Evidence of meeting #8 for Public Safety and National Security in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was inuit.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Senator, Ontario
I left the RCMP as an assistant commissioner in 2005. Following my time as a member of the RCMP—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Sorry, we seem to be having more technical difficulties.
If you wish to restart, you're welcome to do so.
Senator, Ontario
Following my time as a member of the RCMP, I spent seven years as a police chief, two years in Durham Region and then five years here in Ottawa. From an education perspective, I have an undergraduate degree from Acadia University, a master's from Royal Roads and a doctorate from the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security at Charles Sturt University. All my education was completed while continuing to work full time in my policing roles.
Following my policing career, I was appointed to the Senate. I have continued to teach at various universities in Canada and internationally. As well, I do research, often into the issues that impact our criminal justice system and, of course, policing itself.
In relation to your work here, I wanted to speak to a few areas that I believe are important to this discussion. They include training and recruiting, education and of course the most recent argument for the defunding of the police. I will conclude my comments with my view on systemic racism in policing.
Although it is already dated, there is a 2014 Justice Goudge report, “Policing Canada in the 21st Century”, which I believe the committee may want to look at, as there are good avenues for discussion that you could consider.
On the recruitment and training perspective, I believe we need a national review in both of these areas. I would argue that policing today no longer follows standards that are set out nationally, but rather they are found within the mandate of the provinces and territories, and as a result are difficult to completely engage in.
We have, give or take, 180 police agencies in Canada with expenditures of around $15 billion. The disparity in training and recruiting is notable. I would argue that this is an area where the federal government could set a path forward in setting national policing standards for both officers and police agencies. I have met previously with first nations police chiefs, and they expressed a similar concern and stated that they would also support such a movement.
Other countries have been able to do this by setting up a college of policing model—not to be confused with the police college. As an example, the U.K. has done this. They established the College of Policing, which is a professional body for everyone who works in policing in England and Wales. The purpose of the college is "to provide those working in policing with the skills and knowledge necessary to prevent crime, protect the public, and secure public trust.”
Their functions include three primary areas: knowledge, such as developing research and infrastructure for improving evidence of what works; education supporting the development of individuals in policing, including setting educational requirements; and lastly, standards that draw on the best available evidence of what works to set standards in policing for forces and individuals.
I would make the argument that a similar model should be developed in Canada. You may see some jurisdictional arguments with maybe some jurisdictions arguing they'd like to opt out. I would suggest that it would be at their peril.
We can see across this country that without this model, we are scattered from both a recruiting standards and training standards perspective. In Ontario, it's 13 weeks to complete your basic training; in the RCMP it is six months, and some other jurisdictions are even longer. The stark reality is that the challenges police agencies face have changed dramatically, and I'm not sure that we've kept up.
Education of police officers is essential to the development of the officer and the organization overall. Research conducted in the United Kingdom and Australia speaks to the importance of not only continuous training of police officers but of continuous education as well.
I do not argue, as some may, that police officers must have a university degree to begin their career, but I am of the firm belief that education needs to be a foundation of their career and provided throughout their career. Some countries require that a police officer complete an undergraduate degree to be considered fully accredited. Some require education to be taken in its entirety prior to entering the police service, and others require that it continue throughout their career. Regardless, I believe that a focus on education will be important as we look to move forward.
The last area is defunding of police. This most recent argument is one that, in a different way, has been argued by police officers and police leaders for decades, except they have been arguing that the demands placed on them would often be better served by others.
In 2008, when the federal government advised they would provide funds for a 2,500-officer program, many—including myself and senior union leaders—argued that the funds would be better advised to be provided for mental health and addictions services. The continued growth of expectations placed on police has seen a concurrent growth in policing budgets at some level.
As an example, the deinstitutionalization of mental health facilities in the late 1980s and into the 1990s saw a growth in the involvement of police officers in mental health calls for service. The provinces believed that the process of moving patients or clients into communities was better for the lives of the individuals, and it was. However, there were also substantial savings that were often not reinvested in the community programming to provide support.
The impact is that all too often the police have become the de facto response unit to mental health calls for service, often without the resources needed to fully engage. Instead, they use the tools they have.
Some police agencies have identified that a full 20% of the calls for service are mental health calls, often not criminal in nature. Some would argue that more mental health workers, working hand in glove with the police responding to these calls, would be a better service. It's been done, and it is better. However, even this response is a downstream service.
The stark reality is that wait times to see much-needed mental health resources in the community are shockingly insufficient, and that investment in this upstream section of the health system is where it could make the greatest impact, and we would reduce the demand on police—most importantly, by having the right resource engaged at the right time for the right reason.
The same could be argued for the lack of drug addiction resources, where we have six- to eight-month wait-lists in many provinces for residential or even non-residential drug treatment. Many of the people on these wait-lists find themselves involved in the criminal justice system, many times while waiting for treatment.
Again, funding for residential and non-residential drug treatment would remove many of the addicted from the work of our law enforcement and criminal justice systems and place it where it should be, which is with health officials.
Liberal
Senator, Ontario
I will.
My last point is in relation specifically to systemic racism. I would argue that in all government organizations, there has been, and most often still is, systemic racism. This includes the police. An example I've used is representation. In fact, a report from a parliamentary committee called “Equality Now!”, worked on by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, identified that law enforcement must be a representative institution. Both identified this when the discussion of racial bias was at the forefront. As some would say, we need time.
The “Equality Now!” report and the consensus report from CACP were completed in 1983 and 1984. The question is this: How much time is needed?
Thank you.
Liberal
Benson Cowan Chief Executive Officer, Legal Services Board of Nunavut
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
I'm the chief executive officer of the Legal Services Board of Nunavut, which is the territorial legal aid provider.
Nunavut's legal aid context is a little different. There are very few private lawyers in Nunavut. The Legal Services Board is by far the largest employer of lawyers in Nunavut, perhaps even in the Arctic. Certainly that's the case with respect to criminal law. Almost 100% of criminal cases pass through our staff lawyers and our contract lawyers at some point, and we probably carry more than 90% of them to conclusion.
I reside in Rankin Inlet, which is a community of about 2,500 people in the Kivalliq region in central Nunavut. I've been there since January 2019. I grew up in a series of remote first nations communities in northern Manitoba and northern Ontario. While I have a lot of experience working and living with indigenous communities, I want to be really clear that my perspective is not that of an indigenous person. I was listening in on the previous witnesses. With respect to Nunavut, President Obed and President Kotierk's evidence and perspective is, I'd submit, the lens through which these issues need to be dealt with. I can offer some technical advice, but I want to be really clear that I don't experience the systemic racism in the same way that the Inuit members of my community do.
When we talk about systemic racism, for me it's a fairly simple equation: Is there a racialized group that is experiencing a disproportionate burden or barrier? Is that ongoing and persistent? Are remedial efforts ineffective or nonexistent? I would submit that the evidence that this is the case with respect to policing in Nunavut is overwhelming.
We can start in terms of evidence. We can look at the data from StatsCan that suggest that Nunavummiut, people who reside in Nunavut outside of Iqaluit—in most communities, that's over 90%—are four times as likely to be charged with a criminal offence than other Canadians. Once charged, they're more likely to be prosecuted. Once prosecuted, they're more likely to be convicted. Once convicted, they're more likely to be sentenced to jail. They are sentenced to longer sentences, and they serve more of those sentences. I've summarized some of that data in the Legal Services Board 2018-19 annual report, if you're interested, and there are sources for it as well.
Also, when we look at the evidence of systemic racism with respect to policing in Nunavut, we can also look at the repeated instances that we hear throughout the justice system of interactions between the police and members of the community that are fraught with violence and that are otherwise problematic. I summarized almost 30 of those last June and forwarded them to the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP. I met with the commissioner and asked her to consider doing a systemic review. However, those instances that I reported on are still a fraction of what we hear in the community on a regular and ongoing basis. They're present in the courts. There's a consistent process of charges being withdrawn or judicial commentary on these instances. There is a wealth of evidence that there are, on the ground, problematic interactions of a nature that, frankly, just don't exist to the same extent in other jurisdictions in the country.
Then the other piece of evidence is sort of what's missing: any systematic, public or transparent approach to the conduct in criminal investigations and proceedings in relation to this conduct. There have been a few conduct investigations and one set of criminal charges that have been laid in Nunavut against police over the past 20 years.
Generally speaking, I estimate that partly because there is very little in the way of a systematic approach to conduct investigations on the part of the RCMP senior management and partly because it's not a transparent model, we just don't see evidence of these matters being addressed.
Very quickly, I'd say that obviously it's really clear that a new model is required for policing in Nunavut. Regardless of the content of that model, I'd say that there are three elements that must be addressed for any change to be possible.
One is increased resources to front-line policing. In this age of “defund the police”, I know that's not a very popular point of view, but the conditions that rank-and-file officers are forced to deal with are unbelievably arduous and stressful, and no change is possible without more resources. Also, frankly, you're never going to attract qualified Inuit applicants to go and work in those conditions either. Without increased funding for front-line policing, no change is possible.
Second, you need increased resources for restorative justice and social services in the communities. I cannot emphasize enough the lack of alternative dispute resolution or counselling or therapeutic services in Nunavut communities. There is basically a dearth of any of the range of services that are provided in other communities in this country. As a result, all these problems are handed to the police, and they respond with the tools they have, which more often than not are tools of coercion, arrest and charging.
The third thing that has to change is there needs to be meaningful, robust, independent civilian oversight. That means independent civilian investigations on criminal and use-of-force and death allegations, independent complaint-based conduct investigations, and independent oversight at the national level of RCMP policy and strategic direction. I think it's clear that the senior management of the RCMP are unable to drive change and respond to this. The current situation, in which they're not accountable to civilian oversight in a structured way, is part of the problem.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Mr. Cowan.
With that, we're going to go to Mr. Wright as our final seven-minute witness, please.
Robert S. Wright Social Worker and Sociologist, As an Individual
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
By way of introduction, let me just say that I'm Robert Wright. I'm a social worker and a sociologist whose 30-year career in the field has brought me into the fields of child welfare, correctional mental health, education and a range of other fields. I have worked extensively with victims and perpetrators of violence of all forms. I want to thank the committee for having me as a witness. I hope I can bring an informed perspective to the committee.
I hail from Nova Scotia, the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq peoples. People of African descent were not so much settlers as they were settled on this territory, and we have been here for over 400 years and have still here in Nova Scotia some of the oldest and largest Black communities of Canada.
When it comes to thinking about systemic racism in policing, we have the distinction in Nova Scotia of having been the province of the inquiry into the wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall junior. We're also the province of the Supreme Court decision in the case known as R.D.S., and as the pioneer of the impact of race in cultural assessments, I am proud that Nova Scotia is the first jurisdiction in Canada to use these specialized pre-sentence reports to support the courts' arriving at more informed sentences in an effort to address in part the dramatic overrepresentation of people of African descent under correctional supervision in Canada.
I was a participant in a dialogue between members of African-Canadian communities and the Canadian Human Rights Commission several years ago. The Office of the Correctional Investigator had representatives at that meeting, and it was their presence at those meetings that prompted the OCI to make a focal point of their 2013 report a focus on diversity in corrections and the experiences of Black inmates under correctional supervision.
I do not believe I need to tell the members of this committee or Canadians viewing this proceeding that racism exists in the criminal justice system and that policing, as the doorway into that system, is in a critical location to address issues of systemic racism, overrepresentation and differential treatment of people of African descent within those systems.
In response to your questions later, no doubt I will reference recommendations that have been articulated in other reports and studies, but I want to use my time now to emphasize two or three points that I think are critical as we consider how to address the systemic racism that exists in policing and in other layers of the criminal justice system.
The first point is that any reform, any study, any solution must be led by people of African descent. In response to the challenges that we have had here recently in Nova Scotia related to police street checks—and I won't speak in great detail about the machinations that accompanied focus on the dramatic overrepresentation of Black bodies in those statistics—I will say that members of the African-Nova Scotian communities here have called for a provincial African-Nova Scotian policing strategy. It is our belief that no internal studies, no provincially led studies that do not focus and prioritize the leadership and the engagement of people of African descent will be sufficient to address the problem.
The second thing that I would point out is that in the effort to solve the problems that exist in policing, to defund the police by shifting resources to community agencies, mental health services and the like that might be better able to serve our populations, we must remember that those organizations to which we would shift those funds themselves all have records of systemic racism against people of African descent, and it would likely occur that simply the location of our systemic oppression and exclusion would be shifted, rather than that the systemic racism problem would be solved.
Finally, I would simply say that in our effort to address systemic racism in policing, it will be important that all of those organizations that have oversight over policing, from the human rights commissions to police review boards to police commissions and the like, would bring systemic racism to an end in all of those locations. It will be essential in this work.
Thank you for the time, and I look forward to engaging in the questions.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Mr. Wright, Mr. Cowan and Senator White.
With that, we'll start our six-minute round with Mr. Berthold.
Mr. Berthold, you have six minutes.
Conservative
Luc Berthold Conservative Mégantic—L'Érable, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much for your testimony, Senator White, Mr. Wright and Mr. Cowan. Thank you also for joining us today.
My first questions are for Senator White.
Senator, as I read your curriculum vitae, I noticed that you have spent a lot of time in policing in various communities.
I'm going to start with a simple question. What is the difference between being a police officer in the north and being a police officer in a big city?
Senator, Ontario
The expectations that are placed on you in northern communities are to be not just a police officer but also to be a member of the recreation committee and to coach different teams, because there's an expectation placed by the community that when you come into those communities. I'll look at Kimmirut as an example, where I coached soccer and volleyball, neither of which I played.
The expectations certainly in those communities are much different. There's also—I think for me, anyway, having served there as long as I did, for 19 years—that the value I felt by being able to help out in the community was so much more readily available, whereas in a large city there are often service calls, call after call. Often, during the first few years of policing, you're not very engaged in community activities because you're busy doing the response type of call.
The community expectations in Nunavut, as an example, where I served my last northern time, are much different. They expect much more than just a police officer. They expect many things from you, and if you're not willing to give that, then you probably will not be very successful as a police officer in some of those communities.
Conservative
Luc Berthold Conservative Mégantic—L'Érable, QC
Thank you, Senator.
During the first hour, I asked the representatives of the Inuit communities a question about the length of stay of police officers, who often begin their careers in the north. Unfortunately, there are no statistics on that.
Do you believe that, in two years, a police officer has enough time to become sufficiently involved in those communities to be able to connect with residents?
Senator, Ontario
I think that question was for me. I didn't hear if you said it was, but if it was, certainly I do think two years is a short period of time. I think really good police officers will make themselves engaged quickly and ramp it up. The communities often identify that two years is not long enough. That is understandable, but, to be fair, I served four years in Whitehorse and three and a half in Yellowknife, but the other communities I served in were typically two-year periods.
It was often certainly my loss to be leaving as quickly as I did, but the organization, particularly in Nunavut, and probably more so than in the NWT and in the Yukon, tries to move people as often as they can, not always for the betterment of the community, and certainly communities would be better served with officers serving longer periods of time. However, it's a real challenge to find officers to take postings in Nunavut today. You may not have an increased number of officers wanting to stay longer than two years in the community.
Conservative
Luc Berthold Conservative Mégantic—L'Érable, QC
Senator White, according to a brief by Professor Leuprecht of the Royal Military College of Canada, “In Nunavut, the RCMP is so short-staffed that members from other divisions regularly do 6-week stints in the territory to fill vacancies.”
What do you think the RCMP Commissioner should do in the coming months to address this problem, which seems very urgent to me?
Senator, Ontario
It's not a new problem, though. When I was there in 2001 when I first returned to Nunavut, we were bringing in officers from the south. When I was the police chief in Ottawa, I was seconding police officers to Nunavut to do short stints to help out as well.
I would argue that the solution to increased time in communities in the north, as well as having the number of officers at a sustainable level, is going to be developing a recruiting strategy in Nunavut for Nunavut.
We ran an Inuit recruiting pilot project in 2001-2003. We hired over a dozen Inuit police officers, of which two or three are currently posted on Parliament Hill. There are lots of challenges with that, because you have a number of barriers to hiring that you have to work on, and none of them are inexpensive.
I truly believe the solution or partial solution for Nunavut is going to be a recruiting strategy that looks at today, tomorrow and in 10 years' time the number of Inuit you can bring in to the organization. Whether that continues to be the RCMP or even if they went to a self-policing model in the future, you're still going to have the same challenge. I still think that recruiting Inuit is going to be part of that solution.
Conservative
Luc Berthold Conservative Mégantic—L'Érable, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Given the interpretation, it will be even less than that because I have to ask a question in French.
Mr. White, if I understand correctly, these stays should certainly be longer in order to build a stronger connection with the community.
Thank you.
Senator, Ontario
I would agree that longer would be better, but it's more difficult to supply the resources if you extend the number of years. You are not going to have as many officers willing to take those postings to the north.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Mr. Berthold.
Mr. Berthold, you've asked that question twice now, and I think it's very important. I'm going to suggest to the analysts that they make contact with you or your office and refine that question, and maybe research could be provided to the committee, because you're asking an important question.
With that, Mr. Sikand, you have six minutes, please.
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to welcome our panellists.
Mr. Cowan and Mr. Wright, Statistics Canada recently announced it will begin to collect data on the race of victims of crime and people accused of crime. However, it appears it will not include data related to the use of force in the incident or on mental health checks unless they involve a criminal offence. What do you think of this development?
I'll begin with Mr. Cowan, please.
Chief Executive Officer, Legal Services Board of Nunavut
In a Nunavut context, the collection of that data is less relevant, because the vast majority of people are Inuit. As for the rest of the country, it's not within my brief to comment more generally. In a Nunavut context, we can assume almost exactly that the people interacting with the police or mental health, especially out of Iqaluit—
Liberal
Gagan Sikand Liberal Mississauga—Streetsville, ON
Do you have any suggestions as to how that data should be collected or used?