Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my speaking time with the member for Scarborough Southwest.
Historically, the tradition was that the Mounties always get their man. Is that still true? We might wonder about that. We in the NDP want a police force that is the best in the world. We want its reputation for excellence to be restored.
As New Democrats, we want a modern state protected by a modern police force. We therefore do not want to diminish the effectiveness of our police; on the contrary, we want to enhance it. That calls for some serious thought at present. On the question of harassment, we are told we are making too specific a point of it, as compared to other kinds of police misconduct. Allow me to quote Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada, who stated in a self-defence case that a man will never find himself in the situation of a battered woman.
That is a fact. A man will never go through the sexual harassment experienced by a woman. That is very important. It is why we are making a specific point of it. That does not mean we are denying there are other problem; we are not, but that is one that stands out. We cannot solve that problem the same way as all the others.
At the outset, the NDP wanted to tackle the problem of the RCMP and various dysfunctions. We supported Bill C-42 at second reading. We said it was important to take remedial action so that our police force would be more effective, and we voted for the bill, which was in fact sent to committee.
Unfortunately, during consideration of Bill C-42, the representatives made it plain that they were going to shuffle the cards and change people's titles, but fundamentally, the corporate culture that had led to major errors would not be rectified. That is problematic.
In this regard, when we look at the past, we learn that other societies have had the same problems. In France in the early 1900s, the French police were facing organized crime and anarchist movements like the Bonnot gang. The then minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau, said that a modern police force called for modern solutions. He created flying squads, nicknamed the “Tiger Brigades”. That was an effective response to a modern problem.
Later, France had to think about who was going to investigate its police. To police the police, it created the IGS, the Inspection générale des services, which is not accountable to a police chain of command that it is investigating. It is a totally independent police force that investigates certain kinds of wrongdoing by police and recommends remedial action and sometimes, when it is necessary, punishment.
We hoped that our amendments would be taken seriously in committee and would be discussed and accepted.
Requiring members of the RCMP to take harassment training under the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act is not a luxury, it is a necessity. I do not understand why the Conservative caucus, so many of whom have been members of the police, would not consider the wisdom of this motion in amendment. It was necessary and they did not do it.
It is sad to say, but the Conservatives claim to have all the answers, like Louis XIV, who said, “l'État, c'est moi”. He was never wrong.
In short, there is nothing more to be said. We even wonder whether there might not have been some further evolution. Now, the Conservative government is God. God is always right. We should simply shut up. But I will not. There is a major problem here.
The police hierarchy has been given the power once again to fire members for a variety of administrative, non-disciplinary reasons. Examples include illness, too much parental leave or post-traumatic shock, which is not taken seriously. There is even talk of punishing investigators who conduct investigations that displease the political masters.
It amounts to quasi-discretionary power over which we would not have any authority. And God knows that this police force needs help and that we are prepared to give it. That is why the establishment of a completely independent investigative body was requested. By giving a commissioner the ultimate power to decide on what disciplinary action to take, Bill C-42 would give him the power to establish a single comprehensive framework for investigating and dealing with harassment problems.
This was precisely what we did not want. Worse still, it creates the same problems that arose in the case of an individual involved in an investigation into terrorism that directly affected national security. They fingered a completely innocent person. They deported him to Syria and he was tortured. But the problem does not end with the Arar case. Not only was a special commission of inquiry required to determine what had happened, but it took a parliamentary committee to eventually discover the truth. The truth was very simple: elements within the RCMP fabricated a terrorist threat simply to impress a foreign police force. It was unacceptable. These are the kinds of blunders that must not be repeated in the future.
There is also the risk that if the problem is not solved and there is no internal framework to deal with issues of this kind, people are going to find other ways of dealing with them and there are going to be leaks to the press. Rather than going through the usual chain of command, people will leak information to journalists. The best example of this was "Deep Throat", who was a senior FBI officer in the 1970s. When, during the Watergate scandal, he realized that presidential power was so influential that no investigation would be possible, he decided on his own, for the protection of the United States of America and in the interests of justice, to leak the relevant information to the Washington Post. Is this what is going to happen in the RCMP in the future? Will people be forced to leak information to the media?
The broad range of groups and experts who appeared and reported on the extent of the problems faced by the RCMP shows that serious action is required. It would seem impossible to refuse to listen to these many groups, with all their expertise, from so many different backgrounds. Unfortunately, however, the government is still not listening.
Some serious soul-searching is required to determine whether we really want an effective police force in a democratic state. The Minister of Public Safety said that Canadians' trust in the RCMP had been shaken. How could this bill possibly restore this trust? Clearly, it cannot. Perhaps the comments of the Minister of Justice could best be described by Madame de Pompadour’s most famous words: "Après moi le déluge". In whatever he does, provided that he pleases his Prime Minister, nothing else is of any importance with respect to future consequences.
