These searches were done before an open doorway. Men could therefore see everything. Apparently, there are also chemical toilets in the famous cells were people were relieving themselves in front of everyone. Sexist comments were made against women, which I found absolutely unacceptable.

I will close by mentioning Ms. Amy Miller, a journalist I had a discussion with this morning. She told me that she was off on her bike heading towards the interim detention centre, where there was going to be a small protest calling for all of these people to be freed. She was arrested on the way because she was filming a group of young people being stopped by the police. She had her media badge on, identified herself and she was told that when they were “done with her”, she would no longer even want to work as a journalist. She was told that they would have a lot of “fun with her” and that she would never want to come to Toronto again. She was told “We are going to have fun with you”. And that they knew what Montreal women were like. One of the women she met in the famous cage she was in for several hours told her that while she was strip-searched, a finger had been introduced into her vagina.

That said, Minister, given that you are responsible, as Minister for Public Safety, I would like to know whether you are going to apologize to all of these people who experienced such abuses of their fundamental human rights, here, on Canadian territory, in Toronto.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I have a comment before you begin, Mr. Minister,

One of the things we have to be very cautious about, whether it's in a quote or just being used, is that we use the right kind of language. So if there's a quote that includes a vulgarity that shouldn't be used in the House, it shouldn't be used here. I'll just remind you of that for the future.

Go ahead, Mr. Minister.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you very much. I certainly listened with interest to the comments.

There are a number of agencies responsible for ensuring that police conduct themselves appropriately. If there are any individual Canadians, or indeed any foreign attendees, who were at the G-8 and G-20 summits and who have specific issues and wish to complain about police conduct, I would encourage them to bring those complaints to the appropriate authorities. However, I do not get involved in the policing issues. There are appropriate civilian and other agencies that review police conduct. And, of course, most of all there are the courts that have the oversight of this.

So without accepting the validity of any of the comments that were made, but not discounting them either, I would suggest that the member advise these individuals who have made the complaints to take those complaints to the appropriate authorities where they can be dealt with in a non-political fashion and in accordance with the law.

[Maria Mourani, Bloc, Ahuntsic, QC]

If I understand correctly, Minister, you do not want to apologize for the abuses committed by law enforcement under your command. You are saying that complaints can be brought. People are already doing that, have no fear.

Are you going to be undertaking a public investigation to shed light on what happened in this affair, this total waste of one billion dollars? I am not discussing the money invested into this circus, but rather the human rights violations committed there.

I would also like to inform you of the fact that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is seriously going to look into this matter and they will certainly have some questions to ask you, to which you will have to respond.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

Mr. Minister, if you want to respond, please go ahead.

[Vic Toews, Conservative, Provencher, MB]

Thank you.

I would certainly encourage the people who made these allegations to bring them to the appropriate authorities. There are independent bodies as well as courts that make these types of determinations, and I would suggest that they are the appropriate venues for these types of accusations to be dealt with in an appropriate manner.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Minister.

We'll move to Mr. Davies.

Mr. Davies, you have seven minutes.