Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Minister, for joining us. I know your colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour called you Bill. I'm happy to do that in private and socially, but since you're here in your official capacity as minister of the crown, I will call you minister. We are looking to you as the person responsible to speak on behalf of the government and respond to the serious circumstances we're dealing with.
In response to your question from my colleague from the Bloc, you said that Mr. Justice Bastarache found that the RCMP were not as supportive as they needed to be towards women. I would perhaps call that the understatement of the year, but the year is very young.
The committee's response to Mr. Bastarache was quite different from that. In fact, he said about the RCMP that the workplace included systemic patterns of discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation and race, including toxic workplace cultures characterized by misogyny, homophobia, racism and interpersonal violence including sexual violence. He said that women and LGBTQ2S people were prevented from receiving promotions, training and work assignments on an equal basis with other applicants. They had retribution exacted for attempts to bring forward complaints.
That is not exactly the kind of characterization you gave it.
He went further, and I want you to address this particular point. He said that he was not confident that change could take place inside the institution itself—and I think the committee members were struck by the force of that comment that he had no confidence—and that there was no way forward without some form of sustained, independent and external pressure.
I want to suggest to you that this shouldn't be coming from members of Parliament and parliamentary committees. This ought to come from a structure of governance, which you mentioned in relation to the contract policing for the RCMP. What about the RCMP itself? What about an independent oversight board such as those that civilian police forces across the country are governed by?
Would you be supportive of that as a way of ensuring that there was sustained, ongoing and independent external pressure to seek the changes that are necessary?