The committee met at 9:02 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Doug Routley. I’m the MLA for Nanaimo–North Cowichan and the Chair of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act, an all-party committee of the Legislative Assembly.

I want to acknowledge with gratitude that I’m joining today’s meeting from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation and my gratitude to be able to work from their territory today.

I would like to welcome all of those who are listening and participating to this meeting.

This committee has been tasked with undertaking a broad inquiry with respect to policing and public safety in B.C. We are taking a phased approach to this work and have several presentations with subject-matter experts, community advocacy organizations, Indigenous communities and others scheduled over the next several weeks.

We also invite British Columbians to provide written submissions beginning Monday, March 1. We will review those submissions with a view to inviting individuals and organizations to present to the committee at a later date. Further details on how to participate are available on our website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/rpa. The deadline for written submissions is 5 p.m. on Friday, April 30. Additional opportunities to participate will be available at a later phase of the consultation.

The meeting format today is that the presenters have been organized into small panels. Each presenter has a 15-minute time for their presentation. We kindly ask that presenters be respectful of this time limit. Following presentations from the panel, there will be time for questions from committee members. At that time, I ask that members raise their hand to indicate they have a question, and we will keep a speaking list.

[9:05 a.m.]

I also ask that everyone please put themselves on mute and wait until you are recognized before speaking. All audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website, and a complete transcript will also be posted.

Now I’ll ask members of the committee to introduce themselves.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good morning, everyone. Thank you for attending today. I look forward to hearing the proceedings. I’m Dan Davies. I’m from Peace River North.

K. Kirkpatrick: Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Karin Kirkpatrick, and I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

R. Singh: Good morning, everyone. Rachna Singh, MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

A. Olsen: Good morning, everybody. Adam Olsen, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands.

T. Halford: Trevor Halford, MLA for Surrey–White Rock.

G. Begg: Good morning, everyone. I’m Garry Begg. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Guildford.

R. Glumac: Good morning. Rick Glumac, MLA for Port Moody–Coquitlam.

H. Sandhu: Good morning, everyone. I’m Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

D. Routley (Chair): Joining us today are three panelists: Yvon Dandurand, from the University of the Fraser Valley; Samir Gandesha, from Simon Fraser University; and Hugh Braker, president, and Darryl Shackelly, acting executive director, of the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of B.C.

It’s my pleasure to welcome you all to the panel.

First, I will call on Mr. Dandurand for his 15-minute presentation.

Presentations on Police Act

YVON DANDURAND

Y. Dandurand: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning. First, I would like to thank the committee for the invitation to present here today.

I’m a criminologist and professor emeritus at the University of the Fraser Valley and a senior associate and fellow of the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy in Vancouver. I’m also a member of the Abbotsford police board. However, today I’m appearing before the committee in my own professional capacity.

The committee has heard, and I’m sure will continue to hear, many great suggestions about how to address policing issues and deficiencies in the Police Act that have been encountered in the past. You’ll be invited to look, so to speak, in the rearview mirror and help us avoid similar issues in the future. Of course, it’s absolutely essential that we try to draw lessons from past experience. In time, however, we’ll still want to think about what kind of legislative framework will be necessary for the police to meet the challenges of the future. It is absolutely essential that we all try to anticipate and prepare for a different world.

In policing, people now often talk about the need for strategic foresight, but in practice, there’s very little of it. A few years ago there was a national exercise on the future of policing, but in the end, that work could be summed up simply as follows. First, there are new technological challenges that affect us all, including the police, and policing has become more complex. Second, public expectations of the police are evolving and growing. Third, the police cannot do everything, and therefore, choices must be made.

There were not a lot of details provided at the time about how such choices should be made and by whom. This brings us to the question of police governance and how it should be guided by legislation. Addressing that question, I realize there’s a central part of the mandate of the committee, together with related issues of civilian oversight, transparency, structure, standards, recruitment and training. Rethinking police governance is significant because it raises fundamental questions about to whom the police are accountable, who controls and influences what the police do and whose specific interests the police prioritize.

[9:10 a.m.]

It will not have escaped the attention of members of this committee that in the present public debate about policing, the emphasis is often on public confidence in the police, on the fairness and legitimacy of police practices and on the cost of policing. To be heard, many groups have suggested reallocating funds from the police to other services. These groups have been heard. They’ve certainly got the attention of police leaders and, I’m sure, the attention of members of this committee.

I’ve a limited amount of time here. So let me take the example of organized crime, money laundering, illicit markets, financial crimes, cybercrime. A lot of these issues, as you know, have been raised in this province, particularly money laundering and its link to organized crime and its impact. I realize, of course, that some of those issues are being considered by the Cullen commission. Let me ask you: which local police force in B.C. is presently equipped to properly deal with any of these issues?

The same forces that benefit legitimate business — for example, globalization and communication technologies — have also made organized crime networks more resilient than ever. In fact, technology has enabled all-new illegal industries. New forms of digital crime emerge daily, requiring the constant development of specialized investigation approaches. For example, the Internet has made new and more effective avenues available for the marketing and distribution of drugs and other prohibited goods and services.

Many traditional law enforcement approaches have become obsolete. Law enforcement agencies struggle to address cybercrime and financial crimes in a coherent manner. Clearly, they haven’t found a way yet in this province. They must move beyond reactive responses and adopt strategic, proactive approaches. The police must also be able and have the means to sustain their efforts over time, something which, in itself, also presents some real difficulties.

Now, very little of what I just described is facilitated by the present police governance structure and mechanism. Let me try to explain that. How are law enforcement priorities established and maintained? There are policing priorities, of course, set annually, in accordance with the law, by the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General. But to what extent are these priorities actually reflected in local policing? How do we know whether they are?

At the local level, the main determining factor for priority-setting in policing is typically the budgetary process, during which the need for sustained and intensive law enforcement efforts is often sacrificed to the need to come up with a balanced budget. In other instances, when you choose whose impact is primarily local, it clearly captures the attention of local decision-makers. However, at the same time, problems that primarily affect other communities are seen as low priorities.

At the community level, organized crime rarely seems to score high on the priority scale — unless, of course, it is associated with local gang violence and other immediate threats to that community. Law enforcement priorities, when defined at the local level, unfortunately, tend to be relatively parochial. Local communities, in my experience, are not necessarily averse to law enforcement strategies that simply displace crime to another community.

Nationally and internationally, governments have alternated between the desire to centralize police governance and to amalgamate police services and, on the other hand, the need to respond to local pressure and localized police governance as much as possible. We have found a good balance in this province, but perhaps it is possible to improve on it. Clearly, it is a matter of finding the appropriate balance between the two approaches.

With respect to major threats against public safety and serious transnational crime, we need to find ways to align law enforcement efforts to respond as a single system. We still have a long way to go in this province to improve governance, tasking and coordinating to ensure that all levers and means are brought to bear effectively against those threats. A fragmented police structure — and, therefore, a fragmented police governance — will not serve us well in the future.

[9:15 a.m.]

An argument is oftentimes made in favour of creating specialized enforcement agencies. We have a few in this province. I suspect that we’re about to see quite a few others — integrated units, and so on — to deal with specific forms of serious crime.

The resulting issues of law enforcement coordination — interagency exchange of information, intelligence sharing, competition for law enforcement resources — however, emerge out of these efforts and simply cannot be neglected. They obviously require a more complex level of governance and oversight. In practice, these specialized units often lack, in my view, the strong governance and oversight structures needed to independently set priorities, provide direction and evaluate results.

Now, talking about results, this brings me to a second important point I would like to make today. In spite of promises and timid attempts, this province still has to come up with an agreed-upon set of performance metrics for police.

Police boards absolutely need something like this to perform their oversight function. They have more or less been dissuaded from developing their own metrics, based on the assumption that the province would come up with some framework and that it would be preferable to have a common set of metrics across the province. Police boards are therefore reduced to using crime statistics and the number of calls for services as measures of performance, when these measures are basically measures of workload.

The Police Act should mandate the implementation of a results-based performance measurement system for all police activities. Police services has had a long time to develop such a system and has apparently avoided doing so. This is essential, in my view, for organizational ac­countability and leadership accountability in policing.

The Police Act, as it currently exists, contains a lot of provisions focusing on individual accountability. I would say that when it comes to individual accountability, this province has a very robust regime. Of course, that could be perfected, particularly with respect to various forms of individual misconduct. However, the broader aspects of institutional and organizational accountability, with reference to compliance with provincial standards and public safety outcomes, have received less attention. Police boards, I think, need a lot more statutory guidance, as well as a lot more support and funding to exercise this crucial responsibility.

A third point to which I would like to draw the attention of the committee is transparency. The performance measurement data I just referred to are practically useless if they are not made public in a timely and honest way. Public confidence in the police must be built on greater transparency — something I think we all understand but have not necessarily always acted upon.

Law enforcement agencies have a tradition of opacity and secrecy. Opening their books, figuratively and literally, is not something that comes naturally to them. The Police Act should make it compulsory for police boards and police forces to make their official policies public and readily accessible by anyone who is interested. The same goes for budgets, salary scales, strategic plans and other information that should properly be in the public domain. I would argue that the same should apply to special enforcement units and other police-related agencies.

The Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, in his September letter to chairs of police boards, emphasized the need for greater public awareness of the role of police boards as a policing priority and as a measure to promote public confidence in the police. That priority has to be taken very seriously indeed.

The budgeting and oversight roles that police boards play must also be done as openly as possible. Funding for police services is a public policy issue, and it can rapidly become politicized, as we have all, of course, observed over the last few months in this province. The capacity of a municipality to increase funding for policing must remain proportional to its tax base, and not all municipalities have the same needs.

[9:20 a.m.]

The combined impact of political decentralization and financial austerity and the economic impact of the pandemic, which we are just beginning to feel, as well as limited tax revenue, is resulting in what amounts to a devolution of blame by the provincial government to the municipal governments.

The future of policing is also, I would say, about recruiting, hiring and training policemen for the future. There are many unresolved issues in this province about where the responsibility lies for police training, the role of the Justice Institute and funding for ongoing police training. I’m not sure about how much of that issue can be addressed in the Police Act, but it certainly must be addressed urgently. We have had numerous reports and analyses of the situation and still have not acted to provide a provincial framework for effective and ongoing training of police officers.

Also, acquiring and retaining the necessary expertise to conduct complex investigations — for instance, in the case of cybercrime and financial crime — is a complicated process. Cyber expertise has a short lifespan. Cyber competence is difficult to acquire, because it’s a very competitive market. Cybercrime is definitely an area where civilians are more likely to have much greater expertise than traditional police.

Law enforcement agencies have begun to rely more heavily on civilians who possess the necessary skills to support complex corruption, financial crime, cybercrime and environmental crime investigations. Unfortunately, these civilians are often poorly integrated and retained by police organizations as part of major investigation teams. That is clearly, if we are thinking about the future, an area that requires greater scrutiny.

Now, finally, my last point would be about police governance and clarity in the act about where the responsibility lies for operational policies. You will know, members of the committee, that section 28 of the Police Act makes it clear that a municipal police board must make rules consistent with the act, the regulations and the director’s standards. Article 34 of the act also defines the responsibility of the chief constable in terms of implementing those policies, but it does not specifically refer to compliance or the obligation to comply with board policies, approvals and directives.

The act could be clearer, perhaps, about the respective roles of the board in making operational policies — I emphasize the words “operational policies” — and overseeing their implementation and the chief’s role in implementing these operational policies. It should be made clear in the act that police boards have direct policy-making obligations with regard to police operations and that they should not shirk this responsibility.

At the same time, some policy frameworks should also be developed by the province to assist police boards in that function. A certain level of standardization across the province is desirable, while allowing police boards to reflect local priorities, preferences and circumstances in those policies.

I thank the members of the committee for their attention. I wish them the best of luck in their mandate.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

Now I’ll invite Mr. Gandesha to present for 15 minutes.

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

S. Gandesha: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee members. Good morning.

I respectfully acknowledge that I’m speaking from the city of Vancouver, which is located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

I’m an associate professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University. I’m director of the Institute for the Humanities and founding vice-president of West Coast Coalition Against Racism. Unlike my colleague who just spoke, I’m not an expert on policing. I’m not a criminologist. I speak as a political philosopher. That’s my training background.

[9:25 a.m.]

Let me try to address each of the items of the terms of reference with recommendations, followed by rationales for them. Before doing this, however, I would like to say a few words about systemic racism. I think this is a key frame for the entire discussion.

Systemic racism is a direct result of the history of what Cedric J. Robinson calls “racial capitalism.” The term signifies that racism is inherent in capitalism and not extraneous to it. The two foundational features of racial capitalism were the genocidal expropriation of Indigenous lands and the transatlantic slave trade, which was also genocidal in its own way. As Robinson argues, the tendency of European civilization was not to homogenize groups of people but to differentiate — a differentiation that led to racial hierarchization and, as a result, exploitation, expropriation and expatriation.

Historically, both military and law enforcement in the United States and Canada were centred on the consolidation of these twin dimensions of racial capitalism. Wet’suwet’en Elder Freda Huson makes this very clear when she states: “In our experience, since first contact, RCMP have been created by the federal government to dispossess Indigenous Peoples of their lands. They have proven that through their harassment of my people to support Coastal GasLink in invading our territories.”

It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that this history shapes the present reality of policing and leads to the particularly brutal treatment of Indigenous Peoples and Black Canadians, as Robyn Maynard has meticulously documented in her 2017 book, Policing Black Lives…in Canada. When addressing racism, it is necessary to differentiate between its direct and egregious expression, which often has violent and even murderous consequences, on the one hand, and the subtle and often hidden forms, which are referred to as systemic racism, on the other.

Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton provide an excellent illustration of these two forms of racism. When referring to the United States, they contend, and it’s somewhat of a lengthy quote:

“When a Black family moves into a home in a white neighbourhood and is stoned, burned or routed out, they are victims of an overt act of individual racism which most people will condemn. But it is institutional racism that keeps Black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.”

Closer to home, an example of an overt act of racism was when a certain former Premier of Ontario, in the 1990s, was heard screaming into his phone: “Get the fucking Indians out of my park.” Within hours, a non-threatening, unarmed member of the Stoney Point Nation, Dudley George, would be killed by multiple shots from an officer of the OPP at Ipperwash, Ontario. This was a clear and direct expression of racism in its direct form, without any question.

Evidence of the systemic racism in Canada, which is direct, effective, ongoing, settler colonialism, was recently made clear by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination when it called last year for the suspension of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, the Site C dam and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Such a view was echoed in a paper published in 2019 by Scott Clark, PhD, for the Department of Justice Canada entitled Overrepresentation of Indigenous People in the Canadian Justice System: Causes and Responses. According to Clark, such overrepresentation has to do with three factors: (1) colonialism, (2) socioeconomic marginalization and (3) clashes of culture.

[9:30 a.m.]

Other examples of systemic racism include but are not limited to what Mi’kmaw lawyer, writer and chair of Indigenous governance at Ryerson University, Prof. Pam Palmater, has called Canada’s state of emergency, the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered indigenous girls and women. This has hit B.C. particularly hard, as committee members here will know, both in the infamous case of Robert Pickton as well as in an undetermined number of Indigenous girls and women who have disappeared since 1970 on a 425-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 running between Prince George and Prince Rupert that Florence Naziel has called the Highway of Tears.

Two, it can also be seen in the overincarceration of Indigenous Peoples. In 2007 and 2008, the rate was something like 20 percent. A mere ten years later, in 2017-2018, it rose to 28 percent, while the proportion of Indigenous Peoples in the country was around 4.1 percent. The figures for youth, particularly girls, are even worse. Indigenous girls make up some 60 percent of all female youth incarcerated.

A third example. The disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black and racialized persons in Toronto can be seen in figures gathered since May 20 of last year. In Toronto, 50 percent of the population is comprised of members of these groups, yet they account for some 83 percent of all cases of COVID.

Let me turn now to my recommendations in the following order: first, I’ll address transparency and oversight; two, systemic racism; three, UNDRIP; and then finally, I’ll talk about complex social issues.

Transparency and oversight.

One, municipalities in B.C. ought to be required to follow the lead of their counterparts in other provinces and break out their expenditures on so-called protective services such as policing, firefighting, bylaw enforcement and emergency services, so that the public can clearly ascertain exact policing allocations. I think I’m echoing some of the things that Professor Dandurand had mentioned.

Two, adequate funding ought to be made available for individuals and/or families who wish to pursue complaints against the police.

Three, the province might consider raising, again, the myriad problems with the anti-terror law, a key dimension of which is that the additional so-called kinetic powers afforded to CSIS have not, to my knowledge, been met with enhanced civilian oversight. Furthermore, as a leaked internal RCMP memo revealed, the real target of such legislation was less the supposed jihadi threat than Indigenous land offenders and their allies.

Rationale. Independent civilian oversight — again, I think I’m echoing the previous witness — of law enforcement is what distinguishes liberal democratic societies such as our own from police states and military dictatorships. As we have seen globally, as well as in the previous four years in the United States, the line separating the two is extremely thin and precarious.

Two, systemic racism. My recommendations.

One, insofar as systemic racism is produced and reproduced via institutional cultures, altering this culture within law enforcement via anti-racist education and training ought to be amongst the highest priorities for police reform.

Two, there should be a way of systematically screening out candidates with bigoted, sadistic and/or authoritarian psychological dispositions.

Three, there ought be zero tolerance for officers with memberships in or affiliations with neo-fascist and/or white supremacist social movements and/or political organizations.

Four, more generally, there needs to be greater public education about the ongoing effects of settler colonialism on racialized communities in general and First Nations in particular.

Five, there ought to be greater consultation with marginalized communities, particularly First Nations, to build trust between them and law enforcement agencies.

Six, while the information must be handled very carefully, there seems to be a need for race-based data that can be used to identify some of the effects of systemic racism via policing and/or, for example, the effects of COVID-19 on Indigenous and racialized communities.

Rationale. As I discuss at length in my submitted notes, systemic racism exists across society, but as we know from a raft of examples both in Canada and the United States, it disproportionately affects Indigenous Peoples and Black Canadians in particular.

[9:35 a.m.]

The shift of spending priorities, on which I’ll have more to say in a minute, only exacerbates such systemic racism, as persons from these groups tend to be poor due to social exclusion and marginalization, and therefore more reliant on social services, have more negative interactions with law enforcement and, as a result, are disproportionately represented in Canada’s prison systems.

Let me turn now to UNDRIP and my recommendations.

One, the implementation of the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples must continue to proceed apace. This must include an overarching framework for achieving Indigenous sovereignty and genuine nation-to-nation relations.

Two, it bears repeating that central to UNDRIP is meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities, particularly around major development projects that can deeply impact traditional hunting grounds and fishing waters.

Three, complex governance structures within First Na­tions ought to be recognized. It is not enough to consult with elected band councils. Traditional hereditary leadership must also be consulted with and listened to.

Four, the implementation of UNDRIP can reasonably be expected to go a considerable distance towards reversing the unconscionable overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples within the prison system. The latter, as we know from the TRC, is in part a result of ongoing settler colonialism and all of the transgenerational traumatic effects that this entails.

Rationale. As Canada sought to transform itself into a petrostate, or what a previous Prime Minister called an energy superpower, we witnessed a doubling down on development projects, in particular the construction of pipelines, and the inevitable encroachment on unceded Indigenous lands. Insofar as these projects proceed with­out the free, prior and informed consent of proper Indigenous authorities — here many cases can be cited; I’ve already mentioned some of them — one might properly describe it as a kind of process of recolonization.

Playing a key role in this process — and I’ll only refer back to Wet’suwet’en Elder Freda Huson — is, of course, the RCMP. The RCMP plays a key role in this.

Let me turn to the final complex social issues.

One, the shift of funds from social services to law enforcement over the past five decades must be reversed.

Two, funds must be diverted from police budgets to affordable housing, mental health supports, harm reduction measures, funding for more social workers in addition to culturally appropriate child and youth services.

Three, law enforcement agencies themselves ought to be better trained and equipped in recognizing mental health issues and how to deal with them without the use of force.

Rationale. With this, I will conclude. Over the past 50 years, police budgets have grown in relation to public spending on social services. A recent study done by the Globe and Mail analyzing spending on law enforcement relative to other municipal services in Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia, found that spending on law en­forcement significantly outpaced spending on municipal services such as transit, city planning and social services.

It found that between 2009 and 2018, police spending in these three provinces grew by 42 percent, compared to 37 percent for all the other municipal services combined. This contrasts starkly with the fact that, according to Statistics Canada, crime rates have steadily been on the decline in our country such 2000, reaching its lowest level since 1969 in 2013. While many reasons for this have been adduced, increases to police budgets appear not to be have been one of them.

A punitive law and order conception of security seems to have taken precedence over a conception of security grounded in building healthy, sustainable communities.

[9:40 a.m.]

The demand to defund the police that we hear from many quarters these days, particularly after the death of George Floyd, isn’t simply about decreasing funding for law enforcement. Rather, as African-American philosopher, writer and long-time civil rights activist Angela Davis recently stated: “It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions — mental health counsellors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.”

Thanks very much for your attention. I welcome your questions.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Our next presentation is from the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of B.C. We have with us, I believe, Mr. Hugh Braker, the president, and Darryl Shackelly, the acting ED, executive director.

Take it away.

NATIVE COURTWORKER
AND COUNSELLING ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

H. Braker: [Nuučaan̓uɫ was spoken.]

Thank you very much to the committee for allowing us to make submissions for you today.

The name given to me by my mother at her potlatch is [Nuučaan̓uɫ was spoken], which means “whales going around the corner,” but my name has nothing to do with whales or corners. It’s a name that reflects law. My common name is Hugh Braker. I’m president of the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of B.C. and have been president off and on for 30 years. With me today is Darryl.

D. Shackelly: Hello. My name is Darryl Shackelly. I’m the acting executive director of the native courtworkers. I would like to acknowledge the opportunity to address the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act.

I’d also like to acknowledge the unceded territory of the Squamish First Nations, on whose land our organization is situated.

I’d like to also thank Mr. Gandesha for submitting the lion’s share of our presentation today. It brought a lot of knowledge, but it’s stuff that we reflect as well.

H. Braker: Thank you. The Native Courtworker and Counselling Association of B.C. has been in existence for 48 years. We have approximately 50 employees throughout B.C. in most of the courts of the province.

Our real task is to provide information to First Nations people who find themselves before the courts or looking for information about the law. The second is to ensure that the people have access to the necessary resources that they may need at any given time.

We have been variously commented on by provincial court judges, by police, by probation, by court services as being integral to the working of the justice system in B.C. I remember the now-retired Judge Saunderson from Campbell River once wrote a letter in which he said that many of his hearings in Port Hardy and other places would simply collapse if the native courtworker was not there. He said they are necessary to the functioning of the courts.

Our position as front-line workers with Aboriginal people in courts and law has given us a unique opportunity, we suggest, to make some submissions to this committee. We have provided you with a paper that we have written. I’m not going to read it. You have the ability to do that, I’m sure, yourselves, and to take from it the recommendations that we make. What I would like to do in our 15 minutes is to expand on our report. Like many organizations, we don’t have a budget for preparing these types of submissions to you, and we rely on the work of many of our staff.

Firstly, I’d like to suggest to the committee that fundamental to your deliberations on the Police Act amendments is a knowledge of the history of police interaction with First Nations people in British Columbia. It’s fundamental because there is so much distrust of the justice system and the police by Aboriginal people today and so much ignorance in the police forces about Aboriginal people in the law today.

I was a lawyer for 25 years and practised exclusively law with respect to Aboriginal people. I once interviewed an Elder from Ahousat about the Meares Island court case, actually, and he told me about a time in the 1910s when he was attending a potlatch at Opitsaht, just across the bay from Tofino.

[9:45 a.m.]

The police arrived and arrested everybody and took them to a lockup which was then located at Stubbs Island near Tofino. That brought home, to myself, the knowledge that Aboriginal people have about their treatment by the police historically and why there is so much mistrust today. Here was an Elder who had told his family stories about having to go to jail for nothing more than being Aboriginal. So that story, that feeling, that mistrust, that suspicion about the police carried on for generation after generation, and it carries on today.

I think that there needs to be an understanding that Aboriginal people don’t compartmentalize the justice system. We tend to view it holistically. So the courts, the police, the sheriffs, the court services, probation officers — they’re all seen as part of a system that we have to deal with.

Today in British Columbia over 50 percent of children being taken into care by court order are Aboriginal, but we’re only 5 percent of the population. Aboriginal people sit back and reflect on a justice system that takes away so many Aboriginal children.

I don’t envy your task, to be quite honest. I think it’s a formidable one that you’re going to have, just to understand the history of Aboriginal people and the law — the fact that sometimes the police were sent to the reserve to take children away from their families and put them in residential school; the fact that Aboriginal people, over the many decades of their involvement with the police, often see the police treating them differently than they see the police treating non-Aboriginal people.

And it continues today. For example, when I was a lawyer, I represented an Aboriginal youth who was charged with break and enter and theft. He had been chased down by the family and friends of the person who rented the apartment that he was accused of breaking into. They extricated a confession from him by stubbing cigarettes out on his cheek, making burn marks in his cheek because they took their cigarettes and stubbed them out on his cheek.

He was charged with break and enter. Nobody really raised an issue with that. What shocked the Aboriginal community was that the beating — he was also beaten — that he was subjected to and the torture that he was subjected to ended up in no charges for the non-Aboriginal people.

When someone looks at it and tries to understand the Aboriginal view, you must try and understand why Aboriginal people look and think to themselves: “Well, the Aboriginal youth is charged, but the white adults who tortured him and beat him to get a confession are not charged with anything.” That raises suspicions that the justice system is two-handed and does not treat everyone the same.

So we say that there’s quite a bit of a challenge before this committee. We don’t belittle it. We think that there’s a lot of distrust and fear.

I was a lawyer for 25 years and have a great respect for the rule of law. There are many RCMP officers that I have great respect for. I have no respect whatsoever for the RCMP as an organization or as a force, and I might say that I go further and have very little respect for Victoria city police or Vancouver city police either, although I do readily admit that there have been huge changes within the past 20 years in all of those forces.

I think this committee should understand that Indigenous people, when they’re seeking assistance, come to the native courtworkers, always. We are Aboriginal. Every single one of our workers is Aboriginal, and the people identify with us. They feel comfortable with us. They respect us, and they believe in what we say.

When an Aboriginal person wants to apply for legal aide, they very rarely call the 1-800 number. They go see the native courtworkers. When an Aboriginal person wants to complain about conduct by the police, they never go through the police complaints process. They come and see the native courtworkers.

[9:50 a.m.]

We sit in a unique position, because we are the same, even though we have different cultures. We are the same. We are all Indigenous. The people who are in conflict with the law or who have issues with respect to the law will come and see us.

I would like to expand just a bit because I think this committee has a major task in front of it on UNDRIP. You all know that the province passed legislation that was assented to on November 28, 2019 on the declaration of the rights of Indigenous people. If you look at the purpose of the legislation, it says that the purpose of this act is to affirm the application of the declaration to the laws of British Columbia and to contribute to the implementation of the declaration.

My suggestion and submission to you is that part of your task today in reforming the Police Act is to follow the UNDRIP legislation that British Columbia implemented in November. We want to draw your attention to four particular sections of UNDRIP.

Firstly, article 1 of UNDRIP, United Nations declaration of the rights of Indigenous people, says: “Indigenous Peoples have the right to the full enjoyment…of all human rights.” I suggest to you that must be reflected in the Police Act.

Article 2: Indigenous Peoples have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination based on their Indigenous origin or identity. Again, I suggest to you that must be reflected in the Police Act.

Article 7: “Indigenous individuals have the rights to life, physical and mental integrity, liberty and security of person.” That section, strongly, must be reflected in the Police Act.

Article 15(2): “States shall take effective measures, in consultation and cooperation with the Indigenous Peoples concerned, to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination and to promote tolerance, understanding and good relations among Indigenous Peoples and all other segments of society.” I suggest to you that article 15 should be reflected in the Police Act to combat prejudice and eliminate discrimination.

Finally, article 22: “States shall take measures, in conjunction with Indigenous Peoples, to ensure that Indigenous women and children enjoy the full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination.”

From the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association’s perspective, those sections of the UNDRIP legislation…. Remember that B.C. has passed legislation saying that we should try and make sure our laws comply with UNDRIP. I suggest to you that this committee has a task ahead of it to ensure that any revisions to the Police Act reflect those sections of UNDRIP.

In particular, the courtworkers are troubled by a number of issues. Racism has already been mentioned. We believe that racism is both systemic and overt in British Columbia. You have heard submissions already this morning and otherwise about the horrendous rates of incarceration for Aboriginal people, not just across Canada, but in British Columbia. Aboriginal women and girls, Aboriginal youth and Aboriginal men and women suffer from disproportionate numbers for incarceration. We’re disproportionately high.

If you studied how many people die in police custody in British Columbia, the numbers for Aboriginal people are disproportionately way higher than other people. The Native Courtworker and Counselling Association did a study, which is referred to in our written submission to you, about how many Aboriginal people die while in custody. Not only are the numbers dying in custody higher than their proportion of the population, but the numbers who die in police custody are higher than their part of the population.

[9:55 a.m.]

British Columbia has a long way to go, in my submission to you. It’s not just that we’re incarcerated more. If you look at the statistics for charges by the police, it’s more likely, if you’re Aboriginal youth, that you’re going to be charged than if you’re not Aboriginal. The native courtworkers have seen that over and over and over again.

So we say, with respect to racism, that there’s no place for it in any police force in Canada. Police forces must be cognizant of and reflective of the societies that they deal with. We believe that racism should be an automatic ticket out of the police force. We do not believe that the police should belong to far-right organizations, as has now been discovered in Canada with respect to the military. It should be automatic grounds for leaving the police.

We do not believe that the police should investigate themselves, ever, when there are allegations of racism. The trust of the people of British Columbia is lost when they see the police investigating the police.

I remember that once we had a new police officer in my hometown, and he was Aboriginal. He was either Nisg̱a’a or Haida. I forget. One of those two. He was new to Port Alberni. He liked to tell the story that when he first arrived, he noticed that one of the Caucasian police officers — the RCMP officers — would always come on his radio and announce, “Bringing another drunk Indian in,” meaning he had picked up a drunk Indian, and he was taking them to the lockup at the Port Alberni police station. He’d always announce bringing another drunk Indian in.

The Aboriginal police officer got fed up with that. One day he went looking for a drunk Caucasian, and he found one on the street in Port Alberni. He got onto his radio and said: “Bringing another drunk white man in.” He never, ever heard the announcement from the Caucasian police officer ever again that he was bringing in another drunk Indian.

To me, that’s an example of overt racism in British Columbia. It’s not systemic. It’s overt. There’s no place for that in the practice of law or policing in this province. Every day while I was a lawyer, I listened to racism in court. I listened to lawyers stand up while representing an Aboriginal woman and say to the judge: “As is so often the trouble with her people, Your Honour, she was drunk at the time.” That’s racism. It’s overt racism, and it’s systemic racism.

I listened to a provincial court judge while hearing a fishing case. After I had told the judge, “It’s very stormy outside. My clients cannot get into court — because they have to take a boat from where they live — because of the storm today,” the judge looked up and said: “Well, it doesn’t stop them from coming in for their beer.” That, to me, is an example of overt and systemic racism.

Although those two examples I’ve just given you — that one last example and the lawyer one before it — do not involve the police, they’re reflective, in my view to you, of a systemic racism that occurs in British Columbia.

The worst example of systemic racism and overt racism in B.C. involves my own family. My nephew is Black. He comes from the Cayman Islands and married my niece. When he first moved to British Columbia, we lost track of how many times he was stopped by the police. He was stopped by the police at seven in the morning while on his way to work and never charged with anything — stopped. He has no criminal record to this day. He was stopped so many times, we just lost track. He was stopped while getting his daughter from kindergarten, more than once — never any charges. I guess Black men are not supposed to have children. I don’t know.

The worst example was being stopped by the RCMP at a mall in Nanaimo, where he was forced to lie on the cement with his arms and legs outstretched and his head up on the curb. Curbing, as you may know, is used by gangs in the United States to kill other gang members. It’s called curbing. He was terrified.

He would be embarrassed today if he knew that I was telling you the stories, but it has become obvious to us — it has reaffirmed to us as Indigenous people — that the racism in the police force doesn’t just extend to Aboriginal people. It extends to other people of colour in British Columbia as well. So we say there has to be something done about the racism.

[10:00 a.m.]

Two, we say there has to be knowledge of and sensitivity to Aboriginal people’s cultures and their issues. We think that’s lacking in the police forces in British Columbia. They don’t understand the issues that come with having more than 50 percent of children in care being Aboriginal. They don’t understand the issues that come with Aboriginal poverty on the reserve.

I see that I’m running out of time. Three, we must find some way of dealing with the history — the history of the bad relationship between the police and the Indigenous People. We need to heal that relationship, not just for the police but for the Aboriginal people as well. There’s no comfort that Aboriginal people feel with respect to the police forces in British Columbia. There’s no trust. We say that we need to find a way to get around that.

I think my time is up, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to thank you for allowing us to make those additional comments, in addition to the written submissions we’ve given to you.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

Now this brings us to the question portion of our meeting.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you to all three of the presenters. It was very, very interesting information.

In particular, Mr. Braker, thank you for your submission. I actually found it very emotional, as I should. I think that the examples that you gave…. We know, but we don’t know, the kinds of things that are happening. The ability and the way in which you articulated it in your submission, and as you just did now, is really eye opening for us and our ability to be able to look at legislation — the Police Act or any kind of legislation — through that colonial lens and have the realization and understanding that these are colonial measures. These are pieces of legislation that have been developed over years without consideration of reconciliation, cultural differences. Thank you very much for that.

I did have one question. I’m curious about the First Nations and Indigenous courts. I know that’s kind of after the initial interaction with police. Is that a mechanism that helps to support or dispel some of this racism by being able to support First Nations people through the justice system? Has that worked?

H. Braker: Thank you for the question. We have to remember that the Indigenous courts that I’m familiar with are really sentencing courts. They don’t actually hold trials. What they do is sentence a person. If you’re looking at just the sentencing of Aboriginal people, yes, they can have the effect of dealing with the racism and the discrimination and the over-incarceration of Aboriginal people.

I always approach them with caution. In my experience as a lawyer, there are many times when Aboriginal people simply want to plead guilty because they want to get out of there. They’re scared. They don’t trust the justice system. Very often the native courtworkers will hear the following: “Well, I’m going to be convicted anyway.” I don’t know how many times the native courtworkers have heard that.

If you can get past that first part, of Aboriginal people sometimes wanting to just plead guilty to get out of there, then yes, the sentencing court does have some good features to it, some very good features.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much. I have other questions, but I’ll let my colleagues go first.

A. Olsen: Thank you all for your three very good presentations today. I think the one thing that stands out to me — I’d just like to ask Mr. Braker — is: are there any other specialized courtworkers in our system for any other racialized groups? Is the native courtworker there with colleagues from other segments of our demographics in our communities?

[10:05 a.m.]

H. Braker: I’ll ask Darryl to answer that. As president of the association, I’m not a front-line worker, whereas Darryl has much more experience with front-line workers.

D. Shackelly: Mr. Olsen, could you expand on your question? You’re seeing other types of courtworkers, other types of…?

A. Olsen: Well, yeah. We’ve got native courtworkers working in, as Mr. Braker put it, nearly every court across the province. My father was a native courtworker, actually, in the Sidney court.

My question is: are there other courtworkers specialized, working with other racialized demographics in our society?

D. Shackelly: I will say that at the front-line level our staff are tasked with the responsibility of making sure that people are prepared for court appearances. There are other groups within courts that have duties that are similar. They have interpreters. Interpreters assist with the language barrier, but they also, similar to what we do, prepare people for court, explain their rights and responsibilities, like we prepare people for court.

The difference between them and us is once we’re done assisting people with court appearances, we’re also working towards creating wellness plans and plans moving forward, so court isn’t just the primary goal of what we do. It’s working with court personnel, making people prepared for appearances, and then looking at connecting with resources in the existing community to work with some of the challenges that are put forward. If that answers your question.

A. Olsen: Thank you for that. It’s as I expected. I think it’s important to just highlight the fact that for 48 years we have entrenched a system which requires, essentially, this level of support for Indigenous People in our province. While there are other supports for others, as you’ve highlighted, this is a robust system that’s been set up, because we have these outcomes that require this level of support, and I find it…. Well, it’s very troubling.

To Mr. Gandesha, I’m not going to add anything, but I do want to highlight something that has been, I think, an aspect of this work that we’re doing here on this committee for me, and that is that this is really…. The situation that we’re in today has evolved out of the colonization of this country. I was just googling, while we were talking, the photos of the RCMP in their red serges taking kids to residential schools. There are some very shocking images of this.

I think the context you’ve put this in for us today of racial capitalism and the history of our province…. What we are unpacking here is something that’s very, very large and very deeply entrenched in our society that cannot be done simply, as I’ve said often, one silo at a time. Yes, this Police Act is one piece of this, but this is our entire society that we’re talking about and the foundation of the society that we’ve built on it. So thank you for highlighting that today.

R. Singh: Thank you to all the presenters. I would just echo my colleagues. Today’s presentations were very moving, talking about the issues that we know about, how much they’re entrenched in our system. Thank you for bringing that up.

I just have one question for Mr. Braker. It’s a very deep issue. I don’t think there would be a simple answer to this. You talk about the distrust. You talk about what the Indigenous communities have gone through, not just in British Columbia but in Canada. You say that you don’t trust the organizations like the RCMP — not just you, but the Indigenous People don’t trust the Vancouver police department or the Victoria police department. What needs to be done?

We know. We have heard this before as well in other committees. This is becoming obvious. It’s historical. It is definitely what people have endured here. I don’t want to simplify it. What steps need to be taken?

[10:10 a.m.]

H. Braker: You are certainly right in one thing: this is incredibly complicated and will take some time, but part of it is going to be education of the police. I think there needs to be a greater understanding, on the part of police, about their history of involvement with First Nations in British Columbia. The police have a long history, as I’ve pointed out earlier, of being seen by Aboriginal people as being instrumental to putting them in residential school, to suppressing their culture by enforcing the ban on potlatches, by constantly arresting Aboriginal people when other people are not arrested, and by their treatment at the hands of the RCMP.

Firstly, let’s educate the police so that they have an understanding of it, in the hope that their approach will be different. That’s what the hope is. Then the second thing must be approaching the Aboriginal people themselves so that they can vocalize their history of interaction with the police and what they’ve been told about the suppression of the potlatches.

It’s still a common story among Aboriginal people today: how potlatches were outlawed and how the police were instrumental in arresting people at potlatches. It’s still commonly told in Aboriginal communities today. Let’s vocalize that, and then let’s talk to the Aboriginal people about how we’re going to get around that. Without that dialogue happening with the Aboriginal people, I don’t think there will be change.

G. Begg: Thanks to all the presenters. A question for Yvon.

You talked briefly…. Hopefully, you can expand upon it, because it’s relevant to some of the issues that we’re struggling with on this committee. That’s in relation to police board governance. You particularly cited the need for a greater oversight on operational policies. I wonder if you could just expand so that I better understand. Perhaps give me a couple of examples of how that would work. What operational policies might you be talking about?

Y. Dandurand: Thank you for the question. Let me just say that I can’t go into great detail, but anyone interested in a detailed discussion of this could look at the report of Justice Morden in 2012, who made extensive recommendations about the role of police boards when it comes to operational policy. That was following incidents that had taken place during the G20 Summit in Toronto. There’s a very long discussion. Justice Morden was a former associate chief judge.

Basically, the idea is that the law needs to be a little clearer about two things. Obviously, boards cannot interfere with the operations of the police, because you don’t want any of this to be coloured by political considerations or anything else. Clearly, the police need to reserve that independent capacity to act. On the other hand, the police need to have some very clear direction about how those operations need to be conducted. Now, that’s a point of contention currently, here and across Canada. Here in B.C. — where, basically, police chiefs are saying, “Your job is broad policy, and we’ll decide how we conduct our business” — clearly, that is an issue.

Some of the issues that were brought up by other presenters today, and many other issues that you will hear about, are also, clearly, matters not of general policy but matters of operational policy. Unless boards can have a clear responsibility to formulate those and hold police forces accountable for following those, then we will continue to have the same issues. It’s very important for the legislation to be precise about that. Now, if you read the legislation, as I have many times, you can interpret it in different ways, and I think there are legitimate arguments made on both sides.

[10:15 a.m.]

My view would be that clearly, standard operating procedures and directives from the chief are totally at the discretion of the chief, but the chief needs to be accountable to the board for any of those. When it comes to operational policies around priorities for action, around types of methods being used, types of investigations, and so on, the board has the responsibility.

It’s such a difficult responsibility for civilian board members. They need support from the province and police services. Otherwise, in smaller police forces, police boards don’t have the resources or the capacity to do this, so it de facto falls back again on the police chief to determine. Even though the law may say it’s the responsibility of the board, the boards typically don’t have the capacity to do the rest, unless they hire people to do it for them, and then there are budgetary implications, and so on.

I think the law needs to be a lot clearer. In doing so, I hope that the law makes it clear that operational policies are and remain the responsibility of board members and that there also needs to be oversight on how those operational policies are actually applied.

Again, I would recommend a review of Justice Morden’s report. It’s a full discussion of this, which applies to B.C. because the laws concerning police boards — or service boards, as they call them in Ontario — are very similar to ours. So the discussion contained in the report is also very directly relevant to our situation here in British Columbia.

G. Begg: Would you say, then, that what is required is not a legislative change but a clarification of already existing legislation?

Y. Dandurand: I think so. Yes, that would be appro­priate.

G. Begg: One further question, if I may, Chair, to the native courtworkers.

I’ve heard this before on other committees, of the reluctance of Indigenous persons to utilize the complaint process. I think you’ve articulated fairly well what leads them to be mistrustful of that process. I’m wondering if you can help the committee streamline the process. Or what modifications or adjustments would be required so that they feel less inhibited about making complaints?

H. Braker: One of the suggestions from the native courtworkers is that we find some sort of process for the complaints once they come to the courtworkers to make their way into the system. The Aboriginal courtworkers, almost every single day, regretfully, have complaints coming to them about the conduct of the police from Aboriginal people.

You’re right. I did try to emphasize today the fact that we are Aboriginal, so Aboriginal people feel far more comfortable with us. We should find a way to better streamline or find some way to better capture the complaints that are coming to us and putting them in front of a system that the Aboriginal people can trust.

It may take some change in the system so that Aboriginal people do not abandon their complaint, as sometimes happens. Aboriginal people become fearful, quite frankly. Or they simply don’t trust the system, or they simply think it’s taking far too much time and they’re not going to get any satisfaction anyway.

There are a number of issues there that have to be dealt with. If we could find a way to both deal with the system so that Aboriginal people are more comfortable in it and allow their complaints that come to the native courtworkers to find their way into the system, that would be a great help.

H. Sandhu: Thank you to all presenters. Great presentations and obviously powerful and emotional as well.

It’s more like a comment. Mr. Braker, thank you for sharing your son-in-law’s story. I know it takes a lot of courage, and many people can relate to that story. Those stories need to be told. Often we hear that these are hard conversations, but these conversations certainly need to happen if we really want to move forward in a meaningful way.

My comment. I often thought, from my experience working in health care…. We have all this training. I have witnessed, over the 16 years, unfortunately, working with two different health authorities, the racism coming — not all, very few, whether it’s in health care…. And comments, whether it’s comments in the staff room or comments during patient care and whatnot.

[10:20 a.m.]

Then health authorities as well. This is not relevant, but it’s very reflective of systemic racism in every sector. They have courses. People will go to a course. Some don’t want to. Some want to. I wonder…. I’m not sure if the RCMP have this cultural sensitivity course. What I’ve witnessed from my personal experience is that people go and take these courses, and unless…. If they’re not passionate, it doesn’t change anything.

Thank you for pointing out, in the police and RCMP hiring process, proper screening. I think that’s really, really a crucial point — to screen those people before hiring in order to see what kinds of views they have. That’ll be a big help. I often wonder what we can do, but that’s a great point you’ve brought forward.

It is true that the trust is not there, but I wonder. You talked about healing relationships and having a meaningful dialogue. What are your thoughts if there could be a caucus or group created by Indigenous people within the RCMP? Then through that work, we can just kind of heal those relationships, and people will come forward when it comes to a complaint process.

In the end, I highly appreciate all the input and all the presentations and your submissions from all presenters in order for us to do our work, the meaningful work, that we committed to do. Thank you.

H. Braker: Thank you very much. A couple of points we’d like to make.

One, we must get rid of the culture of denial. I was shocked, along with many of the Indigenous people I know and work with, when the head of the RCMP…. I think it was last year or perhaps a year and a half ago now. Last year, I think, she denied that there was any racism in the RCMP. We all sort of sat around with our jaws wide open, saying: “Is she on a different planet or something? Maybe the RCMP just don’t realize how much racism there is.” We were shocked.

Firstly, I think we must get rid of the denial. There must be acceptance and understanding of the racism that does exist in the police forces in Canada. Only if we have that understanding and that acceptance that it’s there can we then deal with it. We must first accept that it is there, and then we can deal with it. It’s like a fireman going to put out a fire. If he doesn’t know where the fire is or he doesn’t understand that there is a fire, he’s not going to be able to put it out. So firstly, let’s do that.

Two, it has to work two ways, I think, for the Aboriginal people to get rid of the distrust. There must be training within the police forces about the history of Aboriginal people in this country and the history of the police involvement with Aboriginal people in this country — and then also an understanding, on the part of Aboriginal people, about why we had these terrible things happening to us over the past over a hundred years now. So I say there has to be something working both ways.

Lastly, it can’t be something from nine till 12. You know, I see the police come in for some cultural training from nine in the morning till 12 noon. Then they all get up and leave and thank everybody for everything, and then that’s it. But it has to be something, I think, that’s ongoing, not just…. It’s not a one-time thing. I’m not going to get rid of racism in a police officer by just inviting him to a three-hour workshop. It ain’t going to happen.

It’s got to be something that’s ongoing, firstly. Two, it has to be structured in a way that’s going to bring home to the police officers the damage that’s being done by racism in Canada. I really think that there’s very little understanding in the police forces about how much damage is done to the social fabric of Canada when you have racism being practised against one of the groups. We have to bring an understanding of that home to the police.

Those are a few of the answers. I could go on for a few hours, Mr. Chair, on this one, but those are a few of the examples that I would use at this time. Thank you very much.

H. Sandhu: Thank you so much — excellent examples. We’ll keep everything in mind when we’re doing this work.

And you’re right. Denial is big. It’s every day. It’s there. It’s not just in the RCMP. It’s in other public sectors or private sectors as well. So thank you.

[10:25 a.m.]

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. I’m not terribly well known for punctuality, so I don’t think it’s a surprise.

T. Halford: Just a few questions. Actually, I’m not sure who I’m going to direct these to, but maybe I’ll start with Mr. Braker. I very, very much appreciated the comments and the emotional impact that I think it’s had on everybody that’s on this call or listening. A couple of things, just to get overall thoughts. Others can jump in.

In terms of the municipal police boards that we have in this province, I’m just wondering if we have adequate Indigenous representation on those boards. I don’t know the answer to that, and I guess maybe I should be embarrassed that I should. I don’t know. I know a couple of boards where, I think, they do.

I’m wondering if this is something that we need to talk more openly about in terms of having representation on those police boards. I do share MLA Sandhu’s comments on…. I don’t like using the word “training,” but in terms of educating potential members and current members on Indigenous culture, I think that that’s something we should be doing at every level, at every profession. I think we should be looking at whether or not we can start that, when you look at provincially-approved training programs, and having that as an element of the studies.

The other question I have — and I guess this one would be directed to Mr. Braker — is that you speak of the distrust, particularly with the RCMP and other municipal police forces. I think I know the answer to this, which is unfortunate. But is that creating a strong reluctance, in your mind, for Indigenous people to get involved in law enforcement? I think I know what the answer would be, but how can we attempt to bridge that divide?

H. Braker: Gosh. Firstly, dealing with the numbers on the board of the various police boards in the province, there are two approaches to take in looking at that. Number 1: should we have the police board reflecting the Aboriginal population in British Columbia, which is about 5 percent — somewhere around there? Or should we have the numbers on the board reflecting the number of Aboriginal people incarcerated — so up around 20 percent, 25 percent, depending on which statistic you’re looking at? Or should we have it reflective of the number of Aboriginal people who come into contact with the police, which is actually much higher? It just depends on where you want to go with that.

I will agree with one thing. No, there are not enough Aboriginal representatives on the police boards in this province, and there should be more. So that’s the short answer to your question on the boards from the native courtworker’s perspective. We need more appointments to the police boards in this province.

With respect to the distrust, yes, I think that is part of the reason why there are fewer Aboriginal people that go into law enforcement. Now, I have to be careful here. I did speak to an Aboriginal police officer who was off duty and went out with friends in Victoria and consumed alcohol. They went to a pub together. He was off duty and later was picked up by Victoria police and put in jail. None of the white people that he was with were put in jail. Only the Aboriginal person was put in jail.

That story goes back to the Aboriginal community. It’s now a very well-known story in a few of the Aboriginal communities on Vancouver Island. Why? Why was just the Aboriginal…? The police who arrested him, by the way, did not know that he was an RCMP officer at the time. They were city police in Victoria. So the Aboriginal people say: “Why was just the Aboriginal guy put in jail? Why weren’t the non-Aboriginal people put in jail?” There was no allegation of violence on his part. There was no allegation of rudeness on his part. There was an allegation of being drunk in public on his part. We don’t know.

[10:30 a.m.]

Yes, I think there’s a distrust that is historical that they have to deal with, but there’s also a distrust that’s based on current events as well. It’s not just something historical. Aboriginal people know what happens when they join the police force.

D. Routley (Chair): I think that is the end of our speakers’ list. I had one question, and it would be directed at Mr. Dandurand.

You mentioned calls for service as performance measure and a lack — it’s congruent with what we’ve heard, generally — of data available in order to make reasonable decisions, which is going to make this committee’s work very difficult too.

Could you perhaps give us an idea of what form you think the relevant data would be or how it might be collected?

Y. Dandurand: Thank you for your question, Mr. Chairman. There are many aspects to that question. The first one is that it’s not that the police forces don’t have data. They are swimming in data. They have a massive amount of data. The question is whether that’s collated and presented in statistics that are publicly available in a transparent way. The data exists, maybe not in a consumable form.

Secondly, there has been a serious exercise in this province, involving police chiefs and others, to develop a performance measurement framework, with a definition of data elements and all this. This was two or three years ago. Police boards at the time were told: “Well, don’t invent your own system because we’re coming up with something that will apply to the whole province.” Well, that thing disappeared from the radar completely. It’s gone.

Now, it’s not as if it’s that difficult to come up with performance measures, other than measures of workload and what I call a measure of efforts. Everyone, including probably all of us here today — certainly, my students — likes to be rewarded on effort, not on results, right? “I tried hard.” This is what I hear from my students and my kids. But clearly, we need to have performance measures that are based on results — so outcomes of safety, outcomes of fairness, all of those other things. All of the issues that were discussed today could be measured on an ongoing basis.

Now, we have met inertia. We have met resistance. I’m not sure how I would qualify it. But the bottom line is the province, various governments, have been promising us with more robust performance measurement systems for justice in general, but specifically for the police, as well, and it hasn’t come up.

What I’m suggesting to the committee is: well, make it mandatory, so probably it will then happen. It’s not a technical issue. It’s not a complicated issue. It is oftentimes a political issue, because if you start asking questions about what the police do, then you have to deal with the response — the answer. Sometimes when you have performance measurement data, you find out things that you may not really want to know or that are difficult to deal with. So politicians sometimes get a little nervous.

The other thing, the other obstacle, is that we have municipal police forces and the RCMP. The RCMP is on its own planet when it comes to performance measurements. Then municipal police forces and boards and municipalities are a little worried about comparisons between cities. “Oh look, if you’re in Langley, you get better service.” Or if you live in Richmond, it’s a different kind of thing.

We have to get to a point where we can look at those statistics as a matter of public policy and have healthy discussions.

I would just add: look at some of the issues that were brought up today by the native courtworkers. Unfortunately, we’re reduced to anecdotes. Anecdotes are very important, and they’re very touching. All of us have listened to them with great interest, and we’re touched by them. But where are the statistics?

We have broad statistics about how many Indigenous People are in prison. We have broad statistics about how many of them are serving probation or breaching probation or whatever. But when it comes to exactly what is happening to those, these statistics are not readily available.

[10:35 a.m.]

We have to get to that point where some agreed-upon set of statistics is applied to all police forces across the province. If there are comparisons that are embarrassing, well, that’s fine. We can discuss them. We can try to find out why it is that the situation is different in Mission compared to Abbotsford or Vancouver or whatever. There might be good reasons for that.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. That takes us a bit over time. I apologize to members and presenters for that.

I really appreciate this meeting and all the participants. The presenters have been excellent. Excellent questions from the committee members. A lot more information added to what we already have to process. So we hope, as a committee, if we do have questions or if we’d like to have follow-up, that you would entertain that, and also, if you have other elements that you’d like for us to consider, please feel free to contribute by writing.

With that, I’ll thank our presenters, all the members.

I would entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting. From Mr. Begg, seconded by Ms. Singh.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 10:36 a.m.