Blair vows better oversight of RCMP
Complaint system needs to be timely, transparent
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair
says Canada’s justice system needs to change in light of the international protests for police reform.
Blair, speaking exclusively to
National Post, previewed changes
coming to civilian oversight of the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police;
possible new requirements on how
the RCMP tracks use of force incidents, and how his government will reduce the over-incarceration of Indigenous and Black people.
But at the same time, the minister was light on clear timelines on when his government would be moving on these issues.
Even on body-worn cameras, which his government endorsed this week, Blair recognized that "with recent instances of police brutality, people have come to rely on for coming to a determination and judgment as to the appropriateness or inappropriateness of police conduct.”
The RCMP has run pilot projects and feasibility studies showing the technology around body
worn cameras works. The Privacy
Commissioner has even offered guidance on how to implement the cameras effectively. However,
the RCMP passed on adopting the
cameras for its officers in 2015.
Protests began late last month
in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd during an arrest by local police, but have since spread around the world.
Black Lives Matter protesters have called to defund police departments, given data showing police are significantly more likely to deploy force against Black people.
The RCMP, the single largest
police in the country, maintains a database detailing every time its officers use force in the line of duty. They have consistently refused to release information from
that database. The RCMP also
confirmed that the database does not collect the race or Indigenous identity of the citizens who were on the other end of the firearm, taser, pepper spray, or physical restraint.
“The lack of the collection of that data has led to a lack of information and understanding about a lot of the different causes of social injustice in our society,” Blair said. “There is a real value in the appropriate and careful collection of race-based data.” He offered no timelines as to when or wheth
er he would require the RCMP to
change its practices, but did acknowledge that “I’ve heard that very clearly, and I agree with that, quite frankly.”
Some police services, including
the Toronto Police Service that
Blair once ran, have aggressively employed random street checks, sometimes referred to as “carding,”
which, data shows, disproportionately affected men of colour in the city.
A review of the RCMP’S own carding practices, by the force’s Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, has been ongoing since 2018. The commission’s budget is smaller than the review bodies for some municipal forces, while it will soon be expected to cover the Canadian Border Services Agency as well. Even when it completes an investigation, it can only make non-binding recommendations to the force.
“If you want the public to have confidence in a complaint investigation and resolution system, it has to be timely, and it has to be transparent,” said Blair. While he hinted at more resources and an expanded mandate, he didn’t veer into specifics.
Images of police throughout the United States deploying pepper spray, rubber bullets, and tear gas have shocked the country. On
Tuesday, NDP MP Matthew Green
asked Blair whether he would ban the use of tear gas by police in Canada. The minister didn’t answer.
When the Post inquired, Blair highlighted that the RCMP use
of force model is “very well developed and well understood,” and while he suggested “there can be regulations for use of certain force options,” he sidestepped the question of further restricting their use at the federal level. “They are not widely used in this country,” he said.
“In almost nine years of public order work in Toronto, I’ve never seen tear gas used once,” he added. Yet it was Blair who announced
that Toronto Police used tear gas
for the first time during the G20 protests. And Montreal police used chemical agents most recently during anti-police brutality protests that led to some vandalism on May 31.
Blair is also the minister responsible for Canada’s federal corrections system, where the COVID-19 outbreak spread rapidly this spring, killing two inmates. Despite calls to begin releasing atrisk, non-violent, inmates, Blair refused. Asked Tuesday, Blair hinted that Minister of Justice David Lametti was forging ahead on reforms that would see fewer offenders, especially Indigenous and Black people, sent to federal prisons. “There are a number of things that I believe can, and must, be done to reduce that overrepresentation,” he said, hinting that “they’re not all, frankly, related to sentencing.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Blair announced new funding for halfway houses to help transition paroled inmates back into the community.
During the pandemic, Correctional Services Canada has aggressively used segregation to house sick inmates, often locking them in tiny cells for 23 hours a day. Asked whether those measures were appropriate, given courts in two provinces have called the practice of solitary confinement unconstitutional, Blair said he was comfortable with how Correctional Services handled the situation.
“The measures that were put in place were not intended in any way to violate anybody’s rights,” the minister said, adding the measures were necessary to protect people from COVID.
“And frankly, I would point out, it’s been effective,” he said.
While the protests have called for drastic change, Blair acknowledged he did not have drastic solutions.
VALUE IN THE ... CAREFUL COLLECTION
OF RACEBASED DATA.