‘It is despi cable to dishonour the memory’ of fallen police
Kenney wants to make it a crime to deface police monuments
• Alberta’s premier is calling for legal protection for police monuments after a statue of an Edmonton policeman killed while on duty was defaced with a “F--- cops” tag last week.
While it’s against the law in Canada to vandalize military monuments, no such specific protections exist for police monuments.
Overnight last week, someone spray-painted the statue of Const. Ezio Faraone, an Edmonton tactical unit officer killed during a bank robbery in 1990. It comes during months of tensions over the role of police and policing after the high-profile killings of Black men by police officers in the United
States.
In a series of tweets, Premier Jason Kenney called upon the federal government to add penalties for vandalizing police memorials to the Criminal Code.
“It is despicable to dishonour the memory of those who gave their lives in the defence of our community,” Kenney wrote.
Just days earlier, Kenney had offered a safe haven for the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, which was toppled and beheaded in Montreal during a protest demanding the defunding of police.
Duane Bratt, a Mount Royal University political science professor, said Kenney’s response reflects a consistent philosophy on the part of his governing United Conservatives.
“I think it’s part of the larger culture wars,” Bratt said. “The people who are very, very concerned about the statues are also the people most likely to vote for Kenney. The people who are vandalizing the statues are least likely to vote for Kenney.”
Canada does have laws in place that protect statues and punish those who deface them, though they apply specifically to war memorials.
A first offence can result in a $ 1,000 fine, a second offence has a minimum punishment of 14 days in jail and subsequent offences can lead to 30 days in jail. The maximum penalty is 10 years imprisonment. It does not appear to have been used.
“I do not believe this section has been, as yet, constitutionally scrutinized,” wrote Lisa Silver, a University of Calgary law professor, in an email.
Kenney floated the possibility of using Alberta’s powers to create regulatory offences, a strategy used in a number of areas — such as drinking and driving laws — that allow provincial governments to introduce penalties without interfering with federal powers to create criminal law.
There would be some options for the Alberta government to enforce some sort of regulatory penalty, explained Silver, but they would need to be carefully crafted: Rules against defacing cemeteries, for example, are provincial law, but they exist in the context of the maintenance and creation of cemeteries. In other words, the provincial penalties are part of a broader regulatory scheme.
“( The Alberta) government must be careful that they are not in effect creating criminal law under the guise of valid provincial law,” said Silver.
Recent incidents of vandalism against monuments have resulted in charges, though they appear to be for the lesser offence of mischief.
There have been a handful of police memorials damaged in recent months: In late June, the Ontario Provincial Police asked for public assistance to identify who defaced the Ontario Police Memorial at Queen’s Park. Then, in early July, a memorial for fallen police and firefighters was splattered with paint at Calgary’s city hall.
Blaise Boehmer, press secretary for Alberta’s new justice minister, Kaycee Madu, declined to comment, referring the Post to a statement from Madu last week. In it, Madu condemned “cowardly and despicable” acts of vandalism.
“I think that we as a society should roundly reject this particularly warped worldview,” he wrote.
There are a variety of peace officer monuments across Canada. Surrey, B.C., has a memorial to fallen RCMP officers. In Winnipeg, outside RCMP headquarters, a statue of an officer is dedicated to those killed on the job. It was vandalized in February 2020.
The three Moncton RCMP officers shot and killed in 2014 are memorialized in life-size statues in Riverfront Park. The four RCMP officers killed in the 2005 shooting in Mayerthorpe, Alta., also have statues, located in Mayerthorpe Fallen Four Memorial Park.