:
I call this meeting to order.
Thank you to colleagues for coming in.
Before I call on Mr. McGuinty and Madame Marcoux, I want to update members on some developments with respect to our agenda.
The first development was that Justice Bastarache is willing to come before the committee. As of Friday he was willing to come before the committee on the 7th. Now that date has been moved up to December 2. I propose giving him the full two-hour slot to be able to talk about that report on the RCMP.
The second thing I noticed while we were voting or doing QP, I'm not quite sure, is that the fiscal update is scheduled for November 30. I will take guidance from colleagues as to whether we just cancel November 30 outright. Both developments will make some serious dents in our previously agreed-upon agenda. Prior to Wednesday, I would appreciate the subcommittee communicating with me as to how we want to proceed. I'll probably reach out to each one of you and try to reorder the agenda so that we have a fully productive period of time from today through to the end of the session.
With that, I'm going to welcome Mr. McGuinty and Madame Marcoux to the committee to present their report.
Mr. McGuinty, given our long-standing friendship and your superior knowledge of parliamentary procedures, I found this report utterly...well, I was going to say “unintelligible”. I'm rather hoping you can explain it to me, because I've given a couple of shots at trying to understand what was being recommended in this report. There are so many deletions in the report that it makes it very difficult to follow the narrative.
For the sake of the chair, Mr. McGuinty, I'm rather hoping you give us the dummies' version of your report.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I'll do my very best to try to accommodate you and other colleagues.
Good afternoon, colleagues. Thank you for allowing us to be here.
We're very pleased to have this opportunity to discuss the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians' 2019 annual report and a separate special report, both tabled in Parliament on March 12 of this year.
By way of background, the committee met 25 times between February and August of 2019. It heard from 48 senior officials from government and civil society, and it relied for this work on over 30,000 pages of classified information.
Turning now to our first review, “Diversity and Inclusion in the Security and Intelligence Community”, this first-ever review provides a baseline of where the S and I community is in terms of diversity and inclusion for women, aboriginal peoples, members of visible minorities and persons with disabilities. Our review shows that the representation of these designated groups is lower than in the overall Canadian public service, particularly for members of visible minorities. Perhaps more troubling, rates of harassment and discrimination remain unacceptably high.
[Translation]
The leaders of these organizations are all committed to fostering more diversity and inclusion in their respective workforces. However, sustained leadership, an overall commitment and greater accountability throughout the security and intelligence community are paramount to ensure these organizations are inclusive and truly reflect Canada's diversity.
The committee recommended that a review be undertaken in three to five years to measure progress. We also recommended that data collection and analysis be improved and that a common set of performance measures be developed.
[English]
Let me now turn to the review examining the threat of foreign interference in Canada and the government's response to that threat.
The committee agreed to focus its efforts on traditional person-to-person foreign interference. We did not examine questions surrounding electoral integrity, did not review cyber-threats and did not examine foreign acquisitions of Canadian business under the Investment Canada Act.
The review concludes that there is significant and sustained foreign interference exercised by a number of foreign actors seeking to covertly and inappropriately interfere or exert influence in Canada. It also found that the government's response to this threat was done on a case-by-case, even ad hoc, basis and that our engagement with other levels of government and the Canadian public was limited.
[Translation]
Therefore, the committee recommended that the government develop a whole-of-government strategy to counter foreign interference and build institutional and public resilience. We were actually fairly specific in our recommendation about what such a strategy should include. It appears at paragraph 297 of the report.
The committee further recommended that the government support this strategy through sustained central leadership and coordination.
I will now turn to the focus of the third review in the committee's annual report: the Canada Border Services Agency, or CBSA.
The committee conducted the very first independent review of CBSA's most sensitive national security and intelligence activities, including surveillance, the use of confidential human sources and joint force operations.
[English]
Overall, the committee found that CBSA's authorities are clear, well governed and supported by several statutes. However, CBSA does not have ministerial direction for its conduct of national security and intelligence activities. This constitutes a gap in ministerial accountability. The committee recommends that the issue formal direction to CBSA, consistent with the practice at CSIS and the RCMP.
NSICOP also prepared a special report on the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. During a 2018 review of DND's defence intelligence activities, DND provided the committee with an internal directive that gives guidance to troops and employees on how to manage the collection of Canadian citizen information. This is known as the CANCIT directive.
[Translation]
The committee decided to conduct a special review of the directive to understand the legislation that governs the collection, use, retention and dissemination of information about Canadians by DND, and to assess whether the implementation of the directive gave rise to legal and operational risks.
The committee concluded that the CANCIT directive was not clear enough and recommended that DND work with the Privacy Commissioner to review all of its defence intelligence directives.
[English]
The committee ultimately formed an opinion that DND defence intelligence activities conducted as part of overseas operations may not be in compliance—may not be in compliance—with the Privacy Act. The committee referred this matter, as a result, to the Attorney General, pursuant to its obligation under section 31.1 of the NSICOP Act. It reads as follows:
The Committee must inform the appropriate Minister and the Attorney General of Canada of any activity that is carried out by a department and is related to national security or intelligence and that, in the Committee’s opinion, may not be in compliance with the law.
The committee also calls on the to ensure DND complies with the letter and spirit of the Privacy Act in all of its defence intelligence activities, whether they are conducted in Canada or abroad.
In 2018 NSICOP recommended that the government give serious consideration to providing explicit legislative authority for the conduct of defence intelligence activities. In 2019 the committee went further, calling on the to introduce legislation to govern defence intelligence activities. In response, the and the have both been mandated to develop a framework governing defence intelligence.
Thank you very much for your attention, colleagues. Those are my comments.
Mr. Chair, if we're not able to answer detailed questions during this session, we would be pleased to provide written responses to you for the committee. I also want to note that this is a 182-page report, plus the special report on DND and the Canadian Armed Forces. We would welcome good comments, feedback and positive criticism on how we can do our work even better for the committee, for parliamentarians and for Canadians.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
:
There are a few things.
The important thing, I think, to remember first off is that NSICOP is not so much an oversight committee as it is a review committee. In this we differ from our American counterparts and are more in line with our other Five Eyes partners, whether that's the ISC in the United Kingdom or the New Zealand model. It's a little different in Australia. I'll just point out for listeners and viewers, and for Mr. Kurek's benefit, that it's more a focus on review than it is oversight.
The question of cyber-threats is exactly what the committee is seized with now, Mr. Kurek, in this particular round of reviews. This cyber-threat review is very considerable. I think we've already received roughly 18,000 pages of documents on this front. We'll be evaluating the cyber-threat question and the government's ability to respond to that threat.
We're also now delving deeply into the security and intelligence activities of the Global Affairs department, something that has never been done before. We try to pursue some of these reviews in areas that have never been reviewed before, such as the Department of National Defence, the CBSA and, of course, GAC.
What was your other question, sir?
As committee members may know, in 2019 cabinet passed a directive creating a five-person committee to be seized with activities during the 2019 election and basically be the recipient of information. This is a committee chaired by the Clerk. It was to be seized with this information that was coming in from different information providers and to make a determination as to whether a certain threshold was crossed, applying a certain test as to whether this five-person committee led by the Clerk ought to communicate with Canadians something untoward or something inappropriate that might have been going on during the election.
A report was just completed by the former deputy minister and clerk, Jim Judd—I believe he was a clerk—and he has made that report public. That report is now still with the members of NSICOP, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians. The unredacted version is with us. We are considering it now, and we'll have more to say about it in due course in commentary to the in terms of how this committee is structured, its mandate, etc.
We won't be looking so much at the electoral integrity, but I can send you more information, Mr. Kurek, on the details of the examination on cyber-threats if that would be helpful.
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The first thing I should make clear is that cultural and ethnocultural communities are themselves targeted by foreign actors. They are often victims in Canada, and the Canadian government has a duty to protect those people—let's not forget.
In our report, we recommend a whole-of-government approach. That means doing a full review of how we conduct ourselves, how we respond, how our various levels of government work together, as well as how we work with Canadians, universities, the political class and politicians. Twice in a row, Mr. Iacono, we recommended that when politicians, including members of Parliament, are elected, they be given an in-depth briefing on the risks of foreign interference.
The report contains a series of recommendations on how the government can make improvements. We learned a lot by studying Australia, which has made significant strides on the issue, perhaps because it has more victims than other countries. I'm not sure. The committee recommended that Canada take a close look at the Australian model.
I was glad to hear you confess that you weren't entirely familiar with the findings in the rather lengthy report. I have to say that I wasn't either. It's quite technical.
I am eager to hear Mr. McGuinty elaborate on the issue. I appreciate the work he's done.
I want to discuss diversity and inclusion in the security and intelligence community.
In the past few weeks, we have seen many news stories about harassment, racism and sexual violence, mainly in the RCMP, but also in the prison system. According to the correctional investigator's latest report, those same issues arise among security officers and inmates.
You may have taken a close look at that. Are there any specific cases you can share with us?
You committed to conducting another review in three to five years to measure progress. Could you please tell us more about the cases you examined in producing your report?
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For the first time, we studied nine security and intelligence organizations, including CBSA, CSIS, CSE, DND, GAC, ITAC, PCO and the RCMP.
We established a baseline to compare representation of women, indigenous peoples, members of visible minorities and persons with disabilities across the nine organizations active in security and intelligence. We did not conduct an in-depth review on violence and discrimination, but that is something we are recommending to the government.
Essentially, we currently do not have access to the best talent in Canada, because we do not know exactly where the nine organizational players stand. We do know, however, that international studies, including FBI and CIA research, show that diversity and inclusion in security and intelligence agencies makes a big difference in performance, accountability-wise. I am not sure whether that's clear.
Mr. Chair, if I may, I would like to have Ms. Marcoux say a few words.
Thank you, Mr. McGuinty, for your presentation and your report.
I will touch briefly on the diversity and inclusion study. It seems to me rather disappointing that there's been such slow progress. You seem to be telling us you don't even know what the level of progress is.
I note that you say there seems to be lack of engagement by the whole of these agencies and it's all left up to the HR departments, which indicates the lack of real concern to actually achieving goals.
I'm wondering why your report simply asks for a three- to five-year review of where things are going, as opposed to insisting upon the setting of goals and targets and something like that. It seems to be an inadequate response to what you've clearly identified as slow progress.
I think one of the things we did point out in the report, to be as specific as possible, was that we took a long, hard look at the 's tiger team, which was created in 2016. We called out the fact that the tiger team, which was set up to develop a performance measurement framework for the entire federal government, hadn't met since June 2018. We believe that there's supposed to be a report every six months to the deputy secretary of the cabinet, and July 2018 was the last meeting we could find.
We went as far as we felt we could as a committee to call on the government to make improvement, and we set the baseline. There hadn't been an examination at all, ever before, that we could find, of diversity and inclusion in the nine organizations that constitute the community.
We felt it was important to call it out and to cite statistically, and on an evidence base with the facts, exactly where we stood. Now we're looking for progress. We've called on the government to take certain measures; we'll see what the government does.
:
Well, there seems to be a significant lack of commitment, obviously, that you've identified. I'm surprised it didn't appear more obvious in your recommendations, but thank you for pointing that out. I'll have to search for those tables.
The thing that interests me the most in your report, because we've been dealing with it in the Canada-China committee and it was the focus of an opposition motion last week, is foreign interference in Canada. I'm not particularly referring to China, although we did hear witnesses saying some of the things that are reflected here in terms of going from one place to another. Your report notes a lack of coordination, for example, and a lack of direction on where to go.
I'm looking at the problems noted here, at the challenges the RCMP faces: that the operations are focused primarily on counterterrorism; that intelligence provided by CSIS is difficult to use as evidence supporting criminal investigations; that Public Safety only recently identified and dedicated resources to the issue of foreign interference; that until late 2017, interdepartmental collaboration on foreign interference was ad hoc and issue-specific; and that prioritizing areas of concern that are the most important has needed to be addressed, and that work in this regard is in its early stages.
It seems to me, Mr. McGuinty, that all of this adds up to kind of a conclusion, in my mind, that the whole issue of foreign interference has not really been taken seriously by these agencies that are either focused on other things or don't have their act together, as it were, and we're very late in the game in doing this. Was that your conclusion as well?
Thank you to both our witnesses.
Thank you, Mr. McGuinty, for being here and for the incredible work that you and your committee do. I think it's extremely important.
Perhaps, though, I can get you started on something very basic. I find that among Canadians there are many different versions or understandings of what foreign interference is, but more importantly, across government agencies and departments there are a variety of different definitions of what foreign interference is.
Could you explain briefly exactly what foreign interference is? Can you touch on why you think departments and agencies struggle to agree on the definition of foreign interference?
:
That's an excellent question. We try to tackle that, Ms. Khera, in the report, in chapter 2. I think it starts at paragraph 106 or 107. We talk about the definition: “activities ranging from overt and often friendly forms of normal diplomatic conduct on the one hand to covert and hostile actions on the other”.
The CSIS Act goes some distance in describing what foreign interference is, and you rightly point out that one of the things we came up against fairly early on was the fact that there wasn't a sort of uniform nomenclature across the entire security and intelligence community, or an understanding.
For example, if foreign interference were being exercised on the ground in a municipality somewhere, maybe in a municipal election campaign, for example, or maybe in some other form or fashion, you wouldn't get necessarily an understanding from front-line police officers. If an outstanding female OPP officer came across something that might constitute foreign interference, she might not know what to do with it or wouldn't understand it as foreign interference.
That's one of the things that we've addressed: to lay out what it looks like. Again, in paragraph 108, we talk about the effects of “Foreign interference activities” and what's at risk here. It undermines a series of Canadian values.
:
Mr. McGuinty, I'd like to talk about CBSA and the findings in your report. You recommend that the public safety minister provide CBSA with written direction on the conduct of sensitive national security and intelligence activities. The direction should include clear accountability expectations and annual reporting obligations.
According to your report, that direction should have been provided by the minister months, even years, ago. CBSA has been asking the minister for clear direction since 2013, but to no avail.
In recent weeks, La Presse has learned that CBSA had reportedly approved direction, but that the minister had yet to issue directives.
Why do you think ministerial directives have not yet been issued formally? The government seems to be pinning the blame on COVID-19, given that directives were supposed to be approved back in February. Nevertheless, it seems to be part of a broader plan, so I'd like to hear your thoughts.
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That's fine. We do have a minute and a half left, but I thank you for helping out with running the clock.
One of the reasons we have these meetings is that you can put flesh on what can be a dry and confusing report. Both Mr. McGuinty and Madame Marcoux have done exactly that, to the point where, as Mr. Harris says, we have dozens of questions. I noted the exchange with Mr. Iacono about how other countries make their colleagues aware of the content of these studies and also raise general awareness.
I think, Mr. McGuinty, that you and I are going to have an off-line conversation about how we can make sure that your reports and your works get a larger audience than possibly an hour before the public safety committee.
Again, thank you for your absolutely outstanding work. Please, on behalf of the committee, thank your colleagues on the committee for us. As you can see, you've really stimulated the interest of members.
Thank you, colleagues. With that, we'll suspend for two minutes while we re-empanel.
Again, thank you, Madame Marcoux and Mr. McGuinty.
:
Thank you for having me.
I have published extensively in peer-reviewed literature on racial and gendered harms of policing in Canada's past and present, most notably Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. I am also a Ph.D. student and a Vanier scholar at the University of Toronto.
I will be forwarding today an evidence-supported argument that sheds light on the increasingly popular and publicly supported calls across Canada to defund the police and highlight the potential, should this be taken up, to meaningfully address the systemic racism that is embedded into policing in Canada.
The first point I want to lay forward is that rather than upholding them, for many communities policing is more accurately understood as a form of harm, particularly for Black communities, indigenous communities, racialized communities and people living with mental health or substance use issues. For example, an American Public Health Association 2018 policy statement affirms that law enforcement violence is a public health issue, addressing that police violence is itself a form of harm in our society.
My work documents rampant racial profiling since the creation of police forces across Canada, documenting, since the 19th century, the heightened policing of indigenous men and women, Black men and women and other racialized communities. Studies conducted in Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver demonstrate that Black people are stopped by police at a rate anywhere from two to six times more frequently than white residents.
Reports that came out by CBC/Radio-Canada about dozens of indigenous women being sexually or physically subjected to violence by the police, as well as the police assaults of Majiza Philip and Santina Rao and other Black women, addressed that there is also a gendered element at stake in this systemic racism within the policing institution. We know that this also has resulted in death. Black people are 20 times more likely to be shot by police in Toronto, according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Funding has continually increased for policing in Canada in a manner that is unparalleled in many other public services. For example, national spending on police operations has increased since the mid-nineties, reaching $15.1 billion in 2007 to 2018. A 2013 government report noted that the cost of policing nationally has more than doubled since 1997, outpacing the increase, they note, in spending by all levels of government. This includes police salaries, which have increased by 40% since 2000, whereas most Canadian salaries have increased by 11%, according to Public Safety Canada. In a context of a COVID-19 economic downturn, reprioritizing has never been more crucial.
We are also in a period in which we have seen the increasing militarization of policing, with particular harms for Black and indigenous communities. For example, a report by Kevin Walby and Roziere in 2018 noted that the use of SWAT teams or tactical squads had increased by 2,000% over the last four decades, increasingly being used for “routine activities such as executing warrants, traffic enforcement, community policing and responding to mental health crises....”
For Black communities in particular, this militarization has at times been fatal or violent. For example, Somali refugee communities experienced raids in which they were assaulted with battering rams and flash-bang devices—which an elderly Somali woman described as being physically brutalized—and, in one instance, told to die in the context of a tactical raid.
In tandem with rising militarization and budgets, there has been an expanded scope in terms of an ever-expanding role for police officers in response to mental health calls and presence in schools more broadly.
We've also seen a dramatic rise in police killings over the last 20 years. A CBC study called Deadly Force highlighted that the number of deaths at the hands of police have nearly doubled over the past 20 years, particularly impacting Black and indigenous communities.
It is important to look to several limited reforms that have not reduced the funding, power and scope for militarization of police and have also been ineffective in ending racial profiling and violence in policing. A 2018 Yale study, the most extensive to date, for example, found that body cams were not an effective way of addressing racism or violence in policing.
A recent study conducted by Concordia University's Dr. Ted Rutland addressed how community policing, frequently proffered as a reform, has been both ineffective in ending systemic racism and in helping to expand and retrench the harms of racialized policing even further in Montreal.
Decades of feminists' anecdotal evidence, as well as more documented evidence, has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of police training.
Of course, civilian oversights continue to be decried in the media and by access to information requests that show there is not only a lack of independence—being staffed largely by former police officers—but that few investigations lead to charges, and zero or less than 1% of criminal convictions.
This suggests that policing in Canada is not only flawed at a cosmetic level, but that the harms, racial and gendered, are structurally embedded into the institution itself.
I'm proposing that the assortment of changes forwarded under the banner of defunding the police are the most appropriate toward meaningfully addressing the issue of systemic racism in Canadian policing. Ending systemic racism requires that we undertake changes to minimize and reduce people's encounters with the police in a variety of ways. Only reducing policing can reduce the harm in policing.
I will now briefly turn toward articulating what this means. Of course, much of what is being articulated at this time is related to public budget allocation, looking at the grossly disproportionate amount of public money and taxpayer money that is spent on policing each year compared to other vital issues, such as shelters, long-term care, public education and social housing.
More broadly, there is also within this call a move to decrease, minimize and move away from a reliance on police in a way that is vastly more substantive. Reducing the budget, reducing the scope and reducing the power of policing are matters in which we are able to address the issue of systemic injustice more broadly. Reducing the scope, for example, is about minimizing areas where policing has been found to be most harmful.
For example, we can see the removal of police officers in schools in the Toronto District School Board, now seen as well in Hamilton, and there is important work being advanced in this regard in Winnipeg and Vancouver.
Reducing the scope has also been a push to ending police responses to mental health calls, given the tragic deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Deandre Campbell-Kelly, and other Black and indigenous and other people killed by police in the context of a mental health crisis.
Ending police accompaniments to drug overdose calls has long been advocated by harm reduction practitioners as a way to reduce overdose deaths, and ending policing collaboration with the Canada Border Services Agency. These are all ways to reduce the scope of policing and the reach that it has in its harm over people's day-to-day lives.
Another element of this is reducing—
My name is Mitch Bourbonniere. I've been involved in community outreach groups that patrol the streets of inner city Winnipeg for the last 30 years, beginning with the original Bear Clan in 1990. Today we have at least six different groups that walk the streets of Winnipeg as racialized peacekeeping groups. We have the Thunderbirds, 204 Neighbourhood Watch, the Initiative, the Mama Bear Clan, the Bear Clan and OPK Manitoba all walking the streets of Winnipeg.
OPK is an organization that supports, welcomes and looks after young men and women who are asking for a better life after being involved in the child welfare system, the justice system, street life gangs and prison. They provide wraparound support around youth issues such as housing, income, employment, education, addiction, mental health and connecting our participants to their original cultures.
Despite experiencing poverty, family breakdown, trauma and violence, as well as involvement in child welfare and youth justice systems, these young people ask for and demand a better life. They work extremely hard to turn their lives around.
It is very discouraging to them when society, and more specifically the police and the justice system, treat them with suspicion and mistrust and as being incorrigible.
I have one young man who was horrifically abused as a child and grew up in an unforgiving child welfare system only eventually to take the life of a rival gang member in a dispute. He was 15 years old at the time. He spent the next 15 years in federal prison.
Coming out a couple of years ago as a 30-year-old, he worked relentlessly to turn his life around, getting his education, his driver's licence and stable housing. He is now fully employed, drives his own vehicle and is a parent to a young daughter.
Because the police have the ability to scan licence plates in traffic, he is regularly pulled over because of his past and questioned aggressively and accused of all kinds of things by police. I know this is anecdotal, but these stories have been told to me over and over again in the last 30 years. Although this is extremely discouraging, he has come to accept that this is just going to happen.
The other young people in my program tell me countless stories of being stopped while walking in the community and being questioned by police and asked for identification for no apparent reason.
Another area of concern is when police are dispatched to do wellness checks of people who are already in crisis and have had previous negative experiences with police, and the situation can escalate quickly.
I realize there are many excellent individual police officers and that the action of a few can taint the reputation and perception of all police. I have heard this being dismissed as a few bad apples. It is my belief that we cannot afford even one bad apple in the police service, as this poisons the perception of police by the community, just as it would not be acceptable for the airline industry to have a few bad-apple pilots. We need to ensure police are properly recruited, investigated and vetted, and that they receive intensive ongoing training around racialized communities and empathy.
I have had some good experiences with the Winnipeg police in downtown Winnipeg with their foot patrol asking us—members of the Bear Clan and OPK—to walk with them because they find it easier to work with the unsheltered folks in downtown Winnipeg when we're there with them. I think it's helpful to community members to see people from their own background who are doing well and are out there trying to help them.
I'd like to see more women in the police, more indigenous people and people of colour.
That is what I have to say at this time.
:
Thank you, Chair, and thank you to both witnesses for the excellent testimony.
Ms. Maynard, you've written about racialized surveillance and, Mr. Bourbonniere, you spoke about it in your remarks as well. You've written, Ms. Maynard, that when it comes to gangs, the number of white kids in gangs is actually greater than the number of Black kids in gangs, and that the number of white kids and Black kids using drugs is actually the same, but it's the Black kids who are grossly overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
Training and education seem to only perpetuate the misconceptions in police services and put these misconceptions into their mindset, so that even if it's not overt racialized surveillance, it's still happening.
How do we change that within police services, bearing in mind that the RCMP is the only police service under federal jurisdiction? I'm wondering if you have any suggestions on how we deal with this racialized surveillance of Black people in particular, but, I would argue, of indigenous peoples as well.
:
Absolutely, and I think you're right that the numbers bear out that indigenous people, in particular indigenous women, also experience very significant rates of racial profiling in Canadian society.
To continue on a bit with what I was trying to get at with my presentation—and thank you so much for your question—whether we look towards increased police training or towards increased community policing, we see that these are things that do not fundamentally get to the heart of racialized policing and the racialized surveillance that you're so importantly highlighting.
I think what we really need to do is work towards minimizing the encounters that Black communities are having with police. If we look, for example, to the deployment of what often are so-called anti-gang squads, they are frequently squads, for example, that have eclipsed.... That was put forward in Montreal, and they were substantively involved in the mass racial profiling of Black communities, particularly in the Montreal North and Saint-Michel regions.
We actually saw a significant budgetary allocation increase because of what they described as increased perceptions of crime. It was unrelated to the actual increase of crime, but this ended up massively expanding the racialized surveillance of Black and indigenous youth in the neighbourhood.
This is why I'm suggesting a reduction, actually, of policing budgets, a reduction in policing those neighbourhoods, and the diversion of funds to things that keep communities safe, such as community centres or anti-violence programs that are not connected to police but are about building communities safely and differently.
If we also move towards the decriminalization of drugs, for example, which we already know increase the rates of hepatitis B, HIV and overdose deaths, as well as contributing to the mass incarceration of Black communities in Canada even as we know that criminalization does nothing to address the real harms associated with drug use, something like the decriminalization of drugs could really substantively impact the well-being of Black communities.
My first question is for Mr. Bourbonniere.
A newspaper article was recently brought to my attention, and I would like to hear your thoughts on it. The story is quite unbelievable, not to mention unacceptable, and is all the more reason why the committee should be doing this study and looking for solutions.
Allow me to explain. A man around 30 years old was kidnapped, so to speak, in Val-d'Or, Quebec. Here's an excerpt from the article:
[English]
What happened to Anichnapéo has a name. They call it a “starlight tour,” when police pick up an Indigenous person for being disruptive, drunk or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once they have them in the patrol car, they drive the person outside city limits and force them to walk back.
[Translation]
This is something that apparently happens all over Canada, as well as in Quebec. I am curious as to whether you have heard people in your organization refer to these so-called starlight tours.
I know there is no magic wand, here, but what should be done to keep this kind of thing from happening and ensure those in positions of power stop discriminating against members of certain communities?
:
That is an excellent question. Thank you.
Actually, there are two schools of thought that come out of the police towards indigenous youth. One is suspicion and mistrust and always believing that these young people might be criminally involved, sometimes with absolutely no reason or evidence. There's another thought that comes toward indigenous people that's equally as hurtful, harmful and devastating, and that is dismissing such critical incidents as missing people, missing indigenous women and girls, and blaming lifestyle. There are always assumptions made that if someone is missing or if someone's in crisis, they're to blame. There isn't the same desperation to honour a request for help when it is an indigenous person rather than someone who's non-indigenous in Winnipeg.
Those two negative experiences that come toward the young indigenous people get ingrained. They internalize it. The police are a symbol. The RCMP are a symbol. They are an authority. They are powerful. They have power. They have privilege. When young people feel so much negativity towards them, such suspicion and mistrust, and their concerns are not taken seriously when they are in crisis or in trouble or are missing, it leads them to believe they are “less than”. That is unconscionable.
:
Thank you for the question.
I believe that I am talking about reallocation to some extent, of course, as well as substantively cutting police budgets, but also about reducing the scope and power of police, just to clarify.
I think it's very important to understand that these calls are explicitly addressing moving that money out of policing, period, and into a community or another more appropriate organization. This is just because of the ongoing link in the ways that even when police are accompanied by a social worker, it still can lead to the harm and death of somebody in police custody. It really is about minimizing the encounters in order to stop the harms of criminalization, to understand that even though police stops and carding are not a direct harm on the body, those are harmful as well. That, of course, is not only about reallocating but about actually evading that interaction altogether, which can't be done by just moving money around within the police budget.
It's not about training police to be better social workers or better harm reduction and drug overdose responders, but about actually just having appropriate responses to mental health crises, to drug overdoses, etc.
I'm beginning to conduct some research on this aspect. I've spoken with people who have been working since the 1980s—after the police killing of Anthony Griffin in 1987 in Montreal, for example. There was a massive community outcry, and what happened afterwards was a promise to have better training with the police. Many Black women and Black community organizers at that time took part in police training. Of course, throughout the 1990s we continued to see an acceleration of police killings of Black people.
As well, after the allegations and systemic evidence came out about policing of indigenous communities in Montreal, again the Native Women's Shelter provided training for the police. Later they went to the media, decrying the way that they were treated by the police; and of course we continue to see it as an ongoing issue.
All of this, as well as evidence based in the United States, suggests that diversity training and all of these other forms of training, while perhaps well intentioned, are not actually effective in addressing the realities of racial profiling, of police killings, of gender-based violence and all the other issues that are at the heart of the problem.
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For the record, I want to correct the population number. It is is 18% of Manitobans who identify as indigenous, not 10%.
We have a very strong and proud indigenous community in Winnipeg. There are very many indigenous people doing so well right now, but we also have people who are wounded from generations of the effects of the relationship between Canada and its indigenous peoples.
Lots of the folks we encounter in the community who are struggling come from different backgrounds. The areas that we patrol are in the inner city in the north end of Winnipeg, where there is a higher indigenous population. As I said, most community members are doing fantastically well. They're doing wonderfully and they're healthy. However, some of our folks who are struggling are indeed indigenous, and it's visual. When you go to our youth correctional jail, you see that all the youth are of colour or indigenous and all of the staff are white. It's stark. It's striking to see that visual.
Our child welfare is about 90% indigenous children in care, and that's just unacceptable.
My next question is for Ms. Maynard. I would like to thank her, by the way, for all of her work.
I looked at her work, namely her book about racial profiling, impoverishment, devaluation and ambient racism.
Ms. Maynard, you have studied the historical legacy of slavery and colonialism and the detrimental impact it continues to have on Black communities in Canada. I am referring to a 2018 article that appeared in La Presse, but it is just as timely today, in 2020.
What would you say is the federal government's role in ensuring the issue is no longer timely and in bringing about real progress? I mean, of course, progress in terms of how Canada's Black communities are viewed and treated.
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I think it's so important to highlight the way that Canada's history of slavery, which is so often erased, is so much a part of the ongoing surveillance of black communities across multiple systems, so I think, of course, that it's really important. I addressed the criminalization of drugs, sex work and poverty through an assortment of bylaws as absolutely crucial.
Of course, ending the mass impoverishment of black communities has always been integral to black people's well-being in this society, but we also need to look at the ways in which federal immigration policies have impacted black communities.
We're thinking of the way that largely black and central American workers are currently in horrifying conditions. The ones who pick the fruit and vegetables for this country throughout the entire summer are most exposed to COVID, as well as the many black undocumented people and asylum seekers who are currently facing possible deportation, including those who have worked as front-line workers in Quebec.
Federal lawsuits substantively increase this if we go to the way that Canada Border Services Agency has been increasingly working with police services in Montreal and in Toronto especially, which means that when people are being racially profiled and are being stopped while driving or are being carded, it can lead to detention or to deportation, given that over half of Canada's black population was born elsewhere.
Those are only a few really important legislative changes that can take place.
The study I was highlighting was in the Yale Law Journal and was published in 2018. That was the most systematic study that looked at every study of body cameras that had been accomplished so far. It found that their use did not reduce police killings in black communities and did not significantly impact use of force.
Another study suggested that police feel confident in the kind of violence that they regularly take part in, so they see no harm in it. Other studies have highlighted the fact that police will often turn off the cameras during violence, so that footage goes missing.
We need to remember that we'd be pushing for reforms that are extremely expensive. A significant public cost is required to implement body cameras, which at best are ineffective and cannot consistently be relied on in the context.
This year, for example, we already had double the police killings by July that we had by that time last year. We're in a crisis, and throwing significant amounts of money into reforms that are not effective is fundamentally not the appropriate solution. It's just a matter of kicking the can forward and not acting on the immediate changes we need to see.
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Thank you very much, Chair.
Mr. Bourbonniere, I have two questions that I want to focus on, but first I want to thank you for what you do. The work done by you and by groups like yours across the country has always intrigued me. In all my years of policing, it's something I always supported.
With your background in front-line service to the community, I'm sure you have many success stories of people from marginalized communities who have embraced the opportunities they were provided with and have turned their lives around. You told us of one during your opening remarks, and I thank you for that.
In all those circumstances, from your experience, are there any common themes or experiences or opportunities that you can explain to the committee that are consistent and necessary to the success of the individuals you're trying to reach on the street?
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Thank you very much for those comments.
You're from Winnipeg and you've walked the streets of Winnipeg, so you will have seen this. It's something that surprised me about 18 months ago, when I was there.
We know the mental health crisis we're facing in this country. We know that the police interactions in mental health crises are increasing as well. Quite frankly, responding to mental health-type calls has been a challenge for policing for decades. Today, with our massive and increased levels of illegal drug use and higher rates of addiction, there are more and more requests for help. Usually the police, in many circumstances, are the only ones who can and do respond. The police have some training, but that's not really their role and expertise.
My time in Winnipeg was short, but from working with the police there and listening to them, I know that many times they have hundreds of high-risk calls backed up because all of their cars, dozens of cars, their first-line responders, are tied up with individuals who are experiencing a mental health crisis and need assistance. They can't leave them at the health facility where they take them, so all of their cars are tied up.
You see this first-hand every single day. Quite frankly, with the meth issues you're experiencing there in Winnipeg, I've never seen a community that has as much of a mental health, drug addiction and crime combination. From your experience, sir, can you help me understand what you think is going to work better? You talk about communities helping each other and people in the community helping people in the community, but we all have to work together. From your experience, how do we properly deal with some of the mental health challenges you're experiencing in Winnipeg, as we are across this country, for a law enforcement response—
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Ms. Maynard and Mr. Bourbonniere, thank you for your opening statements and your contributions to the committee's study.
I have two questions for Ms. Maynard.
Given all of your work in this area, what would you say are the biggest gaps when it comes to access to race-based data to effectively target systemic racism in policing?
This week, three police officers in Repentigny, Quebec, were found guilty by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The city of Repentigny had to pay $35,000 to a Black teacher who was racially profiled and stopped by police. A week ago, the city of Longueuil was ordered to pay $10,000 in damages for racial profiling. Two of its police officers were also ordered to pay damages.
How do you view the role of human rights commissions and similar tribunals in situations like these? The institutions can be hard for people to access, but they can provide an additional layer of accountability, don't you think?
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It's the data. Okay. Thank you. Yes, I'm happy to answer that.
It's ridiculous in a Canadian context that we are so rarely offered the ability to have what should be publicly accessible data when it comes to race-based incidents. We often have to rely on access to information or special reports such as those that have been done by the Toronto Star. Very recently in Montreal, a report was published. Up until then, one of the only statistics that we had was accidentally leaked to the press by the police, but it was actually not supposed to be published. We have an ongoing secrecy that makes it much more difficult.
However, I also would argue that having access to data still does not stand in for change. In the United States, for example, you have publicly accessible data, but if you don't do something to actually address the racism, you're just documenting it better. I'd highlight both that it's important and that's it's also not enough.
With regard to the second strategy and the way human rights offices work, I do think that these are one of the important places where people are able to, in some instances, get justice. Of course, if we look to the Quebec human rights commission, we know that people are waiting years and years to get access to this trial, and it is quite narrow in terms of who really has access to it. As far as oversight goes, as much as these organizations do important work, it's vastly not enough for the number of people who are regularly experiencing police harassment and police violence. As an example, when we looked to one study that came out in Montreal in 2008, we saw that over 40% of black youth in just one neighbourhood had been stopped by the police that year.
If we look to this as the vastly expansive harm that it is across our society that's happening so regularly, human rights organizations do important work and are not given enough power or funding to really intervene. Anyway, it doesn't do any.... It only provides compensation afterwards for an injustice that never should have occurred in the first place. Again, it doesn't get to the heart of preventing police killings, police violence, etc.