Evidence of meeting #61 for Public Accounts in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was rcmp.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
D/Commr Daniel Dubeau
Our policy is that we respect the Canadian Human Rights Act. We will hire people with disabilities, and we do hire people with disabilities. We have serving police officers right now who would identify themselves as having disabilities, so we have both, even in the serving ranks.
Conservative
Phil McColeman Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON
Can you give me an idea of the proportion of people within the ranks who have disabilities?
D/Commr Daniel Dubeau
I have it in here, bear with me, sorry. I don't want to lead you astray.
In our ranks now, 1.9% of our serving police officers who would self-identify as having disabilities.
Conservative
Phil McColeman Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON
Okay. Thank you very much. It's 1.9%.
Now, with the Auditor General's findings and your acceptance of the recommendations and the fact there's an action plan in place, I think there's still a tone today, Commissioner—I say respectfully to you—that essentially you're agreeing, but in some ways disagreeing. Am I correct in sensing that?
Commr Bob Paulson
No.
I think you're correct in sensing the tone, and it's not anything other than the fact that the organization, as the Auditor General identified, was one of the first departments to organize itself and develop a mental health strategy and an action plan and deploy them. Apart from its being in 2014, we had two pieces, two tranches, of that strategy audited, and very critical results.
I think all I was trying to do was to put a context around it to say that it's not as if we're not working towards our employees' mental health and providing very innovative and, I think, successful strategies for supporting these members. But it's in the policing context, and that's a very difficult context. It's also in a labour context that is changing for the RCMP, so it's a very difficult time.
I take no issue at all with the fact that we got some tremendous advice and recommendations out of this, and we're going to act on those and implement them, and we'll be accountable for that. But it came at a time when other reports were coming out, the broken-wall report by the CRCC on workplace harassment, and the other reports, and it's perhaps a little defensiveness on my part.
Conservative
Commr Bob Paulson
We have a mental health strategy and we have a series of initiatives that we are funding from within our own appropriations, and we're doing it, not as well as we could do obviously, but we're doing it. I think we need a little recognition for that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Commissioner. We'll come back.
We'll now go to Mr. Christopherson, please, for seven minutes.
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thanks, Chair.
Thank you for being here today.
I feel the need, just because of the subject matter, to begin with my own respect for, and my own involvement in, policing—not at the federal level but the provincial level. As a former solicitor general of Ontario, I know a little bit more about policing than most civilians, and am close enough to it to have the greatest respect for policing and to understand the challenges. But I've got to tell you, Commissioner, I am woefully disappointed in this approach.
I listened to your last remarks, and you feel like the RCMP's feelings have been hurt, that you're not getting enough credit for the things you do right.
Let me finish, sir, and I'll give you the floor, sir, when I am done.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Thank you.
I'm expressing my own opinion, and I welcome your response to it, but I take this to be a very defensive document. I'm very disappointed in your approach, that it wasn't that this is really important, that you failed to do what you should have done, and that you're going to make the necessary changes.
You can say that you accepted the recommendations, but that's easy to say. I'm going to tell you, too, with regard to this business of challenging whether or not the documents are fair and whether or not our Auditor General is fair is key to the work we do. I hope we spend a little time at the end talking about it further, because at some point, I'm ready to bring in an outside body. The RCMP is an important international organization. If they are accusing our Auditor General of being unfair, I want that pursued.
If the Auditor General's being unfair, we'll deal with that, but if he's not, then I'm not going to accept department heads and agencies coming in here and questioning the professionalism involved. You either accept it, or condemn it and prove it. At the very least, I would hope that you put your issues with it in writing and send it to us, because we will take it seriously. If this document is not fair, we need to know that, because it's a key thing we're working with.
We're going to go on the assumption that what's here is correct. Again, I'll get to my questions, Chair, it's just that we've been around and around with the RCMP on these things. First of all, it's so hard to get them to accept when they've made a mistake or when things aren't perfect. Then we finally get to that point, and they're forced to do something. We just had a report from the CRCC the other day on another failed implementation. Again, they did all the right things, made all the right announcements, but it's the follow-up. It didn't happen. That's what we're about here.
My very first question is regarding page 5 of the report, where the Auditor General says:
Overall, we found that the RCMP did not adequately meet its members' mental health needs. The RCMP was one of the first federal government organizations to introduce a mental health strategy. However, it did not make the strategy's implementation a priority or commit the human and financial resources needed for the strategy's full and effective implementation.
I'd like to know your response to that overall message, Commissioner, and I would welcome a chance for you to take as much latitude as you want to respond to anything I said and my tone. Go for it.
Conservative
Commr Bob Paulson
I agree with the Auditor General's findings, as you've described them. I agree that we failed to deliver adequate mental health support to our members. I also would like to stress that we are engaged, and were engaged, in an active undertaking to do so. We were doing so at the time the audit took place, and even more so now with the assistance of the Auditor General's recommendations.
To characterize this response to the Auditor General's work as anything other than helpful is incorrect. We took issue with some of the methodology, as I think we are entitled to do. If you'd like us to send it to you—because we sent it to the Auditor General—we'll send it to you, and you can make your own findings. We didn't do it because we're defensive. If there's anything I would like to stress to you, sir, is that we are not defensive. I am open to principled, evidence-based criticisms and suggestions on how to make this organization better.
Conservative
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
That's great, thanks. Let's jump into it then.
I'm with the Auditor General here. You did a great thing in announcing it. It's so important to the government for this to work, but it doesn't look as if it was treated that way. That's the problem.
On page nine, paragraph 4.38, the Auditor General says, “We found that the RCMP did not put a business plan in place or allocate resources to support its new Mental Health Strategy”.
Your response, sir, is, “The purpose of the action plan is to identify the components of the strategy that will receive particular attention...to identify the specific...to address.... As the annual action plan does not include resource requirements the RCMP will transform it into a business plan designed specifically to guide implementation efforts for the final two years of the strategy”.
Why wasn't money put up front rather than your coming in here the last couple of years and saying you're doing all of that and you're going to make it all fine? The criticism here is that you didn't do that from the get-go. Why not?
Conservative
Commr Bob Paulson
The way I understand the criticism is that there wasn't a business case, in the classic sense of what a business case is. In other words—and again I defer to the Auditor General—there was no aligning of specific funding allocations, in a document, to specific initiatives. That's what I understood. But we can sit here for the next 15 minutes, and I'll tell you how much money we've put towards all of these initiatives, because we have done that.
NDP
Commr Bob Paulson
I didn't have a formal business plan, but we had a strategy and an action plan, which didn't constitute a business plan—