Public Safety Committee on July 25th, 2022

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

How long had that been going on, Commissioner? The announcement had been made, and it seems to be a suggestion that the decision to do this was as a result of the—

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

For months.

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

Months?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

Months and years, probably since I got in the chair.

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

I think Minister Goodale was actually involved in some of that.

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

Yes.

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

I only have four seconds left, so I will turn it back to the Chair.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you, Ms. Damoff.

I will turn it over to Ms. Michaud.

Ms. Michaud, you have six minutes in this round. Take it away.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Lucki and Mr. Brennan, thank you for being with us today. We greatly appreciate it.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a sensitive topic for many, and I think that those who want answers to their questions deserve to have them, or at least get some clarification about what happened. Allegations of political interference are always a serious matter. This means that we are trying to truly understand what happened, based on different accounts.

There is a lot of talk about the notes that Mr. Campbell took. I will refer to those as well, because there are some things in there that raise important questions. And I would like to hear your comments on that, Ms. Lucki.

Ms. Lucki, in a statement you issued, you assured us that you would never take any action or make any decisions that would compromise an investigation.

Do you consider publicly disclosing the type of weapons used before the investigation is complete, such as in this case, to be the kind of thing that can compromise an investigation?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

I'm a bit confused because there was no inquiry at the point when we were discussing that in a media release. Is that what you are referring to?

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

What I mean is that it seems as though political pressure was applied to reveal the weapons that were used. What we're hearing from the Nova Scotia RCMP is that public disclosure could compromise the investigation.

Do you agree that this could have or would have compromised the investigation?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

That's very difficult to say because there was no inquiry called at the time that we were talking about the release of the types of weapons that were seized. It wasn't until months later that this was released, and it wasn't released by ourselves.

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

At this stage, hypothetically speaking, do you consider that revealing this type of information could compromise an investigation?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

It's hard to be hypothetical because it depends on what they're looking at in the inquiry. If they're not looking at weapons, then it might not compromise anything.

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

The minister just told us that he never made you promise to reveal the weapons used.

You just said the same thing, that you were not pressured by the minister or the Prime Minister. However, you did mention that the government had exerted pressure to obtain certain information.

Can you tell us what that information was? What kind of conversations did you have with the government that lead you to believe you were pressured?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

First of all, there was pressure for every single bit of information related to this incident: the number of deceased, where the deceased were located, who the deceased were, the background of the deceased, the perpetrator, the background of the perpetrator, the perpetrator's common-law spouse, the fire hall incident, the types of vehicles that the perpetrator had, the replica uniforms. It went on and on, and it was relentless, especially from the media. I and the minister and the Prime Minister were going in front of the media in the first three days quite often. To have as much up-to-date information as we could was important.

It was about me providing situational awareness, and most of it was done on my volition to them in regard to this being the normal practice of giving situational awareness to events such as.... Well, there was no event such as this.

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

So you're saying that the government simply sought information, just like the rest of the public, and that pressure was not necessarily applied to obtain information in a privileged way, before the public knew about it, for example.

Correct?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

No, there is never.... Much of the information that I provide is a heads-up. I like to give government officials a heads-up before things are released in the media, and normally they will be released shortly thereafter.

I am only the messenger in all of this. I am not the keeper of any information. I always have to go back to either my deputy of contract policing or my deputy of federal policing, or I need to go to the commanding officer of the division and say, “I have a question. Can you tell me something about it?” Then I see if they give me the reply, and then I'm repeating their reply. It's much the same with any of the media that I do.

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

You say you are simply the messenger in this type of situation. However, as the commissioner of the RCMP, I assume you still give instructions to your employees.

I will quote from Mr. Campbell's notes to provide some context.

On the subject of that notable meeting, he said:

The commissioner was obviously upset. She did not raise her voice but her choice of words was indicative of her overall dissatisfaction with our work. The Commissioner accused us (me) of disrespecting her by not following her instructions.

He also said:

The commissioner said she told Comms to tell us at H Division to include specific info about the firearms used by [the killer].

You had issued instructions, which presumably were not followed. You were angry or upset about it. You linked it to the conversation you had with the government regarding the promise, or not, to give information about the type of weapons used.

Do you confirm what is in the notes?

Perhaps you were upset about something else, like what you said earlier, or other things discussed at that meeting?

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

I'm sorry, Madame Michaud, but we're out of time. But I want to give the commissioner 15 seconds to answer that question.

Go ahead, Commissioner.

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

I want to stress that I was not upset. First of all, upset and anger are not part of my DNA. I'm a fairly calm police officer.

I always spoke in terms of how I felt. I felt disappointed and I felt frustrated with the flow of information over that past 10 days. Using the weapons as an example was but one example of the lack of flow of information back and forth between the ground and national headquarters.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. MacGregor, I now turn to you for your six minutes of questioning.

The floor is yours.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the commissioner and deputy commissioner for joining our committee today and helping walk us through the series of events from April 2020.

Commissioner, you stated that in your mind it wasn't a promise but a confirmation and that the information would be released at the press conference.

I know that there was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of pressure from the public. There was a lot of pressure from the federal government in trying to get this kind of information.

I guess for some people, when they see the Minister of Public Safety asking you, as commissioner of the RCMP, whether or not the information on the firearms would be released at a press conference, because of the very nature of the relationship that the minister has with the commissioner of the RCMP, some people might perceive that to be undue influence in the very posing of the question.

Do you see how that could be perceived by some members of the public?

[Commr Brenda Lucki]

Anything's possible. There were also a lot of questions about when the names of the deceased were going to be released and when the information about the fire hall incident was going to be released. They could not talk about anything until we spoke about it at the media events, so of course anything that we hadn't spoken about to date was of interest.

I really pride myself on giving accurate and timely information. To not give that information when I'm briefing the minister or, by extension, the Prime Minister, is not something I like to do. I like to be accurate and timely.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Commissioner, did you get a sense that when the question was posed to you, this was information the minister and his chief of staff did really want to see released to the public? In the asking of the question, could you infer that this was a result they actually wanted to see happen at the new conference given by the RCMP?