Public Accounts Committee on May 16th, 2019

[D/Commr Brian Brennan]

Yes, thank you.

As the commissioner mentioned, we have three varieties of long weapons that we use. Your question around the number—5,400—of carbines out there.... That, again, is based on the risk assessment of the different environments. Clearly, this is a weapon that the membership is comfortable using. It's more adaptable to a lot of our policing situations, and our investment in our equipment leans us towards that particular weapon as opposed to, maybe, the long rifle. We need to evaluate it.

We're looking at a long-term strategy in terms of exactly what weapons need to be provided to our membership and to what extent those weapons will be used. It's going to take us some time to get through that in terms of environmental...and availability, but our goal is to ensure that our members' safety is paramount and that we provide them with the proper pieces of equipment and training to do that job. It's a long-term evaluation of that piece.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

I hope that can help with the increasing gun violence in our urban cities, especially where I come from in Toronto. In my riding, we've had an increase in robberies.

Was a risk analysis conducted by the RCMP to determine if the smaller detachments, such as those with under five officers, might require carbines and body armour?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

Yes, absolutely. Again, some of it was based on the geography. I'll use Manitoba as an example. There are 23 detachments that are all very far north, and seven of them are fly-in only. It takes a little longer for them to have backup in a big incident because we don't drive to those detachments. We have to ensure that they have the equipment. We make sure that they are deployed carbines and that members in those areas are trained.

Where the challenge is, again, in those areas.... For example, the 23 detachments in northern Manitoba are all limited duration, so every two, three and four years, people are rotated in and out. We have to make sure that they get trained down south before they go up north. We don't want to take them out of the communities to get trained because they're only up there for as short as two years.

Absolutely, the risk assessment was based on that and, obviously, the crime statistics as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Ms. Yip.

Mr. Christopherson and then Mr. Kelly.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, all, for your presence today. It's good to see you again.

There are a number of pieces to this and my colleagues have raised a number of the issues I was going to raise. That's all to the good. I'm going to start drilling down a bit into some of the weeds here.

We have problems with government-wide procurement, all the way from flying—as everybody follows the saga of military jets—down to hammers. Paragraph 5.62 says:

We found that the RCMP did not have a plan to manage the acquisition of carbines, causing bottlenecks in distribution and backlogs in firearm recertification and maintenance. We also found that in the RCMP’s effort to expedite the rollout of the carbines, the RCMP and Public Services and Procurement Canada did not follow procurement rules.

This matters.

When I look over to page 13, paragraph 5.72 adds further insult to injury. Not only did the RCMP not follow the procedures properly, and that's including Public Services and Procurement Canada, but once again Treasury Board let us down on its challenge function, which is its duty to make sure that these things are double-checked. There was a falling down there.

Specifically, under procurement, here's what troubled me the most:

5.71: Under procurement rules, the RCMP should have submitted these orders—

This would be for, I believe, the carbines:

—to Public Services and Procurement Canada as a single request. However, this request would have exceeded Public Services and Procurement Canada’s own purchase authority and therefore would have required approval from the Treasury Board. Instead, the RCMP split the order into three requests, which Public Services and Procurement Canada ordered under its own authority.

What's the deal, Commissioner? This looks, for all intents and purposes, like an absolute, deliberate attempt to get around requirements at Treasury Board, notwithstanding that it didn't do its job either. What's going on here, Commissioner?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

With the carbine, it's a single source. It wouldn't have changed. Once we determined which carbine we were purchasing, it wouldn't change anything, because we could only buy it from one source. We could only afford so many at a time, so we could only purchase as much as we could afford.

I do have with me the director general in charge of that and he could perhaps explain more specifically.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Yes, I do want to drill down a bit on this, because it's problematic.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

For those who may be watching, departments bring their personnel from different areas of expertise and although there are a few who sit at the table, there are others in the audience. We're pleased to have Mr. Watters with us this morning.

Mr. Watters, we'll give you some time on this question.

[Dennis Watters, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Thank you for the question and thank you, Commissioner, for allowing me to respond.

What we had in place at the time was a standing offer to procure the carbines. Our view was that there was no requirement for us to bundle the requirement, the request for process, as the needs were determined, in order to expedite the contracting process.

When you have a standing offer, you can do call-ups against those standing offers and, in our view, it would not have resulted in any savings. To reiterate what the commissioner said, we purchased those under the munitions supply program which has provided Public Services and Procurement with the means to contract large quantities of small arms.

There are four companies that are designated as sources as part of the munitions supply program, one being Colt Canada, where we did procure the carbines. We do not feel it would have resulted in any savings. We had standing offers in place and we followed the process. Bundling of those would not have resulted in any savings.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

So this wasn't a get around?

[Dennis Watters]

No.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay, Auditor General, are you comfortable with the answers you've heard?

[Sylvain Ricard]

Well, I'll maybe put the nuance in there, and I'll leave Mr. Swales to add any specifics he feels are needed.

We're pleased to see that, in the response to the action plan, the RCMP will address the planning aspect of the business, because for us, that is the cause of it. They get requests from all over the place all together. There's a mechanism and there are rules in place that, when you are above a certain amount, there's a process to follow, and that's the message we're trying to convey here, that Treasury Board has a role to play when it's above a certain amount.

When you let that role be played out, it contributes through management. It has other mechanisms, and the commissioner was referencing the fact that they were open to all sorts of challenges in the question process, and that's one of those.

It brings a process by which you get questions. It helps to highlight ways of improving and ways of looking at projects. That's the message we're conveying here.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Do we have anyone here from Treasury Board, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

No.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Maybe, in our deliberations, we could think about sending a letter to Treasury Board to ask them where they were on their challenge function because, again, that's the safety net for us in most of these policy procedures. If it's failing us at the departmental level, it gets caught at Treasury Board in their challenge function, and so it seems that this may have slipped.

Commissioner, who, not an individual, but—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very quickly.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Okay, thanks.

What department is responsible for the planning? I'm really surprised at the lack of planning. That's normally not RCMP failure. They're usually pretty good at doing lots of planning. It's between there and the ground where things get difficult, as in most cases. Who was responsible for this? Where did your organization fail? What have you done about beefing up the very planning that Monsieur Ricard has just spoken of?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.

Commissioner.

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

Yes, we obviously have multiple planning sections depending on what we're dealing with, but when we go into equipment, there's a robust plan as to what's next in line for equipment. Then we do a lot of testing of that equipment. We have to do a lot of consultation with our contract partners because we're in a contract, and we have to make sure that they're made aware of any new purchases because there's money involved that is not all federally funded. In some cases, in a city environment, 90% of that is paid by the municipality. In a provincial environment, it's 70%. We have to make sure that we can do a proper rollout within the funding envelopes that we have.

That's where risk assessments all come into play, but in this case, we determined very quickly where these carbines needed to be deployed. Obviously, in the Moncton situation, there were members with carbines, but that situation was a pretty dynamic situation, and I'm not sure.... I know the MacNeil report has made those recommendations, and we are absolutely following all the recommendations.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Commissioner.

We'll now move to Mr. Kelly followed by Mr. Dhaliwal.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Commissioner, I'm going to read the sentence from the concluding paragraph of the report:

We concluded that the RCMP had not provided all of its officers with access to hard body armour, carbines, and recertification training to respond to an active shooter.

My question for you is, why?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

We could not deploy 100% to every single member. With 20,000 members, we could not deploy 20,000 hard body armour nor the carbines at 100% of the need because of the amount that it took. We had to do it in segments.

Maybe I could get Mr. Watters to explain that process because, given the numbers that we were dealing with, we had to do the risk assessment and ensure that, based on our risk assessment, we'd roll it out in that fashion. We just didn't have enough equipment to do it at the same time.

[Pat Kelly, Conservative, Calgary Rocky Ridge, AB]

Commissioner, I didn't see anything in the report that said you were under-resourced or that you did not have enough hard body armour or enough carbines. You received equipment that you had asked for, and yet members who needed access to this equipment did not have it. That is not a matter of resourcing or having resources. That's management.

Why did the people who needed it not have it?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

An active shooter situation can happen anywhere. To say that we knew what was going to happen in Moncton.... We didn't know that was going to happen in Moncton. We tried to ensure that when we did the deployment we could get as much of that type of equipment out to as many people as possible.

To say that at the point of the tragedy in Moncton, everybody who needed access to a carbine had it, no, they didn't. We didn't have the means to do that.