Public Safety Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you—

[Michel Bastarache]

[Inaudible—Editor] the line there.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Harris.

Mr. Van Popta, please, for five minutes.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Justice Bastarache, I have a couple of questions around maternity leave and the rules around that. I was quite shocked that a big organization like the RCMP would have such an unprofessional HR department.

Now, is part of the problem that it was a civilian HR department? Would it have been better if it had been embedded in the RCMP? What are your thoughts on that?

[Michel Bastarache]

What I was told is that a lot of the people who work there are not professionally trained in that area. That is one problem.

The other problem is that they seem to be subjected to a lot of pressure from different people in management and there are a lot of decisions that are being taken under pressure, and they may not be in the best interests of the force or of the person subjected to that pressure.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

If I understood the comments in your report correctly, some women were staying at work too late when they were pregnant and were being put in harm's way, and perhaps they were coming back to work too early, all because of concerns about job security. I just wonder if those were directions that were coming to the HR department from above. It would seem to me that the HR department would be there to be a filter to stand up for the rights of women.

[Michel Bastarache]

Yes. That's what it should be. Some women think that they can go to the HR department and explain their position and get good recommendations or be heard before any decision is taken. Many others say, no, it's not real, because the HR department is there to service the administration, the guys in charge of the province or the district, and they're just there to fill in the forms and make it happen.

What is true today is something that I don't know, but I do know for a fact that there was a problem at a certain point. There might be a problem now, even if it's a lesser problem, but the solution is of course to have that service be independent and very professional, and there's no reason that can't be put in place right away.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Mr. Chair, do I have a minute or two left?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You have two minutes.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

I have a question about the possibility for affirmative action within the police force. One the one hand, you say that women, people of the LGBTQ community and racialized people should be encouraged to join the RCMP at the recruitment level, but at the promotional level, you say that any decisions about promotion should be blind. I can understand that the intention, then, would be to help women to advance, but the opposite might also be true if it closes the door on possible helpful affirmative action programs.

[Michel Bastarache]

Well, I'm not terribly in favour of these kinds of programs. What I think you have to have is equal opportunity. If the recruitment is okay and you have a sufficient number of women there and you're doing a good development plan for them, you don't need affirmative action. They will perform as well as the men, and they will get the promotions if they're better. I'm not afraid that it wouldn't happen.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you for your confidence in women.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Van Popta.

Madam Damoff, go ahead for five minutes, please.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

We seemed to have turned a lot to things around training and recruitment, but your report dealt with 53 recommendations; there were a whole lot of things in it. When Commissioner Lucki appeared last week at committee, I was asking her about your report. She said:

I'm not speaking about an internal review. I'm speaking about actions internally to change the culture, to change the governance, to change to stewardship and to change how we deal with these things internally.

A few years ago when the former Commissioner Paulson appeared at committee, my colleague Nathaniel Erskine-Smith asked him about the 37 measures in the report that you referenced, that 2012 report, and he responded that all 37 had been done. I guess my question to you is, do you think the RCMP has the ability to make these changes internally, or do we need some kind of independent external oversight, and some kind of reporting on the steps that have been taken to ensure that they're done? This isn't an easy fix, but this is something that's been going on for a long time. Can it be done just within the RCMP, or do we need some kind of external provisions put in place?

[Michel Bastarache]

If the government has confidence in the commissioner, which seems to be the case, well then they should support her and they should sit down with her and ask for her plan and see if she has sufficient financing to make it work and support her if she has to make some structural changes, and things like that. It won't happen if she's alone with her project. She has to build confidence in her with the people around her and she has to have a number of men and women who are there to put in place all of these changes that she advocates being made. Things can be done if you have the right people and you have the means. The problem in the past was basically that they just had ideas. They had promises about what it should be, but they certainly didn't seem to have a plan to implement much of it, or if they did, it was a failure, because years later we still have women standing up and saying “we're still being discriminated against”.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Commissioner Paulson told us he had a plan, and it obviously wasn't working. Having just been through the study that we have done on systemic racism, we know there was a lack of accountability within the RCMP. With that there is the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission and then the RCMP Interim Management Advisory Board. Most police services have put in place some kind of oversight with what's going on. It sounds as though you're saying that the commissioner can do this with the support of the government. Is that what you're saying?

[Michel Bastarache]

I'm saying that the only possibility for her to have success with her plan is to have that kind of support. If the government decides that it's going to depend on her to do it, it has to step in there and support her. If it wants to change things and put in a supervisory committee that has actual powers, it will be a very different job for her. It has to make up its mind and act accordingly.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

I have only about 45 seconds left. You mentioned having a future review of the RCMP as a policing organization, and claimants also spoke about it being time to replace the RCMP's mandate with something more restrictive. I wonder if you could speak about—you did a little bit—contract policing and what the RCMP should be involved in when it comes to federal policing.

[Michel Bastarache]

Federal policing, as I see it, is a specialized job. You need people with more education and more training; who don't move around and change from one function to another; who develop their expertise in one area and build on that; who have leadership; and who have people who can come in and support them, or replace them when they retire. I think that's very different from general policing.

If they want to do general policing, it seems to me they shouldn't have the same people, with the same training, trying to do the effective federal policing and the municipal and provincial policing. There are some people who like that and who want to do that kind of policing. Well, okay: Hire them, train them for it, and let them do it. But don't move them around and put them in other functions where they're looking at cybercrime and things like that.

That's what I meant. A few women recommended that you break the RCMP and create three different police forces with these functions, but you don't really have to do that if you're going to specialize people and create different mandates within the RCMP.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Madam Damoff.

Colleagues, we have a little more than 10 minutes left. I propose to ask a question myself and then go to a two-minute lightning round starting with Ms. Stubbs; going to the Liberals, if they could indicate to the clerk who they would like to have; then Madam Michaud; and then Mr. Harris.

Justice Bastarache, you are a scholar of the law, with a well-established reputation for serious scholarship. Policing is essentially a social contract between the citizen and the representative of the law. It becomes a little disturbing when you hear the phrase, “there's the law, there's justice, but then there's the way we see it”.

The RCMP is sitting on literally hundreds of Criminal Code offences within their ranks, but that are not prosecuted a Criminal Code offences. Have you given any thought to how this actually breaks, in a larger sense, the social contract between Canadian citizenry writ large and the police?

[Michel Bastarache]

It concerns me tremendously, because I think it's not consistent with their role and their function. They should be administering the law, implementing the law, not trying to invent a parallel set of rules that suits them. Not prosecuting real, serious criminal offences destroys not only that; it destroys the moral obligation.

To me, a good policeman has got to have a moral compass. He's got to know something about fundamental values. I think that should be put in their heads at Depot and nurtured after that. But I was told that the contrary happens. People arrive there with the moral compass they got from home or from their schooling. Then they're told, well, no, don't take that too seriously; we've got our own way of dealing with crime here; we have our own definition of justice.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Both you and I are officers of the court. We're sworn to uphold the rule of law. Yet here we have the chief law enforcement agency in the country routinely abusing the rule of law. It's rather hard for people who want to adhere to the rule of law, or for us to encourage others to adhere to the rule of law, to tolerate such blatant abuse of the rule of law.

[Michel Bastarache]

No, absolutely. I think we don't have the police we deserve if that's the way they think. It's not only what they're doing, but it's the way they think and the way they approach things that has been [Inaudible--Editor]. As I said, what bothers me is that I know these things have happened; I know these things have been said, and they've been repeated to me by hundreds of women.

I don't know exactly how it's changed or whether today these things don't happen anymore. The difficulty I have is that when I interviewed and met the women, some of them had only been in the force a few years and they were still there, and some of them had been retired for 15 or 20 years. You get messages, but they're not situated in time where you have a continuum and know exactly where you stand today. But that's what the commissioner should be able to do.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Finally, you have within your body of evidence, which is not public, the names of those who are serial abusers, if you will. In our study we've heard of badge abuse, where officers point to their badge and say they're the law here, too bad for you, and they're going to do what they want to do. Have you made any correlation between the people you know exist and have evidence of the abuse and their external conduct with the larger citizenry?

[Michel Bastarache]

In the case of the big abusers, I was often told by the victims in the police that they also abuse the women they arrest or abuse the people in the homes they search, and things like this. But as you say, these are other instances where they don't obey the law, because they are the law. That, of course, is a problem. It's almost modelled on some TV show where the police are to be seen as representing the law, period.