Public Safety Committee on Dec. 7th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Yes.

[Patrick Roy]

There are no subsidies at all. We fund the program from our budgets. The police officers are paid from the police service budget, and the social worker's salary is paid by health services.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you for that.

You have five members on that team. If you don't mind my asking, are the social workers on that team paid through the police service or through health services?

[Patrick Roy]

Social workers are paid by health services, i.e. hospitals. In our region, this is the Centre intégré universitaire de santé et de services sociaux, or CIUSSS de l'Estrie. Confidentiality is a basic principle. So there are built-in barriers. Social workers cannot reveal everything to the police. They must therefore remain employees of the health services to maintain their access to information. That is why they are paid by health services. Some police organizations pay their social workers, but we do not.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you for that.

As you explained in your opening remarks, sir, mental health crises and police interventions are increasing exponentially across the country. They've been increasing for decades. The policing community seems to be the one responsible for responding to this.

You explained how you do this, and I'm curious to know more. If I understand you correctly, if you have a person in crisis, the specialized members of this unit respond, with responding units. Once the coast is clear and the risk is mitigated, the patrol officers leave and the specialized unit stays there. Is that correct?

[Patrick Roy]

That's right.

I have been working in the mental health sector for several years. The fundamental problem will always be within the purview of social workers, but dangerousness will always fall under policing. When we arrive on the scene and the threat is removed, the generalist police officers leave the scene and one of the five specialist police officers stays with a trained social worker who will provide the necessary care or assistance to the person.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We'll have to leave it there, Mr. Motz.

Thank you, Inspector Roy.

Madame Lambropoulos, you have six minutes, please.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to thank the witnesses for being with us today.

My first question will be directed to representatives of the Sherbrooke Police Department.

A man was killed in an altercation with Montreal police. The man was Sheffield Matthews, a 41-year-old man described by those who knew him as a father who had spent most of his money on his children. He worked in a seniors' residence and had experienced poverty. He was considered a caring, considerate, and hard-working person.

He was someone whom many people from a similar background looked up to as a beacon of hope. He was going through a crisis at the time he was found by police on that morning in NDG. He was shot because he was found wielding a knife, and I guess the policemen who were there felt threatened.

I'd like to know if you can tell us what the protocol would be in such a situation. What should it have been in order for this innocent man, or someone who overall is a good person, to not be shot by people who are there to protect society and to protect citizens? Rather than his being killed at the hands of police, what do you think should have happened in that situation? How can we prevent situations like this from happening again?

[Patrick Roy]

This is a very good question.

I can't comment on this particular event because I don't know all the details. The only thing I can tell you is that in Quebec, police officers are not trained to kill someone in order to save their life. Obviously, when a person is suicidal, it is not the police officer's mandate to kill them to save their life.

On the other hand, it is not the mandate of the police officer to be killed by a person who, unfortunately, has mental health problems. I'm not talking about this particular event because I don't have the details. However, if a police officer arrives at the scene of a call, as happened in the case you mentioned, and a person opens the door with a baseball bat and runs at him, he will still have to defend himself with the tools at his disposal depending on the threat. This is the notion of dangerousness. Do we want this? Do we wish for this? No police officer wants to have to do such a thing.

Unfortunately, we are sometimes called upon to react to an aggression. Are there other tools that could be used? Could these calls be directed to a social worker instead of a police officer? Again, the notion of dangerousness is managed by the police, while the crisis and assistance is managed by health services. If health care workers were sent directly to the scene, they would be exposed to accidents.

Police officers are sometimes faced with situations where they have no choice but to intervene to protect themselves or others from a potential assault by a sick person. In Quebec, fundamentally, a police officer is not trained to kill someone in an attempt to save their life.

[Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Liberal, Saint-Laurent, QC]

Thank you.

My next question is for you, Mr. Babineau. Thank you for being with us today.

I'm quite new to the committee and I haven't heard much testimony, but I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you the following question.

Last week, Mr. Bastarache was here to tell us about the systemic misogyny that exists within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or RCMP.

What do you think makes racism systemic in the RCMP? Can you give us some examples and tell us why you think it is systemic racism?

[Alain Babineau]

I can answer in French or English.

First of all, the RCMP has been plagued by systemic racism throughout history. We can go back to the “March West”. We can go back to residential schools, Black activism in Nova Scotia in the 1960s, 911 national security and, lately, racial profiling of Blacks and indigenous people right across Canada, so there's nothing new there.

You can go back to 1941, when you had two Black Nova Scotians who applied to join the RCMP. They were perceived as problems for the RCMP. It was offered to them to write the entrance exam, in the hope that they would fail. Coincidentally, they failed the exam. It wasn't until the 1970s that the RCMP got their first Black member within the organization. There has been a systemic pattern throughout history that cannot be denied.

I'll give you a quick example. For two and a half years when I worked in the RCMP, I assisted a member of the RCMP who was denied promotion on three separate occasions within the same unit that he had been part of for 15 years. The last time he was denied promotion, the person who was promoted was a white individual, and the Black officer had trained that person. Everybody in the unit couldn't believe that this was happening.

What happened is that we filed grievances and we filed for disclosures. Lo and behold, we learned that the decision-maker in that particular case had been disciplined for using racial slurs against Black people in a previous post. This person was put in a decision-making position for a promotional board, and a Black person was a candidate.

Was that person racist? I don't know, but a reasonable person would think that this decision-maker should not have been on that promotional board as a decision-maker. That's part of the systemic discrimination policy that we need to eradicate—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We're going to have to leave the answer there.

Thank you, Ms. Lambropoulos.

Ms. Michaud, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for being here.

I'm going to address Mr. Babineau first.

Mr. Babineau, I know that you are a law enforcement analyst. I'm going to continue in the same vein as my colleague Mr. Motz, who spoke earlier about the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP.

If I understand correctly, the process is not that independent after all. When a member of the public wants to make a complaint, they send their request to the commission, but the commission immediately refers it to the RCMP. That's where a review is done. If the complainant is not satisfied with the RCMP's response, or if the commission is not satisfied with the response, a second review is undertaken. It can take 10 or 15 months—and sometimes longer—before the complainant receives a response. In your view, should the process be more independent?

Given what was described in the Bastarache report, should there also be an independent body for RCMP officers and employees who have suffered damage in the RCMP?

[Alain Babineau]

Yes, absolutely.

As a complaints manager, I handled complaints that were referred to us by the external committee. These complaints were investigated internally.

In all honesty, I have found that police officers and RCMP members are often harsher on their own colleagues than an outside agency would be. At the same time, there is this perception of independence that needs to be maintained.

I would add that this puts police officers who have to investigate a colleague in a precarious position, because eventually they may find themselves working with that colleague, and even being under his command.

There should be a totally independent body, much like the Police Ethics Commissioner in Quebec or Ontario, who is totally independent. The same should apply to the RCMP.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you.

In your opening remarks, you said that there should be more examination of the policies, practices and standards that are in place. Several studies have come to the same conclusion: there is systemic racism in Canadian policing.

This is our last meeting on the subject. Several solutions were proposed to us. I would like to know your opinion on the studies you have done and what you have observed.

What do you propose at this stage? What should be the federal government's action plan to address systemic racism?

[Alain Babineau]

As I said, there are two parts to this.

The first component deals with racial profiling in all its forms. Certainly there should be a federal anti-racial profiling law that all police forces in the country would be subject to, especially when they want to obtain funding for mental health programs or to fight organized crime, for example.

Police services in Quebec should have an internal policy to counter racial profiling and provide training to police officers, as well as be open to diversity in their workforce. This should be essential if police services want to obtain federal funding to conduct their operations. Otherwise, there will be no real change on this front.

The second area is diversity in policing. Unfortunately, Quebec is the worst province in the country when it comes to diversity; it's shameful. Again, there is a lack of accountability in this regard and it is difficult to recruit members from communities that feel oppressed by police services. So there is a lot of marketing work to be done to get people from these communities to come and work in police services that are traditionally white.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Indeed, a great deal of work must be done to attract people from all walks of life.

Do you think that the most racialized communities or cultural communities, such as indigenous people, are reluctant to join the police because they see police officers as enemies or people whom they don't trust?

[Alain Babineau]

Unfortunately, that's true and that's the issue.

First, the communities aren't reflected within the police departments. I'm thinking specifically of Quebec. Second, they feel oppressed by the police.

A Black person would be a bit of a masochist if they wanted to work, for example, in the Quebec City police department. This department has never hired a single Black person in over 100 years.

There's so much work to do in terms of diversifying police departments. It's a major challenge.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ms. Michaud, your time is up.

Mr. Harris, you have six minutes, please.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Babineau, you have spent quite a long career in the RCMP. As a Black man, can you tell us about your experience? I know you related one incident of an apparently race-based refusal of a promotion.

What about your own experience? What was that like being in the force? You were presumably outnumbered, but what was your experience? Could you give us an idea of that?

[Alain Babineau]

This is an interesting question.

As a Black person, in all spheres of life and in all organizations, you're subject to microaggression on a daily basis. Those are the things you learn to live with, but it stays with you. It could be anything from jokes, to innuendos, to challenging you about recent events to try to find out what your personal opinion would be.

I'll give you a quick example of one time when I was in the drug section in Toronto. In drug units, you play hard and you work hard. You have to be tough-skinned to be a part of those units. I was standing in the middle of a meeting one time where we were planning a drug project in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto, and this member had come from up north. He had spent a number of years in an isolated post. It was his first time in Toronto dealing with different...Black communities, for instance. He was standing there and he said that those niggers are just like those Indians up north.

That is the kind of overall opinion...he was drawing an inference from his experience in dealing with criminality where he was up north. Now he was having to conduct drug enforcement and he was looking at those people as having the same kind of mentality as those he had been exposed to in his previous post.

That was as I was standing right there. It was like I was invisible. Again, it becomes part of the way people express themselves. They stereotype everybody who comes from a particular culture as being potentially involved with criminality. That's the problem.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Former justice Bastarache—

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mr. Harris, I just want to reflect on the use of certain language, even in the context of this conversation. There have been some real difficulties that our overall society has had with some use of some words. I just want, in future as we go through our testimony, to avoid the use of certain language.

With that, you can continue, Mr. Harris.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

I was about to say that former justice Bastarache testified before this committee last week about his report in dealing with the Merlo-Davidson assessment of the class action lawsuit against women suffering from harassment—and worse, as women in the RCMP.

In his report he concluded that in the RCMP, there was a toxic culture of misogyny, homophobia and racism. Would you care to comment on that, based on your experience in the RCMP for 27 years, I believe?

[Alain Babineau]

It was 27 and a half years.

I don't think the RCMP is any worse nor better than most of the larger police services in this country when it comes to these kinds of issues.