Public Safety Committee on March 5th, 2009

[Susan Pollak]

I'm not aware of any other body, an independent, arm's-length body such as ours, that would have the span of review that is envisaged in O'Connor's report, no.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

In most of the other countries of which you spoke it would be more of a parliamentary committee?

[Susan Pollak]

That's correct.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

And would they have similar powers to those we've been talking about here today?

[Susan Pollak]

Actually, the parliamentary committees, as far as I can see, do not have the degree of access that we enjoy at SIRC. I think it's because we are independent and not within Parliament or answerable to a minister that we were given those extraordinary powers of access. So there's a bit of a saw-off between whether you want an organization that has full and complete access but doesn't have any kind of political function, or whether you give it to the political arm and you restrict the access to some degree.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

So is it fair to say that we may be ahead of other countries?

[Susan Pollak]

It's just a different model.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Holland, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, I have a correction on the no-fly list. Certainly it's not always the case, but there have been instances, including with Maher Arar, where Canadian intelligence has led to a Canadian citizen's being put on a no-fly list in another country. That's one clarification.

Second, I think we're understanding why O'Connor's recommendations haven't been implemented, despite the fact that the government said they would. The parliamentary secretary just said that he doesn't really understand the need for these recommendations to be implemented.

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Oxford, ON]

Mr. Chair, that's not what I said.

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

That's what I understood.

Here's my concern. We have a budget right now for Mr. Kennedy's office that's at $5.2 million. It's actually smaller because it's been eaten away with inflation. That's against a budget for the RCMP of over $4.25 billion. At the same time, because we don't have this legislative mandate, we have to spend tens of millions of dollars on inquiries in order to get into some of these matters.

If I could get to the crux of it, there are dark corners that right now, Mr. Kennedy, you are not able to look into. In other words, if there is a question you have with respect to something that's going on, a complaint you get, if the RCMP says they don't want to provide you with that information, they're unable to, because of the current legislative restrictions. Is that correct?

Second, there are also situations in which if something happens with CBSA, there's no way of reviewing that at all. I fail to see, regarding the examples that Mrs. Pollak gave, that we can investigate everything that's going on with CSIS. How is that the case if you have something that involves more than one intelligence agency? Justice O'Connor has been fairly consistent on the need to try to integrate these and find a way to follow something beyond just one agency. These things are multi-agency.

I'm hearing a lot of questions from the government side about being the world's best and whether we are better than other countries. I'm not hearing a lot of questions about why we haven't implemented O'Connor's recommendations, what deficiencies there are there, and what the dangers are of not implementing these recommendations, so I want to come back to that. People will go away from this saying everything's just hunky-dory, and we really don't need to implement Justice O'Connor's recommendations. There are all kinds of things that can't be done, and worse yet, enormous amounts of money will be wasted because you don't have the legislative authority to investigate something, and we will have to have tens of millions of dollars spent on an inquiry.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

You have time for a response.

[Paul E. Kennedy]

Are there black holes? I've indicated that clearly there are. They only show up when you have an issue and you have to look and you can't get access. That's a black hole. The CBSA one is clearly an example. I said the integration isn't just federal--it's federal-provincial-municipal, so it's a very big issue. To talk to the other one, we in fact do. I can make a chair-initiated complaint, which I sometimes do. When I look at that, I look beyond merely the conduct of the officer. You look at the policy, procedures, and so on. A police officer is trained to do something. You take the law, and the officer is trained to adhere to the law. So you have policies, procedures, and training. The officer, in good faith, may be doing exactly what he was told to do. The problem lies not with his conduct. It lies with the policy and training, and that's why you have to go back and do it.

If you look at tasers, as an example--and you can choose any subject matter you want--I had a case dealing with an aboriginal woman who was tasered five times, including at the station. She was handcuffed. It was unjustified. Did I get a reaction from the RCMP to change its policy? No. The minister asked me to look at their taser files, because I had filed my complaint on Dziekanski. They had abysmal files regarding their use of tasers across the force. I looked at that and used statistical analysis dealing with...and going well beyond the complaint to look at what they were doing, how their policy would change. The policies changed, without factual justification, over a period of years, to having use that was inappropriate. We made strong recommendations that caused the RCMP to go back and change their policies and procedures and training.

I could have 1,000 people tasered and nothing would happen, but because I looked at that statistical base and could see what happened and point to it, I could offer them constructive advice: here's the size of the problem; here's what's happening; here's what I think you should do.

If you just look at complaints, you're going to get the squeaky wheel, squeaky wheel, squeaky wheel. So yes, in fact you have to do it. These things aren't adversarial or different.

As far as the models go, you could go across the world. There are very aggressive models out there in terms of policing and all their activities. They're very aggressive. Anyone who's gone to Northern Ireland would have a sense of what's happening there.

So yes, you need to have more than just a complaint. Otherwise, the poor officer is sitting there without any benefit. Our philosophy is to maintain and restore the public's confidence in the RCMP. You do that by finding out where the problem is and helping them identify the problem. You help the member so that the member is not hung out to dry and so that you don't have the same problems over and over.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Richards, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Thank you, and thanks to all the witnesses for being here today.

Let me first address some comments in the opening remarks of Mr. Kennedy. I take great exception to his comments about funding and the comparison made between the budgets of the CPC and the RCMP. I find that to be a completely unreasonable statement to make. No offence intended here, but it is unreasonable to compare the work of bureaucrats or paper pushers to that of RCMP officers who risk their lives to keep us all safe and secure.

Comparing the whole budget of the RCMP to the whole budget of the CPC indicates to me that there's an assertion there that all of the activities of the RCMP require review and oversight. When you look at the RCMP there's the cost of vehicles, infrastructure, buildings in each community where they serve, training, and equipment. Of course, there's the increasing load of paperwork we put on our officers that requires more support staff, computers in their cars, etc. To make that comparison is entirely unreasonable, given that a lot of their expenses do not require oversight or review by the commission.

I wanted to make that comment, make that clear, and put that on the record, because I took great exception to those comments.

My question is for Ms. Pollack. In your opening statement you mentioned that many times SIRC's recommendations to CSIS are not binding. Yet my understanding is that CSIS does tend to accept or endorse the majority of your committee's recommendations. I'm just trying to get a better feel for where CSIS and you tend to agree and which issues you tend to diverge on. Maybe you can give me an example of each of those. Maybe you can give me a significant recommendation that CSIS adopted, some of the reasons why they chose to agree, and an example of where you felt a significant recommendation was not accepted and why.

[Susan Pollak]

It's going to be hard for me to cast back. There is one example that comes to mind of a recommendation we made repeatedly over a number of years through our investigations of complaints. I'll let Ms. Roussel tell you what the disposition of that recommendation was and how we finally came to see some change.

[Sylvie Roussel]

I think the example is the issue of destruction of notes that came before the Supreme Court in January. The committee has on several occasions recommended that CSIS not destroy its notes, that it keep its notes for the purpose of being able to get back to more than what's out there or what CSIS has. The committee made that recommendation on several occasions. Finally, the whole issue came before the Supreme Court of Canada last January. The court said that CSIS should be keeping notes in accordance with section 12, which is on retaining intelligence information.

That's one of the examples where we made recommendations that were not followed, and it finally came to resolution this year.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Make it a brief question, please.

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

I want to get a sense of some of the recommendations where you did agree.

[Susan Pollak]

Because we're a review body, we're not there on the ground day to day directing the operations of the service. That is the responsibility of the director and his staff. We try to keep our recommendations at a general level so the service can determine what makes the most sense in implementing those recommendations, should they accept to do so, which they do in the majority of cases.

Quite regularly we see that they have partially implemented a recommendation concerning, say, human source policy or targeting policy, but they haven't gone the entire distance we may have suggested in our recommendation.

I'm really not able to be more specific than that. I hope it gives you a sense of how things are. We try not to be too directive in the recommendations, but rather identify what we think the issue is through analysis. Then we say we think CSIS needs to take a look at the pertaining policy and make some adjustments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

We will now move over to Mr. Kania. We're starting our rounds again from the top.

Mr. Kania, please.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Kennedy, we just heard from Mr. Richards, and we've now heard a formal position from the Conservative government that they believe civilian oversight of the RCMP is conducted by a bunch of bureaucrats and paper-pushers. So I'd like you to please pick up on that and tell us exactly what you think about the comment of the Conservative government that civilian oversight is conducted by a bunch of bureaucrats and paper-pushers.

[Paul E. Kennedy]

We have our annual report that goes to every member of Parliament, and other work we do we give, certainly, to the critics of each of the parties and committee members. We try to do that and inform people through the years.

All of the work we do, whether it's public statements or things like that...we have a very interactive website. If you look at it, one of my pet phrases with my staff--and it drives them crazy--is “sweat equity”. If you have less, you have to be much more creative.

When I was appointed in October 2005 we had a five-year backlog of files. We eliminated that. I was quite angry when the first file I signed was 10 years old and it was a cell death case. I said we were going to get rid of that, so we eliminated entirely our backlog. We have a service standard of 120 days. Right now it is a service standard that 80% of our cases are dealt with within 120 days. Currently it's about 88% that we're doing. We've knocked off processes all through the place in terms of efficiency.

I think I'd go on record to say that these paper-pushers have probably the most effective review body in the country, and I'd invite an auditor to come in to see what we've done. We have a very highly skilled workforce.

The value of what you do is value added. I have over 35 years in this business of public safety, and I've dealt with the RCMP from day one, from the level of constable to commissioner. Certainly, being a former prosecutor and a senior assistant deputy minister, I deal very closely with them.

I think we've done great work. To do value added, I haven't said this commission is inefficient; I said the commission has to have enhanced powers to do some true value-added work, and I think that's what we've been doing. We did our bit through sweat equity in terms of efficiencies. The organization, actually, in its history cannibalized itself because of financial shortfalls. There used to be an office in Edmonton as well as one in B.C. The office in Edmonton was cannibalized.

The RCMP are the provincial police in eight provinces, and yet the complaint is that we have an oversight body located in Ottawa and we have an office in B.C. We're trying to do virtual outreach and we're doing good work in that regard. I think the government could be quite proud of the efficiencies we've displayed with our money.

My annual report this year will itemize the kinds of things we've done. I think we're a value added...with the money the ministry gave us. I would not have been able to do the taser report but for the fact that Minister Day was able to get that money for us. If you look at my last annual report, you'll notice I take pains to compliment the minister on having addressed that issue.

You'll look at it and you'll find the key issues that we could not address--the police investigating the police, police interaction with people with mental health disorders--and you'll say, “Why are you looking at police interaction with someone with mental disorders?“ When a police officer has to attend at the house of an individual, and the officer has three months' service, and the person he's trying to help by taking him to a mental health facility ends up getting shot and killed, there's a problem there. It's not the bad officer. We're trying to say, how can we help them identify this and how can we identify systemic problems that they may need assistance with?

In the Kingsclear case in New Brunswick--systemic rape of young individuals over decades--we found problems and we made constructive solutions. That's what we try to do.

So I hope that when one looks at the value of it, there's value for money.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Would you agree with me that the supervision of the RCMP by the Conservative-described bureaucrats and paper-pushers is necessary in order to keep the credibility and efficiency of the RCMP?