Thank you very much.
As you rightly note, there is an important consideration here of ensuring that you have a high-quality, credible investigation of the police. That requires a certain level of skill and experience by the individuals conducting that investigation. You want to balance that, on the other hand, by ensuring that public confidence is strengthened in knowing that it's not necessarily the police investigating the police when at all possible. This scheme tries to find the right balance, one that recognizes the important principles at play and some of the operational realities.
The three-step hierarchy is very much intended to do that. It's not that you pick one of the three; you start with the first option, and if that doesn't work—and only if that doesn't work—you go to the second. The first option in B.C., Alberta, and Nova Scotia is that the province would refer that matter for investigation to the existing civilian police investigation body. It would be unusual if there was some reason they couldn't do that. That would be the process you would use. You ensure public confidence in the process by knowing there's an entirely separate civilian investigative body with the right skills and experience to fully conduct that investigation.
If you are in Saskatchewan or another contract jurisdiction and you don't have one of these civilian investigative bodies available to you, you would go to the next-best option, which is to have a completely separate police service conduct the review. That ensures there's impartiality, that there is no possibility that members of the same police service who know each other—perhaps socially—would be investigating one another. You rule out any partiality.
If that is not possible, for whatever reason—and it's usually operational, such as in the far north or somewhere where you can't get a police service there quickly enough—you would have the RCMP conduct the investigation. In that case, there would be an obligation on the RCMP to demonstrate that they have gone through that three-step process and they haven't been able to refer to a civilian body or have another police service do it. Moreover, they would have to explain what measures they are taking to ensure the impartiality of the investigation they are conducting on themselves. For example, there would have to be information provided on the nature of the RCMP investigators. Do they have any connections whatsoever to the individuals being investigated?
The CPC did an important report about two years ago that reviewed RCMP investigations and looked at this question of impartiality. They established a number of benchmarks to look at in terms of ensuring the impartiality of the investigation. That provides a useful framework to help the RCMP and all police services to ensure that in the approach they take when they are placed in a situation of having to investigate themselves, they take as many steps as possible to ensure impartiality and a lack of bias.
On top of all that, for those last two options of another police service or the RCMP being involved, an observer can be appointed. This is an independent observer appointed by, for example, the province or territory, who would have the necessary skill set to understand how investigations are undertaken and who would be able to provide an impartial assessment of the quality, credibility, and impartiality of that investigation. That provides an important tool to make adjustments, if needed, during the course of the investigation. Let's say the Regina Police Service is conducting the investigation of an RCMP member; the observer would have the capacity to contact the chief of police in Regina and say, “This is what I have observed. I have problems with this. It needs to be fixed.”
If, for whatever reason, it's not fixed, the report at the end of the process goes to the provincial attorney general. That is taken into account in going forward with this matter, so there are a number of steps taken to buttress the process of police investigating police.