Yes. We have been concerned about the street check issue since 2003, with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission's report that acknowledged that police had been street checking a prominent Black individual here in our community. The human rights commission said street checks need to be looked at.
Since 2003, police and RCMP were keeping race-based data and did nothing with that data for 14 years. We had the Wortley report. We had a legal opinion on the legality of street checks, and not three hours after the legal opinion declared that street checks were illegal, we had a provincial ministerial directive that suggested how similar checks could be done under some kind of looking into suspicious activity.
We believe the provincial ministerial directive is still directing police to engage in illegal activity in the way they police citizens, and of course, we believe Black folks will be dramatically overrepresented in those stats. Therefore, I think some federal directive simply suggesting that these practices cannot break the law is necessary.