moved:
Motion No. 1
That Bill C-42 be amended by deleting Clause 1.
Motion No. 2
That Bill C-42 be amended by deleting Clause 22.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to bill C-42 at report stage and to speak to the two amendments that we have just moved.
First, I will begin by paying tribute to the women and men of the RCMP who work everyday to help keep our communities safe. I acknowledge the essential service they provide, often in the face of great danger and ignoring many of the individual challenges which surround their work in order to do their duties.
In particular, I acknowledge the loss of two constables this year, Constables David Brolin and Derek Pineo, who lost their lives in accidents while on the job serving all Canadians. I also take this opportunity, while I am on my feet, to wish all the public safety officials, detective services and emergency services, who will be working when many of us are celebrating, a very happy but also a very safe holiday season.
Bill C-42 is before the House this session and we on this side supported it at second reading because we all must acknowledge that despite its proud history and its ongoing exemplary service, the RCMP faces some very serious challenges. What we are all hearing in our constituencies, and have all heard in testimony before the public safety committee, is that there are at least three major challenges.
Among these challenges facing the RCMP is, first, the loss of public confidence. For many years, the RCMP has been an icon in our society and the trust levels still remain very high, as they should. However, anytime our national police force begins to lose public confidence, we must all be concerned and we must address the causes of that loss of confidence. The causes centre around a number of unfortunate and high-profile incidents involving the RCMP, which have resulted in deaths or serious injuries to the public.
Some of this loss of confidence is to be expected whenever there are these serious incidents and, because the RCMP is charged with the use of force, many times these will inevitably be challenging situations. Some of that loss of confidence is a direct result of public concern about the structures to which we hold the RCMP accountable. In particular, members of the public are concerned about the police investigating themselves in these serious incidents. That loss of confidence in the accountability measures is not only a loss of confidence by the public, it is also a loss of confidence by serving RCMP members who have every bit if not more of an interest in independent investigations which will establish either their responsibility or non-responsibility in these incidents.
We also have serious evidence before us of a second challenge. That is a flaw in the culture of the RCMP. That flaw is that the RCMP has become a workplace with a culture that all too often has tolerated harassment in the workplace and specifically sexual harassment. When we have more than 200 women, who have served or who are serving in the RCMP, who sought to join a class action lawsuit alleging that they had faced sexual harassment on the job, then this is an important issue for the House of Commons to address. The magnitude of the problem cannot be denied.
Finally, it has become clear that there is a problem in the management of human resources and labour relations in the RCMP. This is a flaw that many have acknowledged is responsible for failures to deal with these other challenges in an effective manner. It cannot be denied that procedures are long, complicated, time consuming and fail to bring about changes needed to address problems both with individual behaviour and with more systemic problems. Therefore, again, it is a challenge which we must address in the bill before us.
The Conservatives presented Bill C-42 to the House just before the summer recess and suggested that it was the solution for addressing these challenges. On this side of the House, we responded that we felt the bill did attempt to address the challenges faced by the RCMP, but that it left lots of room for improvement at committee. Therefore, we supported Bill C-42 at the second reading stage in the hope that we could comprehensively address these major challenges. Now that the bill has been returned to the committee, after the Conservatives opposed and rejected every amendment to strengthen the bill, we have little choice but to oppose its moving forward at this time.
We have proposed two amendments at report stage that will allow us to discuss some of the amendments already rejected at the committee stage. The first of those deletes the short title which we believe, as is becoming a tradition here in the House, is one of those overly political titles applied to bills. In this case, it is overly political in our view because it is called the “enhancing the RCMP accountability act” when in fact Bill C-42, in its unamended form, would fail to address that accountability challenge. Therefore, we do not believe the bill would accomplish this goal. I will say a bit more on that in just moment, but that is why we have proposed deleting the title, which would lead the public to believe that this challenge had been met.
Second, we have proposed deleting clause 22 so the RCMP act would retain its original wording in what is section 33 of the actual act. What it does is state clearly that the power to deal with grievances remains exclusively with the commissioner. In fact, what has happened in Bill C-42 is that the government has chosen to enhance the powers of the commissioner at the expense of everyone else working in the RCMP, even in respect to the new review body that is being created. Therefore, further concentration of power in the hands of the commissioner and the Minister of Public Safety is the answer proposed in Bill C-42 when almost every independent witness we heard before the committee said that the problem was exactly the concentration of power in the hands of the commissioner and the minister.
When we asked what consultation had been done on the bill, the answer we received led me to believe that the minister, the RCMP commissioner and a senior RCMP leadership simply put their heads together and came up with a solution that gave them responsibility for resolving the problems. We could not find any of the witnesses who appeared before us who had been consulted about the changes included in the bill. We believe those witnesses provided some very good solutions and good ideas about how to address these challenges.
The approach adopted in the bill, as unamended, relies very much on the model of the Royal Irish Constabulary. It is a 19th century model, dating from 1822, which was designed as a paramilitary model to help police and the Irish population that saw the British as an occupying force. Is this really the model we need for a modern RCMP? It ignores the lesson of the other British model of municipal policing, which was also established in the 19th century for the metropolitan police of London, based at Scotland Yard.
The municipalities throughout our country have taken that model and developed it very effectively into a local community policing model, which has an independent board that keeps policing at arm's-length from a political minister and has very good accountability measures built into that model. Bill C-42, as unamended, sticks with the old paramilitary model instead of learning the many lessons we have learned at the municipal level in Canada about how to improve accountability and responsiveness to communities and how to create a more healthy workplace.
Witnesses at the public safety committee spoke out against these additional powers for the RCMP commissioner and the lack of independent oversight. Mr. Tom Stamatakis, president of the Canadian Police Association, said:
--extraordinary powers in this regard...go beyond what one might find in other police services across Canada.
For example, in Ontario, a police officer who is subject to a disciplinary process retains the right to appeal the decision to the independent Ontario Civilian Police Commission.
As well, we heard from Mr. Robert Creasser, from the Mounted Police Professional Association, who had similar kinds of remarks.
It became obvious to us in the NDP, after hearing the witnesses and experts, that the bill retained its deep flaws and would not meet those challenges referred to. It even fails to look at previous advice offered by Justice O'Connor in the Maher Arar inquiry. It fails to take into account the recommendations from the task force on governance and cultural change in the RCMP from 2007. It fails to take into account the recommendations from the former chairs of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission.
It is clear the bill could have been fixed, that solutions were out there. In order to play a constructive role, the NDP put forward amendments in four areas.
The first of those was in the area of harassment. We proposed a simple amendment to add harassment to the training responsibilities of the commissioner. That was rejected by the Conservatives. Therefore, Bill C-42, which purportedly addresses the problem of sexual harassment, does not even have the word “harassment” in the bill.
Second, we proposed measures to strengthen the independence of the new proposed civilian review and complaints commission. The commission would report to the minister and would make only non-binding recommendations. We need a truly independent commission that can make binding recommendations.
Our third recommendation was to create a national civilian investigative body to ensure that the RCMP would no longer placed in a conflict of interest of investigating itself. The bill addresses this partially by allowing provinces, which have independent commissions, to investigate the RCMP. However, only four provinces have those measures in place.
Finally, we introduced amendments that would have created balanced labour relations within the RCMP, including creating power for the independent review committee to deal with grievances. The concentration of power in the hands of the commissioner is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Given the long time between major revisions of legislation like the RCMP Act, 25 years in this case, there is a great responsibility on us to get it right this time. As Bill C-42 stands unamended, we will be opposing its moving forward in the House.