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. It’s an all-party committee of the Legislative Assembly.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging, with gratitude, that I am joining today’s meeting from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation.

I would like to welcome all those who are listening and participating to the meeting. Our committee is undertaking a broad consultation with respect to policing and public safety in B.C. We are meeting with subject-matter experts, community advocacy organizations, Indigenous communities and others.

We also invite British Columbians to provide written, audio or video submissions. 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 submissions is 5 p.m. on Friday, April 30.

Today’s meeting will start with a presentation from SUCCESS. SUCCESS has 15 minutes to speak. We do have a timer to help us with that. Following the presentation, there will be time for questions from committee members.

All the audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website. A complete transcript will also be posted.

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

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

Today I’m joining you from the Coast Salish territories, especially from the Kwantlen, Katzie and Semiahmoo First Nations.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good morning. I’m Dan Davies, the MLA for Peace River North and the Deputy Chair of the committee. I look forward to hearing from you.

K. Kirkpatrick: Good morning. Thank you so much for being here. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick.

I think, Queenie, I’ve been on some calls with you before.

[9:05 a.m.]

I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

I’m proud to have a riding located in the traditional lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish First Nations.

Thank you again for being here.

H. Sandhu: Good morning. I’m Harwinder Sandhu. I am the MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

I am joining you from the unceded territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.

A. Olsen: Good morning. It’s wonderful to be with the committee again this week. I’m honoured to be with you all.

I’m in my home here in W̱SÁNEĆ.

R. Glumac: Hi, this is MLA Rick Glumac. [Audio interrupted.]

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

G. Begg: Good morning, everyone.

Hi, Queenie. Good to see you.

I’m Garry Begg. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Guildford.

It’s my pleasure to join you today from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people, including the Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Katzie First Nations.

D. Routley (Chair): They’re all my friends, but he’s the Whip of the caucus, so I have to butter him up a bit.

Today the committee is assisted by Karan Riarh from the Parliamentary Committees Office and Billy Young from Hansard Services.

Now I’d like to introduce our first presenter. This person comes from SUCCESS. Queenie Choo is the CEO.

Presentations on Police Act

SUCCESS

Q. Choo: Thank you for inviting SUCCESS to present before you today.

I am pleased to join you from the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations.

To provide some context for those who are not familiar with SUCCESS, we are one of the largest social service agencies in British Columbia, with 48 years of history. We provide a broad range of settlement and community social services to 72,000 unique clients annually, who come from 150 countries. Before I go further, I would like to acknowledge that the community is diverse. There are many experiences and perspectives. What I offer to the committee today is only as one of many. I would encourage the committee to proactively seek out and listen to different voices — particularly from communities that have been historically excluded and oppressed — as part of your work.

First of all, I would like to set out my definition of systemic racism, which I believe will help provide some context for the remainder of my presentation. I use the definition that has been adopted in Canada’s anti-racism strategy. “Systemic…racism consists of patterns of behaviour, policies or practices that are part of the social or administrative structure of an organization and which create or perpetuate a position of relative disadvantage for racialized persons. These appear neutral on the surface but, nevertheless, have an exclusionary impact on racialized persons.” This is not about individual attitudes and behaviours. This is really about looking at the systems and the structures that create racial inequities, whether intentional or not.

Moving to the heart of my presentation today: community trust in police. For many people, the police are meant to serve the community. They are ultimately accountable to all community members. As such, there must be community trust in the police in order for the police to be effective in their role. However, statistics show that there are disparities in the community’s trust in the police.

For example, an August 2020 Statistics Canada crowdsourcing survey on experiences of discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that 23 percent of respondents indicated that they had a low level of trust in police. Certain population groups are much more likely to have a low level of trust. For example, 71 percent of the respondents who identify as gender-diverse, 52 percent who identify as Black, 40 percent who identify as Indigenous and 33 percent who identify as persons with disabilities indicated that they had low levels of trust in the police.

[9:10 a.m.]

Respondents who have experienced discrimination are even more likely to indicate they have a low level of trust in the police. We need to understand what this means and ask why. Why is it that there are such different levels of trust, among community members, in the police? What is driving these differences? When communities share their experiences and reasons, are they actually being heard by those in power to create changes? What will it take for police to earn the same level of trust from racialized communities?

These are not easy questions to answer. However, I’m very pleased to see that the province is actually taking this first step in making reforms, and I’m happy to share one set of perspectives on how to move forward.

First, one of the most popular suggestions on how to improve police services is to increase diversity by hiring more Black, Indigenous and racialized police officers. This is a popular sentiment among many community members as well. While I agree that increasing representation for greater diversity is important, this alone is not enough. Systemic racism and oppression are not HR problems. More policing, even if it is police from racialized communities, is not the only answer because the system is what needs to be different.

If there is not an organizational culture that offers true accountability, inclusion and belonging, and there is lack of culture that empowers people to generate transformative change, it will not matter how many racialized people there are in the police force. As I said at the very beginning, systemic racism is about the policies, practices and culture that make up the system and create racial inequities, whether intentional or not.

Second, policing cannot be examined outside the context of community safety and well-being. Indeed, what we need instead is to adopt a holistic view. We must start with the vision of what community safety and wellness look like, particularly for those who are oppressed and excluded. Based on this shared community vision, we then can determine what is needed to make this a reality. What are the needed institutions and systems? What do they look like?

Here we can ask what the role of policing is in achieving this vision. We need to ask how communities view police and see their role in fostering community safety and wellness. What role should they play, and what role are they not suited to play? Once we know this, then we can ensure the relevant institutional systems are sourced appropriately to achieve the community vision.

We also need to adopt a framework to get to the root causes, the root issues. We cannot continue to only address them at the surface level. That way, we are able to take a proactive and preventive view rather than a reactive view to community safety and wellness.

Third, training for police officers and leaders must be evaluated and improved so that it is appropriate for the role in achieving community safety and wellness, as well as in specific community contexts. Further, the training must be part of the comprehensive approach, rather than piecemeal workshops, as learning new practices and unlearning old practices requires constant attention and reinforcement.

Training must be reinforced with action that demonstrates accountability. In other words, it is not good enough to just attend a workshop. Rather, the learnings from the trainings must be reinforced by appropriate policy and protocols, including measures to ensure accountability.

Both formal and informal training need to be considered. Informal training is very much linked to organizational culture, according to Dr. Brian Rubineau, an associate professor in organizational behaviour at McGill University. Informal training that is behaviour that is learned from observing and copying peers and mentors can actually reinforce systemic racism. Instead, we need to foster informal training opportunities that support and model [audio interrupted] and practices.

[9:15 a.m.]

Fourth, the need to collect and share disaggregated demographic data is something that comes up often in recommendations to improve all systems. This is an area that needs to be strengthened. In order to build accountability, disaggregated demographic data on police interactions, use of police force, crime [audio interrupted] and charges, as well as police complaints, must be collected and shared. However, data must be collected and used responsibly to generate positive changes.

I echo the B.C. human rights commission in their report on disaggregated demographic data collection in B.C. I quote from the report. “Disaggregated data is merely a tool, to be utilized depending on the context and aim, and it must be accompanied by a process that supports the purpose of reducing systemic racism and oppression and achieving equity.”

There needs to be clear and independent analysis and governance to ensure the data will be focused on achieving positive changes. Data should not be weaponized against communities to create stigma, stereotyping and harm. While there may not be any intention to create harm, the impact still could be harmful, and there must be safeguards in place to prevent that from happening.

I would also like to add that there need to be actions that come from data in order to reduce oppression and promote equity. Communities, particularly communities that have been excluded and oppressed, need to be active participants in deciding how this data will be used to create positive change. The actions that come from the data must also be generated independently to reduce conflicts of interest.

The collection and disclosure of disaggregated data needs to be made mandatory by the province. There should be standardized data that needs to be collected and disclosed at least on an annual basis to foster transparency. The data that needs to be collected, as well as how it is collected, needs to be mandated at the provincial level by the government.

This is aligned with the B.C. human rights commission’s recommendation: draft “a provincial policing standard requiring all police forces in B.C. to collect and analyze race-based data,” and disaggregated demographic data, “across the full spectrum of police services, including both victims and offenders of gender-based violence on arrest and cleared-by-charges rates.”

Fifth, one of my recommendations is for greater accountability and transparency in policies, practices and training. All these areas need to be evaluated independently on a regular basis with results shared and improvements generated, implemented and monitored. The evaluation should be in reference to best and promising practices, as well as expectations of police from the community in promoting community safety and wellness.

For this process to be effective, there also needs to be an open culture that is willing to consistently evaluate, re-evaluate and implement improvements. Oftentimes, this is viewed by some as a sign of weakness and, to them, signals a lack of support for the police. However, this is far from the truth. Being accountable and supportive are two different things. Being open to evaluation and change is a demonstration of commitment to accountability and constantly doing better to ensure the safety and wellness of the community.

I would like to close by saying that, moving forward, there continues to be a need for ongoing meaningful consultation with the community. However, we must keep in mind that doing consultation should not delay meaningful actions for change.

I also want to echo the comments I made at the very beginning of my presentation. The community is diverse. There need to be active efforts to ensure that community members are able to share their perspectives and feedback.

[9:20 a.m.]

I encourage this committee to actively seek the feedback of Black, Indigenous and racialized people, as well as LGBTQ2S+ folks, youth, women, persons with disabilities, immigrants, refugees, migrant workers and those without status in Canada. The committee needs to ensure an accessible and safe space is provided for those people who share experiences and perspectives.

I would also like to add that the community needs to be consulted at all stages, not just now but also when the recommendations are developed as well. Of course, SUCCESS would be more than pleased to do whatever we can to help facilitate this process, moving forward, given the importance of this committee’s work for the community. Thank you.

D. Routley (Chair): A question I ask everybody who presents is: would you be willing to help us, going forward, if we have more questions? So I won’t have to ask that later. Thank you.

Now I’d like to thank you for your presentation. I see a couple of hands up.

T. Halford: Thank you, Queenie. It goes without saying that you’re one of the hardest-working advocates out there in the community, across the Lower Mainland and across the province. Thank you for that. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve been able to talk with you — via Zoom, it seems, more often than not.

I just wanted to say that you brought up a good point on the HR point of things. I think that’s something that somebody like me has to realize. Just in terms of what you’re seeing in the community in terms of policing and mental health, if you’re able to maybe give some of your sharings on that and ways, in your community, that we could better support policing and the bridge of mental health.

Q. Choo: Thank you for the question, Trevor. This is really real in the reality of the real world. I think that the mental health, or maybe I should say the mental health and wellness, needs to be supported from all angles. That’s why I talk about a holistic view in looking at the community safety and wellness from all angles — from the policing point of view, from the community constituency’s point of view.

The community vision, the all-inclusive vision — that needs to be articulated, created and ordered, and it belong to the community as a whole, including the police. If we can achieve that, I think the mental health and wellness will fall in place very nicely.

G. Begg: I want to echo what Trevor said, but I want, as well, to commend you. When you mention things like a holistic approach and transformative change and an organizational culture that is not exclusionary, I really sense that you get the big picture.

It’s a very multi-faceted approach, so thank you for being so articulate and for helping us, too, get the big picture. When you talk about crime and root causes, that’s what we should be talking about, and policing and root causes. I thank you again.

Q. Choo: Thank you, Garry.

R. Singh: Queenie, I really appreciate you taking the time and coming and presenting to the committee. I know the last year has been very difficult for your organization and the community as a whole, especially with the incident that we saw this week with the Atlanta shootings. I know how traumatic it is for the community.

Your work, your advocacy — I just can’t thank you enough, Queenie, for what you do in the community and how much you advocate for it. We really need strong allies like you. As I always say, thank you so much for your great work, Queenie. Really appreciate it.

Q. Choo: Thank you, Rachna. You are the champion for racism, and you are the champion also looking at developing the legislation on anti-racism. I could not commend you further.

[9:25 a.m.]

This is a great way to get started, to make sure we understand the definition of hate crime in order to have the legislation to guide us through so that those offenders could be prosecuted and tell the public those behaviours do have consequences. I think that’s vitally important.

I commend your government to be able to take this first step forward.

R. Singh: Thank you so much.

A. Olsen: My lack of a clear, singular question is a tribute to your succinct presentation and just how detailed it was. I think you leave us with some testimony that gives us a lot to think about but, as well, a lot to work with.

While we’ve not met, Queenie, it appears you’ve met all the rest of my colleagues. It’s nice to meet you today, and thank you for your presentation. I think that you’ve given us a lot of really good information to work off of here as we go forward.

Q. Choo: Thank you, Adam, and thank you for your and everyone’s good work moving this forward. Again, I reiterate what I said. I commend the government, the province of B.C., to really start it off with looking at the reform of the Police Act. This is imminent, and this is important work going forward.

H. Sandhu: Again, I would like to just make a comment, Queenie. Thank you so much for the presentation. The way you shared all this information…. I really don’t have any questions, but I would like to applaud the work that you’re doing and your advocacy. As MLA Olsen mentioned, I haven’t had a chance to meet you. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to meet you one of these days or via Zoom.

I just wanted to commend…. I really like when you highlighted the police training being comprehensive rather than piecework. I have mentioned this previously as well. I think that there is a big need, and thank you for highlighting that and the need for data, segregated data. It’s the big one if we really want to make meaningful change. Thank you. I appreciate the work you do.

Q. Choo: Thank you, Harwinder. I do look forward to meeting you one day. Thank you for the good work that you are doing.

D. Routley (Chair): I’d like to thank you too, Queenie. I think Adam put it well. It’s the comprehensiveness and the succinctness of your presentation that’s really given us not only a lot to work with but in a form that we can really discuss in a good way as a committee.

I have one question around data collection. We’ve heard that as a recurring theme. It’s clear that we need to be able to have information to make reasonable decisions. But on the other hand — the public policy hand — we have the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. When government collects information, it has to be for a specific purpose and only that purpose. Holding information for an unspecified purpose is difficult in the context of that act. So as we consider, that will be a difficult path for us to chart, perhaps. But people are generally not terribly aware of privacy protection and policies around that.

[9:30 a.m.]

My question is: when you speak to people about, for instance, their trust in police based on their racialized background or their community background, do you ever encounter a misgiving from people giving information on those terms? Do people feel comfortable doing that, in your experience?

Q. Choo: Thank you, Doug, for the very good question. That’s why, in my presentation, I did emphasize that when data is collected, it needs to engage the communities — what data is to be used, how it’s being used and what is being asked, in collaboration with the community — so that people understand that the data, in fact, is used for the long-term impact of the subject matter. That’s the emphasis of the process — to set the stage for how those data are being collected beforehand. Those are very important elements before we actually go ahead and do the data collection.

D. Routley (Chair): Yes, and anonymization of data is important as well. So I suppose the method we use is….

Q. Choo: Absolutely.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. Do I see any more questions? I see Dan saying thank you.

Okay, I think that’s it. Many thanks, Queenie, for an excellent presentation and helping us have a deeper understanding of our own work. Thank you.

Q. Choo: Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your invite. Good luck with your work.

D. Routley (Chair): Now, committee members, I think we have a brief recess planned. Do we have time, Karan, for five minutes?

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): I think we were going to go into deliberations first and then take a recess, but you can swap it if you like. It’s up to you.

Deliberations

D. Routley (Chair): No, go ahead. We’ll go into deliberations. We’ll have to have a motion to move in camera, then.

I see that from Trevor, seconded by Dan.

The committee continued in camera from 9:32 a.m. to 10:08 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Welcome back to this meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. This committee has a broad mandate to review policing and public safety in the province and provide recommendations on reforming the Police Act.

We’ve organized the panels, including this panel, into a 15-minute period for their presentation. We’ll have a timer available to help with that. Then we also will have time for questions at the end of the presentation.

Now I’ll ask members to introduce themselves, beginning with MLA Singh.

[10:10 a.m.]

R. Singh: This is Rachna Singh, the MLA for Surrey–​Green Timbers.

G. Begg: Hi, folks. I’m Garry Begg. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Guildford.

I’m coming to you today from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi there. Thanks for joining us today. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–​Capilano.

H. Sandhu: Hello, everyone. I’m Harwinder Sandhu.

I am the MLA for Vernon-Monashee, which is located on the unceded territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.

R. Glumac: MLA Rick Glumac from the riding of Port Moody–Coquitlam.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Hi, good morning. Thanks for joining us. My name is Dan Davies. I’m the MLA for Peace River North.

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

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much, everyone.

Our first presenters in this phase will be the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. We have with us Harsha Walia, executive director; and Meghan McDermott, interim policy director and senior staff counsel.

Thank you for joining us, and I’ll hand it right to you.

Presentations on Police Act

B.C. CIVIL LIBERTIES ASSOCIATION

H. Walia: Thank you for the invitation to present to the special committee. My name is Harsha Walia. I use she/her pronouns. I’ve been the executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association for the past year, preceded by Josh Paterson and David Eby.

I’m joined here today by our senior staff counsel, Meghan McDermott, who also sits on the province’s advisory committee on provincial policing standards. She’ll be joining me for the discussion portion of this panel. I also look forward to hearing from, actually, Pivot after me.

I’m speaking to you from the unceded, unsurrendered territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations, who continue to affirm their laws and jurisdiction on these lands.

The history of policing has always been intertwined with colonialism. The North West Mounted Police was established in 1873 to displace and contain Indigenous people onto reserves, to repress anti-colonial Indigenous rebellion and to enforce the illegal pass system, to punish the practice of Indigenous cultures and ceremonies and to force Indigenous children into residential schools. Any investigation into reforming policing must contend with policing as a pillar of colonialism and enslavement in this country.

The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls clearly highlights how the simultaneous over-policing and under-protection of Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people are two sides of the same colonial coin.

Our first recommendation is that the province must work with First Nations in B.C. to align the Police Act with UNDRIP. This includes, first, developing provincial guidelines for the non-enforcement of criminal charges against Indigenous land defenders and nations asserting their title and rights on their lands and waters. This was starkly evident in the militarized policing raid on Wet’suwet’en territories last year and the subsequent arrests in urban centres during Indigenous-led Wet’su­wet’en strong solidarity actions, as well as protests against Trans Mountain expansion.

Such policing and enforcement operations act as a bla­tant tool of continued colonial criminalization and violation of the province’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which the province has implemented.

Second, Indigenous nations must have the full opportunity to participate in, guide and consent to any future draft bill to reform the policing act prior to its introduction. This includes actually obtaining free, prior and informed consent from each First Nation in the province before subjecting them to municipal police forces or the RCMP in B.C. and not withdrawing provincial program and service funding for any First Nation who does not consent to such policing.

Finally, First Nations whose members and territories are being policed by colonial law enforcement must have meaningful jurisdiction to negotiate policing services as well as authority on civilian police board governance and oversight bodies.

I’ll just briefly tell you, but I can talk more about it later if you’re interested, about the BCCLA and our interest in policing issues. We’re the country’s oldest civil liberties and human rights organization, and we’ve been advocating for law reform and litigating in the courts, as well as at numerous public inquiries — including the APEC inquiry, Frank Paul inquiry, Braidwood inquiry, the provincial and national missing women inquiry — for over six decades. I won’t talk more about that, but certainly, if you have any questions on that, I’m happy to talk about it.

We’ve also been working with family members and loved ones for justice for victims of police killings, including Alvin Wright, Greg Matters, Bill Gillespie, Dale Culver, Ian Bush, Kevin St. Arnaud and Clayton Alvin Wiley.

[10:15 a.m.]

I want to move on to talking about some of our other key issues and recommendations. But first, I want to read you the names of people who have been killed by police and in police encounters in the past five years in B.C. The names of these people, and to invoke them, is really important into the space so that we know that when we’re talking about policing, we’re talking about real lives. We’re talking about someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s nephew, someone’s uncle, someone’s neighbour, someone’s colleague, someone’s friend whose life was taken away in a moment of hardship.

Waylon Jesse Edey. Travis Rood. James Reginald Butters. James Daniel McIntyre. Hudson Brooks. Myles Gray. Kenneth Robert Hanna. Craig Andrew Ford. Dale Culver. Kyaw Din. Clayton Donnelly. Barry Shantz. Everett Patrick. Chester. Julian Jones. These are all people who were killed by police and in police encounters in the past five years in B.C.

We don’t have the death penalty in Canada, but we give police the lethal power to take a life — even when they are supposed to be trained not to kill, even in the most escalated scenario. Across the country, tragically, 68 percent of people killed in police encounters were impacted by mental illness or substance use, and Indigenous and Black people are disproportionately killed. B.C. has the shameful honour of the country’s highest rate of police-involved deaths.

I do not know every police officer in this province, but this committee is not tasked with investigating every individual police officer. This is about the system of policing. From six decades of work in the area of police reform and accountability in the province, we have found that policing has been resistant to meaningful reform.

I want to emphasize that so-called bad policing cannot be fixed by putting more money into policing. I would encourage this committee to not get stuck on the ineffective hamster wheel of more and better training; more technological fixes, like police-worn body cameras; more diversity hiring; or more funding for police to be first responders for social crises. What you need to do is to make the bold choice to choose differently and to radically transform policing.

As such, our second set of recommendations is to shift resources from policing to community-based safety. We carry the assumption that police serve and protect and act in the interest of public safety and that policing actually works. Growing proportions of government budgets go into policing, with no legislated audits or evaluations. There is actually very little independent evidence that policing in B.C. works and, in fact, reams of evidence that suggest the opposite.

When it comes to domestic violence, you have heard from Battered Women’s Support Services that survivors of domestic violence are often wrongfully arrested, especially if they’re Black, Indigenous or immigrant women of colour whose first language is not English. The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre informed you about a safety audit where only 15 percent of women in the Downtown Eastside were comfortable going to the police with reports of violence.

When it comes to the crises of missing and murdered women, we had a provincial inquiry and a national inquiry, systematically highlighting the complete neglect and failure and racism of police.

When it comes to the hub model or situation tables, which the province of B.C. is, unfortunately, currently expanding, an investigation showed that even though the purpose of situation tables is to actually reduce police involvement, police in B.C. were the ones leading interventions on Indigenous women and Indigenous and immigrant youth.

Furthermore, sensitive personal information being shared between agencies and with law enforcement without consent likely constitutes an illegal breach of privacy rights.

When it comes to ACT teams, which are a policing and mental health treatment collaboration, you heard from Dr. Craig Norris that there is actually no research or evidence that police-embedded ACT teams are working well in the province, and his own research suggests that the presence of police is likely detrimental. Dr. Norris also noted that B.C. stands out in comparison to other jurisdictions, where their mental health teams do not necessarily involve police.

Furthermore, why do we even assume that all social crises must be solved through policing? A police state isn’t solely defined through overt police repression and control but also in the degree that policing permeates our lives. The B.C. Ministry of Health and the Canadian Mental Health Association reported to you that one in five interactions with police involved someone with a mental health or substance use problem.

You have also heard that police attend about 75,000 mental health calls in the province. Why do we normalize police as the first and only solution to so many social issues ranging from mental health wellness and supporting youth in schools to victim services for survivors and responding to racist hate. It defies logic that any one profession can be expected to respond to, and has the skill set to respond to, such an array of life-altering issues.

[10:20 a.m.]

On top of that, it is completely illogical to assume that police will be trusted by those who are made most vulnerable. Why are Indigenous, Black, racialized, migrant, undocumented, sex worker, drug user and homeless communities — who are already criminalized in the matrix of criminal laws, child apprehension systems and immigration laws — being forced to accept social supports in the forms of police wellness checks, police liaison officers in schools, police officers in social housing and mental health teams and police-side victim services?

Even if those services work for some people, they do not work for most racialized people because of the deep mistrust of policing, the reality of systemic racism in policing and the role of police as an armed enforcement agency. Imagine going through a crisis or being in distress and being met with an armed officer with a gun on their hip.

Policing is, in its very foundations and its mandate, the antithesis of social services. The Police Act must not entrench policing as some kind of benevolent public service. Instead, the Police Act must be reformed to limit the scale and scope of policing power, and policing resources must be redirected to non-policing, community-based services and upstream safety solutions.

Furthermore, community safety includes full decriminalization of sex work, decriminalization of drugs, decriminalization of public intoxication, decriminalization of poverty, decriminalization of immigration status and, as I mentioned before, the recognition of the sui generis nature of Indigenous protests to immediately lessen how Black, Indigenous and racialized communities are criminalized, surveilled, stigmatized and marginalized.

While many of these laws are federal, we recommend that the Police Act be amended to set provincial guidelines of non-enforcement and that policing forces be directed to not use provincial resources toward enforcement of these social issues that disproportionately impact BIPOC communities.

Our third set of recommendations is an immediate ban on police street checks. Data over ten years from every municipal police force across B.C. shows that Indigenous and Black people are over-represented and harmed by street checks. There is also no legal basis for street checks in either common law or statute. Therefore, the province must ban street checks immediately. Almost 10,000 people and 100 organizations, including Hogan’s Alley Society, Black Lives Matter, Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, WISH Drop-In Centre Society and the BCCLA, have written to the provincial government to immediately ban police street checks.

Our fifth set of recommendations concerns the police use of force and weapons. We are witnessing the horrific and unfettered increase in the militarization of policing. We recommend that the Police Act place immediate stricter limits on the use of weapons, including the use of police dogs and tasers, and eliminate the use of full body restraint devices.

The province must also implement a no-carry policy in Indigenous, Black and low-income communities and neighbourhoods. Police must not be authorized to carry handguns in communities who are already impacted by systemic racism and police violence.

This echoes and builds on the recommendation by the National Indigenous Justice Summit, convened after the police killing of Chantel Moore. As the B.C. coroner’s office has painfully detailed to you already, 20 percent of those who died in interactions with police or within 24 hours of an interaction with police in B.C. were Indigenous people.

Tear gas is a chemical weapon. The use of tear gas is banned in warfare by the 1925 Geneva protocol and the 1993 chemical weapons convention. But it is used by domestic police forces as a riot control agent. As recommended by international law and human rights experts, we also recommend that the provincial government ban the use of tear gas.

Our sixth set of recommendations concerns the use of police technologies. Last month four Privacy Commissioners released an unequivocal report on the illegal practices of Clearview AI and how 48 law enforcement agencies, including in B.C., ran thousands of searches using Clearview AI’s facial recognition software database. This recent controversy highlights the rapidly expanding terrain of policing technologies, including surveillance technologies and algorithmic policing, despite there being no regulation or oversight over this and the significant Charter, privacy and constitutional implications.

We echo the recommendation by legal experts of Citizen Lab that all levels of government, including the provincial government, must place an immediate moratorium on law enforcement agency’s use of technology that relies on algorithmic processing of historic mass-police datasets and on the use of algorithmic policing technology.

Our seventh set of recommendations concerns police accountability. First, police accountability mechanisms must be truly and fully civilian. According to a Canadian Press investigation, the vast majority of independent investigators staffing police oversight bodies in Canada are white men who are former police officers. The province must ensure that the OPCC and IIO are fully civilian, with no investigators having a past law enforcement background, including in police, Border Services or security agencies.

As you heard from the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, there is a need for community-based civilian complaints systems that are a counter to and not an appendage of the police system.

Second, the mandate and scope of police oversight bodies need a significant overhaul, including ending the CRCC and OPCC practice of informal dispute resolution between complainants and police officers.

[10:25 a.m.]

This is horribly inattentive to the power imbalance. Furthermore, the mandate of the OPCC is not to exclusively serve the interests of the complainant but rather all parties, including the police. In addition, oversight mechanisms typically include police investigating police. For example, when the OPCC receives a complaint about a police officer, they usually appoint another municipal policing agency. This goes against the principle of independent and fully civilian oversight. These structural flaws work against the urgent need for meaningful access to justice and police accountability.

For your information, we are actually currently suing the RCMP commissioner, Brenda Lucki, in court for her inexcusable delays preventing the release of a CRCC report into RCMP spying on Indigenous land defenders and climate advocates. We call for the OPCC to be able to initiate their own investigations or hearings and to shift investigations of police conduct directly to the OPCC. Similarly, the IIO should be given the authority to self-initiate public interest investigations and, as recommended in the Braidwood inquiry, have an independent prosecution service.

Police complaint mechanisms should also incorporate principles of Indigenous justice. The BCCLA has been working with an Indigenous nation in B.C. to develop a unique restorative justice program for resolving certain police complaints based in Indigenous laws. We also support the call by the National Indigenous Justice Summit for an Indigenous-led police oversight body with broad investigative powers.

Third, the definition of misconduct in the Police Act must be revised to incorporate the necessary lens of systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism. Oppressive statements and behaviour by police officers should explicitly constitute a public trust offense and requite mandatory reporting. Furthermore, given the immense power of police and the balancing of officer privacy rights against the broader public interest, there should be a publicly available database of investigations of officer misconduct.

Fourth, we echo the long-standing recommendation by Justice for Girls that the mandate of the IIO should be expanded to include sexual assault and gendered violence by police officers.

Fifth, we echo the call by Pivot Legal Society that the province must guarantee legal aid funding for racialized police complaints to the CRCC, IIO and OPCC, as well as for civil actions in court and for filing human rights cases against the police at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

Our eighth final set of recommendations concerns police governance. The issue of police governance is in the limelight at the moment, with an undemocratic, appointed police board appealing the decision of a municipal city council to freeze the police budget. This is unconscionable, as it makes local democratic control over policing and calls to defund police essentially ineffective.

The lack of independent governance at the police board level is also apparent in the provincial review, led by David Loukidelis, that is currently underway. This review is to examine the Vancouver police board’s role and respond to BCCLA’s and UBCIC’s service and policy complaint about VPD street checks. The actions of the Vancouver police board, including…. Authorizing a draft copy of a street check report to be released to the VPD and then censored is a violation of the police board’s civic trustee obligation.

Police boards must be representative of communities most impacted by police violence and fully accountable to communities, not just providing cover to police departments. Unaccountable and private police charities like the Vancouver Police Foundation are the racial- and class-based privatization of policing, and they must not be allowed to supplement the public police budget.

Like police oversight bodies, we also recommend that the director of police services not have a policing background and must come from a civilian background.

In conclusion, through the course of this process, you will hear many different opinions. But the choice to be actively anti-racist, as set out in your terms of reference, is yours. If the provincial government is serious about addressing systemic racism, we encourage and implore you to act on these recommendations.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much.

Next we have Meenakshi Mannoe, criminalization and policing campaigner from Pivot Legal Society.

Go ahead, Meenakshi.

[10:30 a.m.]

PIVOT LEGAL SOCIETY

M. Mannoe: Thank you so much for the invitation, and a lot of appreciation for Harsha’s words. I’m looking forward to the discussion with Harsha and Meghan after this presentation.

I also want to recognize that today I’m joining from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Skwxwú7mesh Nations. And I want to, like Harsha has done, recognize that for Indigenous people across B.C., policing continues to exert colonial power over sovereign people on their own territory, often done in concert with private industries, as was the case with the invasion of the Wet’suwet’en yintah, the ongoing intimidation in Secwepemculew and the violent arrests of Indigenous youth organizing as Braided Warriors and occupying insurers of the Trans Mountain Pipeline just a few weeks ago.

Today I’m presenting to the committee on behalf of Pivot Legal Society, which is a non-profit legal advocacy organization with a focus in four key campaign areas: the rights of unsheltered and unhoused people, drug users’ rights, sex workers’ rights and the rights of people who are subject to criminalization and policing, which is my area. Alongside my co-workers, we approach these campaign areas through strategic litigation, public legal education, media engagement and digital outreach.

Pivot, of course, has been in existence for nearly 20 years. I’ve only been working with the organization since 2018 and full-time since April 2019. I’m formally trained as a social worker. I’m a registered social worker. I’ve worked in community and prison outreach, in HIV case management and intake at Legal Aid, and I’ve really seen the forces of criminalization across the spectrum of that work and of my work independently in communities.

Across Pivot’s campaign areas, we see ongoing harms leveraged against people who are poor, who are racialized, people who work in informal and criminalized economies, including sex work, vending, low-level drug dealing. The police play a central role in this. You’ve heard from my colleagues at VANDU a few weeks ago who really detailed this.

I also really want to emphasize the spectrum of criminalization, which needs to be understood in broad and intersectional terms. This also encompasses the use of bylaw officers, private security guards, delegated social workers and stigmatizing and punitive bylaws that are meant to make life in public space inhospitable.

I want to take a moment and recognize that because of the current context of COVID-19, we have to meet in this format. But for the folks that I have worked alongside and organized alongside, so much of the experience of policing is really embodied. It’s felt as psychological terror, as physical terror, and that is so impossible to convey through Zoom.

I really hope the committee members prioritize outreach to directly impacted folks respectfully and make sure to get on the ground in some way to see what exactly a street sweep looks like. When you see a row of officers standing shoulder to shoulder — accompanied by city workers, bylaw officers, a dump truck — pitchforking people’s belongings when they live on a sidewalk, it is a graphic experience. It can’t be captured through this medium. I really hope that committee members are able to connect with folks in street-involved communities throughout B.C. to get on the ground and see what this looks like and feels like.

Again, I’ve prepared a report for the committee. Appreciation to Karan and Mariana, who have forwarded it to you. It includes five overarching recommendations and 26 specific recommendations, which I’m going to review this morning. I’m hoping that if you have questions about context or the genesis of these recommendations, feel free to ask in the discussion, but I’m really going to focus on each of these now. Again, echoing some things that you’ve heard from a number of other participants up until now…. But now it’s my time, so I’m going to make the recommendations.

[10:35 a.m.]

One is to harmonize the police complaint process between municipal police and RCMP. This has already been recommended by Justice Wally Oppal. For many people, it’s very confusing. People don’t understand whether they’re in OPCC jurisdiction, where they need to make a complaint, and these processes need to be harmonized. Again, echoing the call for civilianization — looking to this committee to implement an immediate transition plan to create wholly civilian-staffed, police accountability and oversight agencies where investigators of misconduct or criminal conduct have no prior police experience.

Three. We need to mandate a culturally responsive framework within civilian-led oversight bodies, specifically highlighting the needs of Black and Indigenous survivors of police violence. We also need to see a decolonizing and anti-racist mandate upheld by accountability and oversight agencies, and that also needs to include commensurate funding for Black, Indigenous and other racialized individuals and organizations to ensure equitable access to the complaint process. There’s a continued call for transparency and accountability through systemic investigations and methodical data collection.

The next umbrella area is around access to justice. We have made this recommendation over and over — a call for dedicated legal funding for police complaint clinics to provide both public legal education to help people navigate the process of bringing a lawsuit or complaint against police officers or police forces and to ensure representation for families and victims in instances of police-involved serious injury or death. So to really facilitate the full participation in proceedings like coroners’ inquests or civil actions.

I cannot emphasize this enough. When you are a survivor, or when you are grieving the loss of a loved one, this system is impossible to navigate on your own. There is no independent legal representation available to people. There are a few agencies — I’m thinking of the UBC Indigenous legal clinic, Atira women’s legal advocacy program — that have the capacity to undertake police complaints, but there’s no central, core funding to make sure that everyone who has a complaint about the police has access to justice.

We also call for legal aid funding to support racialized people in making police complaints. Whether that’s summary advice [audio interrupted] service, full representation, it needs to be based on the needs of the individual and the nature of the complaint.

We also call for funding and access to services through community-based victim services programs, including benefits that are available through the Crime Victim Assistance Act.

I’ve already spoken about the spectrum of criminalization. Again, I know that the mandate of this committee is limited, but I think it’s very important to understand how criminalization is a spectrum, how it impacts people from street stops and surveillance to displacement from public space to the use of prisons. Like BCCLA and a number of other organizations — over 80, I believe — we are calling for an immediate moratorium on the use of street stops. This is the only constitutional response to an otherwise illegal policing practice that continues to target Black, Indigenous and poor people.

We also are calling for officers to cease interference with Indigenous ceremony and follow Elder-established protocol.

We are looking for an anti-racist audit of all gang-related policing in B.C., of all forces, in recognition that Black, Indigenous and other people of colour are inappropriately classified as gang members by law enforcement.

There are a number of recommendations here around police ceasing enforcement of sex work–related offences; of ceasing enforcement and over-policing of unsheltered people who live in public space, including tent cities; and ceasing the confiscation of personal belongings from people who rely on public space.

We also call on this committee to make recommendations related to the end of prohibitionist policing. We have made a recommendation multiple times, including to Minister Farnworth, to implement de facto decriminalization for simple possession, which is within his powers. We are living in a five-year crisis. An illicit drug supply has been poisoned. Over 7,000 people have died in the last ten years. We need to see this recommendation put into place immediately and recognized as a life-saving measure.

[10:40 a.m.]

We also have recommendations around the development of bubble zones around supervised consumption sites, overdose prevention sites and other harm-reduction sites. We often hear from folks who access these services that they are fearful of attending because a police officer is parked right outside.

It’s completely illogical. If you know what public health guidelines recommend — “don’t to use alone; use one of these sites” — and you also know that you’re not protected by decriminalization, you’re being deterred from attending when a cop car is parked outside of the entrance, as is the case throughout B.C. I’ve seen it here in Vancouver. I’ve also seen it in communities like Surrey, on 135A.

There are a few other recommendations related to policies around confiscation of intoxicating substances, confiscation of new or used harm reduction gear, including that the possession of these should not serve as a basis for search or investigation. Again, this just drives drug use underground. It permeates the lives of people who use drugs, and it creates this atmosphere of constant fear of criminalization.

Finally, I want to speak to the need to support communities that seek to defund the police. This has been a confusing area. Of course, the conversation has been in the forefront since last summer, but there have been efforts to defund the police before. I think that for many people, including myself — I’m not trained as a lawyer; I’m not a policy expert and haven’t done a PhD on these things — there are a lot of policies that are very unclear to the layperson.

I’m thinking of things that define the adequate and effective level of policing in B.C. How is that defined? Who is defining that? What is the determination of authorized strength of all police forces in B.C.? How is that defined and designated? Are there ways that communities could fund and support health, social and community services to reduce the authorized strength?

The current case in Vancouver, of course, has illuminated some of the issues. There was a similar question several years ago on Vancouver Island around what the framework is for defunding the police. If you have a push for this at the municipal level, if you have citizens and communities who are calling for this, who are looking to lawmakers to implement defunding of the police, how do we do it without fear that the director of police services is going to interfere and roll back these decisions at the municipal level?

What kind of framework can be made available so communities can do this? You’ve heard from communities like BWSS, VANDU, BCCLA, of course, about the hazards of policing. And we as local advocates are also looking to our government to implement these changes. But then we’re stymied by a really confusing set of policies and practices and an inaccessible way of engaging with the government. Ultimately, this is really about divesting from police harm, investing in community safety. This isn’t about wanting to get rid of the police just because.

You’ve heard about all of the different ways that communities feel impacted by oppressive policing. And I want to also take a moment and recognize that a lot of communities have built alternatives when they knew that the police could not keep them safe. I’m thinking of the bad-date reporting. I’m thinking of communities where overdose prevention sites are peer-run, where folks who have experienced mental distress take care of their peers, try to respond to them, knowing that wellness checks aren’t safe.

This is really about prioritizing the safety of “marginalized” communities in B.C. I’m thinking of Black, Indigenous, racialized, two-spirit, Indigequeer, queer, trans, disabled, immigrants and migrants, substance users, low-income folks and people who are engaged in criminalized economies. There’s no reason that these folks should not feel safe just because of the stigma that they experience, which is then leveraged by policing.

The committee today, and throughout the duration of your work, which, I believe, wraps up in October, have the opportunity to make recommendations that would not only reduce systemic issues of policing throughout B.C. but also support the visionary work of defunding and dismantling the current organization of policing structures and support the movement to divest from policing and invest in community-wide appraisals, response and support work.

[10:45 a.m.]

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you, Meenakshi.

I guess this is our opportunity for questions from members.

R. Singh: Thank you both, Harsha and Meenakshi. Really good to see you both and hear your presentations.

As you have mentioned in your presentations, we have heard from a number of other stakeholders talking about these issues — the challenges that police are facing, challenges that the community is facing.

Harsha, my first question is to you. You mentioned — and we have heard it have talked about it before as well — that the first resource that anybody has at this point, when they are in a state of crisis, when they are having a mental health crisis…. The first resource they think about is the police, because that is easily accessible, and that is something that everybody knows.

You mentioned that we have to move away from that. Would you have any examples of any other jurisdictions where, when people are in crisis and are looking for resources, they don’t go to police, but there are different resources that they go out to, especially after hours.

H. Walia: Thank you for that question. Our written submission will have more examples from other jurisdictions. Right off the top of my head, particularly around mental health crises, for example, jurisdictions like Sweden have a whole team where cops are not involved. They have a fully staffed, fully resourced equivalent to 911, but not policing and not containing any of the same kinds of policing-related harms around detention, including mental health detention, where people are cared for. That’s one jurisdiction.

As Meenakshi said, I would also echo that there are so many examples in our communities right now that just aren’t scaled up. Immigrant women, for example, who are survivors of domestic violence and who may be worried about deportation, already go to a lot of community services that aren’t associated with police because they face the double fear of policing and potential deportation either for themselves or their partners.

For over 30 years, when Indigenous women and girls and two-spirit people were going missing in the Downtown Eastside, and when the communities knew that nothing could happen when they went to the police, there was full-on but not well-resourced networks of Indigenous women and Elders who went looking, who did full missing-persons investigations in the Downtown Eastside for women in the neighbourhood.

They are still doing it. Sophie Merasty is an Indigenous woman who recently died, last year. Women in the community feel that her death is not being taken seriously by the police, and they are conducting their own de facto investigation into who last saw her, where she was last present, who was with her and who was in her network.

These are the kinds of smaller-scale, for lack of a better word, examples that do exist, but that do need to be seen and do need to be resourced. Then there are larger-scale, public alternative measures. I think we have to pay attention to both, because even when there are larger-scale…. Say that we end up with a full alternative — mental health, paramedical, para-ambulance that exists in certain jurisdictions. We’d have to make sure everyone can access that equally so that, again, people who are migrants and afraid because of their lack of immigration status are also able to access those services.

Of course, we know that systemic racism in health care is another issue. We have Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond’s report on that. All of these are related, and also it’s related to mental health apprehension. If people are calling mental health services, they shouldn’t have to fear a mental health apprehension and involuntary detention and coerced treatment, if that’s not what’s suitable for them.

It’s interconnected with so many other issues as well.

[10:50 a.m.]

R. Singh: I totally hear you. I see the intersectional perspective, and we have heard from so many other organizations talking about the same things. Thank you for bringing that up, and I’m sure…. We’ll definitely go through your report and get more information from that.

Thank you to you and Meenakshi for coming in today for this presentation.

R. Glumac: Thank you to the presenters for all the recommendations that you’ve submitted. I think we could spend a whole day going through each of them in detail and understanding more background around each of them, but we have to kind of narrow down to a few questions that we have.

One question that I have is…. You mentioned that…. Both organizations recommend — that the IIO and the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner shouldn’t have people with police background in there. As I currently understand it — correct me if I’m wrong — the OPCC does currently have that. The IIO doesn’t, but one of their recommendations was to change that so that they do have that. I think they’re requesting that. If I remember correctly, they’re doing that because they want…. They’re saying that to have that kind of a background is helpful in that that experience helps them conduct the investigations.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to give you an opportunity to expand upon why you feel that it’s important that there is that independence and give you a chance to expand upon that a bit more.

M. McDermott: I’m happy to share that. The IIO…. Our understanding is, I think, that they can hire anybody who has been a police officer so long as they haven’t…. The normal rule is so long as they haven’t been an active police officer in B.C. for the past five years. That doesn’t prevent them from hiring somebody who was a police officer yesterday from Alberta or from another jurisdiction. So we have a lot of people, I think, from the UK, for instance, who work in the IIO.

However, even that rule has been relaxed, I think, on a two-year basis, so now they have discretion to hire people who are on active duty right now as a police officer in B.C. I think part of that — you’d have to defer to them — is having a dearth of applicants or people willing to move to the Lower Mainland with that kind of expertise.

What organizations like ours are pushing for and what we want to see in the future is that we do have…. Civilians can be properly trained to do this and have the trust from both the public and from whatever forces are being investigated by them. We hear over and over again from police that you need to have a police background in order to credibly investigate police, and we just reject that premise altogether.

In our written submissions, we will provide examples of jurisdictions where they do have effective oversight by people who had never been police officers. They’re able to do a good job and look into any complaints, from misconduct all the way to police-involved deaths, and able to provide that service to the public without ever having been associated with the police previously.

R. Glumac: Just a quick follow-up. Do you have any recommendations on how to harmonize when you’re dealing with a federal police force and a municipal? There’s an inherent challenge there because of the different jurisdictions.

[10:55 a.m.]

M. McDermott: I can offer something: obviously, coordination with the feds, but also through service agreements and intergovernmental relations. We know that the federal government has also taken notice of the public appetite to get at systemic racism in policing and police accountability. If the two levels of government really are serious, there’s nothing preventing the two levels of government from basically streamlining the services and making it easier for the average person to figure out what happens.

Instead of these 20-year agreements and this patchwork of jurisdiction, where, time after time…. There are different complaint systems. There are also a lot of gaps in accountability, we found, when people do want to make complaints about various employees hired by differing levels. I think, really, it just takes the political will from both levels of government, and of course, if the feds aren’t going cooperate, then you could just use as much power as possible through your negotiating agreements.

M. Mannoe: I wanted to just add in…. I’ve had conversations with Doug King, who was the former police accountability lawyer at Pivot, around the IIO civilianization, specifically. Through my conversation with Doug, it’s clear that…. There are ways to create a training academy of sorts for independent civilian investigators.

In our recommendation, we…. What we’ve heard from the IIO is that they need this two-year time limit because they need to function. They don’t have enough people trained to do this investigation work. I am curious as to why there hasn’t been the dedication of resources to developing a training program that would enable non–police officers to learn the skills needed.

Again, I think this goes back to public perception, as well, and the feeling that even in accountability there is this ingrained resistance to police actually…. There’s this cultural piece happening. It’s hard to trust an institution where you can become an investigator with two years of exemption from the police force. It’s hard to trust that. On top of that, as has been pointed out repeatedly, people don’t have access to independent representation or support throughout the process. I really struggle to understand why this hasn’t been created.

I think, going back to the harmonization…. I mean, we have, for example, policing directives that are applicable to both RCMP and municipal police in B.C. So why can’t…? What is the challenge? I’m confused as to why. If we know that people are also accessing inequitable complaint processes just because they happen to live on different sides of Boundary Road, why isn’t this being harmonized?

Again, as a bit of a layperson in this, I’m confused. If we know that one process is totally insular and one is insular but a little bit less, why don’t you create directives that say that the RCMP and municipal police forces will be subject to the same oversight body?

H. Walia: Could I add just one thing to Meghan’s and Meenakshi’s excellent comments? That’s also that civilianization, I think, is twofold. One is the civilianization of staff. The other is the civilianization of the process.

Even if you have civilian investigators, which we don’t have…. Echoing what Meenakshi and Meghan said, there really are no barriers. You can address those barriers, and you can change those systems. There’s also the process, which is that even if you have a fully civilian staff at the CRCC or at the OPCC, the process of the complaint is such that it goes, in the case of the OPCC, to another municipal policing body. Or in the case of the CRCC, it goes back to the RCMP.

I would just stress that for civilianization, we not only think about it in terms of staffing, which is vital, but we also think about civilianizing the process, where the complaint, when it is redirected, does not go back to a policing agency as a matter of process. That, just to echo Meenakshi’s point, hugely impacts public trust and goes against the very logic of having an independent complaints process.

If I’m making a complaint against the VPD and a civilian investigator approves it but then sends it to New West PD, I’m not going to have trust in that process just because it’s a different police department.

[11:00 a.m.]

A. Olsen: I thank all three of you for your really important presentations here to us today.

I think it’s important that we acknowledge that this process that we’re undertaking is a review of the Police Act and that that process, in and of itself, has us focusing on police.

What I think you and others who have presented to this committee have begun to…. The picture that you are painting for us is of a society that allocates its resources differently. Necessarily, that’s going to require a package of laws or amendments to current laws that then reflect what that society looks like.

The challenge here is that you are responding to the amendment of the Police Act. There are very strong statements that are being made about policing and policing within the institutions. To Meenakshi’s question about: “Why hasn’t this been done?” It hasn’t been done because the Legislature hasn’t, until now, turned its focus towards these systems with the level of intensity that we’re doing here. This is an opportunity….

I would just say that rather than ask any questions, I’m going to definitely sit with your presentations and the recommendations. I would encourage you, if you decide to put written material before this committee, to further take the opportunity to paint the picture, to fill the canvas for us, of the society that you see. It’s going to be….

There are a number of laws and statutes in this province, thousands of laws and statutes in this province. The outcomes…. The posture of government, the posture of our institutions and how we respond to certain things are going to necessarily impact further than just a police act, as you are articulating the kind of society. I really think that this is a much, much broader conversation.

This is not a deflection or a sidestep of what you’re saying. This is an acknowledgment that, actually, in order to change the institution to create the world that a lot of people in this province are talking about, it requires a comprehensive approach. I think that we can take that comprehensive….

I’ve said the same numerous times. My colleagues will have heard my voice several times talking about…. Passing the law of UNDRIP, for example, requires actions on the other side of it as well as just passing the law. It’s the same thing here.

I encourage the…. I think our first presenter earlier today said it. This process should start at: what are the outcomes that you want? What do you want to get from this process? We want to get a society that has more kindness and more compassion and less policing. How we achieve that vision now, I think, is the challenge that we have. We can make a lot of recommendations to the Police Act, but we can also make recommendations for changes to other acts as well, which then can start to flow those resources into the correct places.

I really appreciate the comments that you have made today and the information that you’ve provided us and the challenge that you’ve put in front of us — and the challenge that our communities and the people in our communities have put in front of us. I really appreciate the strength that you’ve brought to this committee today.

I raise my hands to you.

M. Mannoe: Is it possible to respond to MLA Olsen?

D. Routley (Chair): Yes.

M. Mannoe: Thank you so much.

I also want to recognize that this committee was formed, not once but twice, in response to a global uprising around policing. For myself, as someone engaging with it — although your mandate is limited — in my day-to-day work, I have to understand policing in terms of layered policing, as it’s been described by Jeff Shantz.

[11:05 a.m.]

I have to understand the spectrum of criminalization because the reality for the folks in the communities that I work alongside is that often the police that they interact with are participating in numerous policies and forms of legislation. They’re enacting the Criminal Code. They are enforcing hostile bylaws. They are acting in concert with delegated social workers. They are part of the broader system of white supremacy and settler colonialism. So even though your mandate is limited, I can’t come to this and present just on the Police Act.

I know that for folks who are engaging with police in their day-to-day lives as a means of survival at times, we have to understand it more broadly. I think that goes to: what is our vision of the next world? It’s not just about getting rid of police for the sake of getting rid of police. It’s so that people aren’t dying alone because they were afraid to go to a safe consumption site because there was a police car parked outside, and they had a warrant, and they didn’t want to get picked up and go to jail for three weeks.

We see, again, there are numerous recent police-involved killings in the Downtown Eastside. That might not be within the scope of the Police Act, but when the community itself has to undertake investigations because they’re not well served, and they’re looking into who was killed. Who was this person? Where did they live? Who was their family? People are already having to undertake these investigations and unpack the layers of policing that inform their lives, including in supportive housing. It is difficult to parse out.

I appreciate that each committee member here has a difficult job, because your committee is also serving as a lightning rod for every broader conversation around policing. But I can also say that we’ve been making these recommendations, not just since last summer. We have the oldest civil liberties association in the country. We have an organization that’s been around for 20 years.

For me, it’s challenging because I see how we made these recommendations in 2018, in 2019, in 2020, in 2021 now, and still are met with not just resistance but a bit of passing…. Like who has jurisdiction? People are literally dying in the street, and we’re debating jurisdiction. It’s hard to stomach.

A. Olsen: If I may, just one final comment. I want to just acknowledge specifically that last comment, but all the comments that you’ve made, Meenakshi, and all the of comments that Harsha and Meghan have made, as well, and raise you up for that.

I would just say that while we’ve been given the responsibility of the Police Act, I don’t know that it will be possible for us to ignore the intersectionality of this work with all the rest of the other things that you’ve raised. I think that we have to acknowledge and embrace that as part of the challenge that we have.

That’s one member. I’m going to be working with my colleagues on this. But it’s certainly front and centre for me — the intersectionality of this work with all of the rest of those other services and approaches that we should be taking.

HÍSW̱ḴE SIÁM. Thank you.

H. Walia: Can I add, just briefly…? Also, I just want to echo what Meenakshi said and also emphasize that a lot of our recommendations, both from BCCLA and Pivot, are within the scope of the Police Act. You can certainly recommend amendments to the Police Act within the scope of everything that we’ve talked about, and even where there are federal laws, the province has jurisdiction to implement provincial guidelines on non-enforcement. That’s key, right? Non-enforcement of criminalizing laws is squarely within your mandate, whether that’s the decriminalization of sex work or drugs, or immigration or poverty. That is all within your mandate.

I know we have been talking about the ways in which these are interconnected, but just echoing that that doesn’t become the reason we don’t take immediate action. There’s no reason that street checks cannot be banned today. The director of police services can and should ban street stops and street checks today. You could recommend and push them to do so. The Police Act does not authorize it. The law does not authorize it. None of these….

I’m also aware of the complexity of issues not becoming cause for deflection, as MLA Adam Olsen pointed out. But there are things that we can do now that communities are really calling on you to do now. These recommendations are within your mandate, even as much as they may intersect with other legislation.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you all. Thanks, Members, for your questions. Thank you, presenters, for your excellent contribution to our considerations and expanding our understanding.

We have a five-minute recess scheduled, but we’ve gone a bit over time. Do committee members want to take a short break? Okay, two minutes.

H. Walia: Thank you all for your time. Have a good day.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much.

The committee recessed from 11:10 a.m. to 11:15 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): I’ll welcome everyone back to this meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. For the benefit of our guests, as I’m sure they know, we’ve been given a broad mandate to examine policing and public safety in the province and to make recommendations on reforming the British Columbia Police Act.

This portion of the committee’s work is split into several phases. This meeting is set up for presentations — to take 15 or 30 minutes, in your case, to the presenters.

But first, I’ll ask the committee members to introduce themselves prior to the presentation.

R. Glumac: I am Rick Glumac, MLA for Port Moody–​Coquitlam.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi, there. Thank you both so much for being here, or three of you. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

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

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Hi. Dan Davies, MLA for Peace River North.

Welcome.

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

H. Sandhu: Hello, everyone. Welcome. I am Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

R. Singh: Thank you to the presenters. Rachna Singh, MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

D. Routley (Chair): MLA Olsen may not be back yet, so we’ll jump right in, then.

Our next presenters are from Vancouver Coastal Health. We have 30 minutes for their presentation. There is a timer available on the screen to help. I’ll also remind everyone that audio from our meeting is broadcast live on our website, and a complete transcript will also be posted.

Our presenters now — Andrew W. MacFarlane, regional director, mental health and substance use, and Dr. Christy Taylor, psychiatrist, assertive outreach team. I’ll hand it right over to you.

VANCOUVER COASTAL HEALTH

A. MacFarlane: Wonderful. A pleasure to meet everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today about our partnership programs with a number of different police detachments and to share some of our learnings throughout that process and some of the outcomes. I think that will probably be of most interest to folks. Recognizing, as you’re probably all aware, that Vancouver Coastal Health covers the Sunshine Coast, the Bellas, up to Whistler and Squamish, North Shore, west shore, West Van and Richmond as well as Vancouver. We have a number of different detachments that we work with.

Before I start, I’d like to respectfully acknowledge that I live, work and play on the occupied territories of the Coast Salish people, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

I guess I’ll just walk through the slides here that I have. I believe that you have them in front of you already. The second slide highlights some of the key themes that we really wanted to have on your radar, which I suspect, from some of the previous folks, is already on.

We want to continue to develop a comprehensive and effective mental health system in partnership with our local police detachments, as well as multisectoral partners. We also would like to champion for provincial standards similar as we have for ACT, ICM, assertive community treatment, intensive case management and EPI early psychosis for the entire province so that we’re all aligned across the different health authorities with how we provide crisis services.

We also want to, as I mentioned, have services available both urban and rural. That obviously applies to Vancouver Coastal Health but also the other health authorities. As I mentioned, multisectoral partnerships to support a very clinically complex population with mental health, substance use, behavioural challenges and housing difficulties as well as interpersonal difficulties, which come to interface with the crisis system within mental health and substance use, and high users of our emergency department and hospital beds.

[11:20 a.m.]

We also want to advocate for the importance of these relationships and partnerships to be formalized by having agreed-upon data and outcome that is shared, having the information-sharing agreements in place and memorandums of understanding about why we’re actually doing this work — which, we’ll share with you, we do have in place with a number of our police partners — and to recognize, as you’ll see on the next slide, that there’s a long history for Vancouver Coastal Health and calls for action with regard to this population.

But one of the things I wanted to flag on the next slide, which is a number of the documents…. These are just a few of the documents that have impacted how we do our work. Starting back in 2008 with the Lost in Transition document, over time, the importance of the collaboration and partnership and joint initiatives starts to come through in all subsequent documents. We’ve had a very strong working relationship with our detachments, over the last 15 years, related to this population.

I wanted to highlight, quickly…. Just two quick slides before I hand over to Dr. Taylor, who is one of the psychiatrists with our program and is probably, within Vancouver Coastal Health, one of the docs that is most closely involved with working with the populations that interface with the criminal justice population, in crisis, in and out of our emergency departments, and have those complex clinical presentations.

I wanted to quickly talk about Vancouver and the adult programs where we have joint initiatives. Assertive outreach team, where Dr. Taylor works, is primarily dedicated to those folks that don’t necessarily fit nicely into the mental health or substance use boxes and are frequent users of our ED. That is a partnership program where two Vancouver police department officers are assigned to us.

We have the assertive community treatment team, which you’re very familiar with. We did have five teams. We now have a sixth team rolling out, with the funding that the ministry supported for us in the fall. Car 87/88, which is our outreach program…. Then obviously, in the midst of an overdose crisis, we have an overdose outreach team, where the Vancouver police — which has been one of their requests for a number of years — direct referral pathways into that program.

In addition to those actual programs that we have, we also have partnership tables where things like the ISA and the MOU that we have in place were originally established. Some of them are monthly, some of them quarterly and some of them annually. I put those in there because I wanted to highlight the governance structure that’s in place to help us problem solve through issues, to be data-driven, to be evidence-driven and to be accountable to the joint boards of Vancouver Coastal Health and the Vancouver police department, which is the project link presentation to the board annual meeting.

Just one last slide that I would like to highlight. This is the data slide. I suspect, of any of the documents that you share…. I will acknowledge that this is part of a much bigger document. This is just a cut and paste.

I wanted to highlight ACT, teams 1 to 5, from January 1 to December 1, 2020. If you look at the mental health bed days, for 308 clients that were active, they had 11,200 bed days in the year prior to coming into the program. In a year post coming to the program, they decreased by almost 60 percent. In the current year, which is a year from today back, in their involvement, we’ve continued to increase that pattern. I include that there because I really wanted folks to see the profound impact on the health care system of ACT.

Similarly, if you shift over to AOT, because that’s more of a crisis-driven program…. You’ll hear a little bit more from Dr. Taylor in a moment. You can see that in the current period, we have had a 90 percent decrease in bed days for that population that are historically very high users with lots of contact at the emergency department, as you can see above and with the length of stay within acute units. Also, as you go down, you can see consistent patterns of decreases in police contacts. This is a benefit for both the health care system as well as the criminal justice system.

[11:25 a.m.]

I think I’ll pause there, because I think…. Dr. Taylor, if you could hop in and talk a little bit about the daily work that you’re involved in, some of the obstacles that you’ve historically encountered and some of the opportunities, I’ll hand over to you now.

C. Taylor: Thank you. Hello. Thanks for having us. Good morning, everyone.

I think I’m probably going to be the only psychiatrist you hear from in this committee, certainly the only psychiatrist doing this kind of work, so I thought it might be most helpful for you to know my thoughts as well as my experience and a little bit about my background.

I’ve been involved in providing psychiatric services in Vancouver for over 25 years now. The first half of my time was at St. Paul’s Hospital, and the second half has been through VGH and Vancouver Coastal Health. I’ve always worked in the emergency or acute care setting, so I’ve always worked with the very mentally ill. And I’ve always appreciated the presence of police and security when I do my work, because I feel I wouldn’t be able to do it in the hospital or on the street without this safety presence there to keep things under control. I’ve been with AOT for the past three years. That’s the background that informs this work.

I think another really important thing about trying to understand why we’re in this mental health crisis right now comes from what’s changed — certainly, over my 25 years, what’s changed. I think that my impression is that things have gotten more complex. Cases are more complex. Things are more intense. It does feel more dangerous in this period of time.

I think it’s because drugs of abuse have changed. When I first started, snorting cocaine was the bad drug that brought people to hospital in psychiatric crisis. Then it turned to crack cocaine, and even that drug was about a 48-hour hospital stay for people to settle down and be able to be safely released to the community.

But then we transitioned to crystal meth, and we started to see that it sometimes took up to a month for people to come out of psychosis from using crystal meth. Now we’re learning, also, that crystal meth can lead to a permanent psychotic state, whether it’s because the addiction is hard to leave or the psychosis remains permanent. We can’t tease that out, but people are much more ill and more violent and don’t come out of that state very easily with crystal meth. That’s a big change.

I think society has changed in this last number of years, as well. There’s less trust in institutions, in authority, in science, so people are questioning a lot more. That affects things.

I think the crowding that we’re experiencing makes a big difference too. When I first moved here, Metro Vancouver was 1.7 million people. Now we’re at 2.6 million people — almost one million more people in the same small space, with the police trying to maintain public safety with all of these other factors.

You’ve heard previously about the institutionalization and why we have more mental illness on our streets now. I think that’s where it started. Then the drugs changed, society is changing, and I do think there’s just a lot more crowding in the world, and that leads to a lot more conflict.

The police have always been asked to respond to mental health crises, and the police and the emergency room are the only places where there is an immediate response to a mental health crisis. So it’s not that they’re the best responders, but they’re the only ones available right now. Obviously, they’re 24-7 as well. Most mental health crises don’t occur between 12 a.m. and 8 a.m. Most of them occur in the other hours of the day. But it’s the police and emerg that are there.

What have we done as a mental health system to try to address this? You’ve heard about Car 87. They’ve been with us for decades. Now they’re much more incorporated into a bigger mental health crisis system. You’ve heard about ACT. You’ve had a presentation previously about ACT. That model is a little different because it comes from the deinstitutionalization thinking, and it’s much more patient-centred.

Car 87 and AOT tend to be patient-centred with public safety highly in mind, so the addition of AOT…. I think it was 2014 when they started. Like I said, I’ve been with them for three years. That is a different team. I did a literature review in getting ready for this, and there’s really not another team quite like AOT out there that’s in the literature, anyway.

What’s different about what we do…. It is crisis response. We get referrals from the police, from hospitals, from mental health teams, from individuals if they can find us, or through the AAC. But we also provide treatment. So we will meet someone, do an assessment and try and stabilize the crisis but also provide treatment.

[11:30 a.m.]

There is a model called street triage. It’s what they use in the U.K. But I would say that here, we’re providing street treatment, as well, while we stabilize someone and then move them on to the appropriate mental health service afterwards.

Who do we see at AOT? I thought the best way for you to get an idea of that was to tell you about a couple of the people I saw this week.

One gentleman had been released from hospital on Monday. We saw him on Tuesday. I saw him at his camper van on Slocan and the Grandview Highway, right by the food bank depot. He was happy as a clam, still very ill, still quite grandiose, but willing to see us because he thought that the injectable medication we prescribed for him keeps him less impulsive. He’s recognizing now, in his early 30s, that he’s making a lot of bad decisions and getting himself into trouble.

He knows he has to see us because he’s on extended leave, but he was cooperative, very talkative, wanted to share all of his stories, and described his van as being the best place in the world to live because it works just fine. And we noted that it was covered in a blue tarp and surrounded by lots of garbage and things in disarray, hadn’t been moved forever. So that was that gentleman. He’d had involvement with the police, so that’s why he is with us.

Another gentleman we saw on Granville Street at Nelson, outside the Tim Hortons, his favourite place to meet us. He’s responded really well to treatment. He was no longer paranoid, no longer profane and hostile, willing to talk with us. Still saying, “I don’t have an illness. There’s no need for me to see you,” but charming and talkative and cooperative with that and recognizing, again, that he needed to stay in treatment.

We helped him apply for a review panel. He has the right to appeal that. So that’s kind of a success. He was showered and clean and dressed and could make eye contact and have a conversation with us, so that was a big change from when we first met him.

We met a gentleman at the Yukon this past week who came to our attention from the police because he assaulted a woman at a SkyTrain station out of the blue, a woman he didn’t know at all. He thought she was part of the intelligence agency that has been surveilling him for the last six years.

The Yukon shelter is very supportive of him. They like him. He’s a lovely guy. They want to make sure he gets into long-term housing, but because of this assault — and he was in turn assaulted by a bystander — they want to make sure that he gets some kind of treatment. He’s voluntarily seeing us, but there’s a bit of coercion around the housing piece. But at this point, he’s willing to work with us. We’ll start some medication, and we’ll see what happens with him.

And then we saw another guy at his parents’ house in East Vancouver. He had come to the attention of the police because he was acting bizarrely. The police chose to step between him and a bunch of elementary school children that they saw, and when they got out of the car, he attacked the police. They required hospital assessment and were fine, but a psychiatric nurse and police officer went to his house.

The police officer did not find him certifiable under section 28, so they subsequently asked me to come and see if I would certify him under form 4 of the Mental Health Act. Police were waiting, and we couldn’t get into his house, and he didn’t want to come out. So there were lots of people around trying to make it okay for him to work with us, but he was too paranoid.

That’s just a sample of some of the people I saw last week. Our typical patient — and this is typical, so I’m not giving you data — is a male, has psychosis, has addiction, has involvement with the criminal justice system, may have a head injury, definitely will have had trauma and neglect at some point in their life. So a really difficult population. And it’s appropriate to have the police involved with this population because they all have had assaults of some kind or another or jail time related to other charges.

When someone is at an ACT team, they’re more stable and have been involved in treatment longer, and so they don’t need to have police all the time and shouldn’t have police all the time. So it’s a spectrum of illness requiring different police presence at different times.

I think that’s about…. You can ask me questions later about other things we might see.

Just to leave it, I think the benefits of these models that we’re using is that there is more diversion to mental health care and less criminal justice time. There’s less use of force when mental health and police work together. When the police do section someone and take them to the emergency room with a psychiatric nurse involved, they wait less time in the emergency room — police can get back to policing if they have a mental health nurse involved — and there are less hospital days, as we’ve seen.

[11:35 a.m.]

I think this collaboration increases everybody’s knowledge. It increases officer confidence in dealing with mental health crises. It builds trust between police, public safety and public health, and it tackles the stigma a bit. I also think it just keeps patients and society an awful lot safer.

I’ll answer any questions later, if that’s okay.

A. MacFarlane: Dr. Taylor, did you just want to comment a little bit about the length of stay in your program and the disposition?

C. Taylor: Yes. We’re supposed to be a one-month transition team, but I don’t think we meet that target. I do think it’s a little longer, typically. The disposition usually is to a mental health team or an ACT team, and rarely anywhere else that I can think of. Usually it’s to other mental health services. That would be the typical place that they move on to.

A. MacFarlane: Right. Thanks very much for adding that. Part of the reason I ask that question is because AOT, if we hadn’t been having this meeting…. Ten years ago, all the programs — other than Car 87, Car 88, which used to be MHES — would not have been on the radar. Those are all additional supports, over the years, that we have worked on, together with the ministry and our other partners, to be able to create a continuum of services.

Given, exactly as Dr. Taylor highlighted, the increasing complexity of the clients in the community, we were needing to look at other models. AOT is one that is a made-in-Vancouver creation, and it has demonstrated, as you saw in the stats earlier, very effective outcomes.

I’m just going to walk us through — I know we have ten minutes left — the rest of the slides. Essentially, the key themes here are that we have similar programs in Richmond, with the RCMP — Fox 80, which is a similar program as Car 87 and Car 88 in Vancouver. Again, similar to my comments around Vancouver, we now have an ACT team up and running, dedicated to the population in Richmond. Both have RCMP attached to those programs. It is a result of the extra funding that we received in the fall, dedicated to the homeless populations that we’re seeing across the Lower Mainland.

Again, similar to Vancouver, Richmond has formal RCMP liaison roles where leadership or clinicians can have access to our partners within the RCMP or the VPD. Then again, similarly, we have the structures put in place for the accountability and information-sharing.

It’s interesting to note that in Richmond, they also have cross-pollination through their education, and RCMP officers attend our heart and soul, which is the orientation that we have for all our new MHSU staff coming on board. That talks about recovery-oriented systems of care. It talks about trauma-informed practice. It talks about the importance of family inclusion and peer inclusion in our systems of care. So from an early onset, per these programs, the RCMP partners are able to participate in that. So that’s Richmond.

In Coastal, you’ll see that the RCMP in North Van is very involved with particular units. Also, given the large population of First Nation bands, we work with the RCMP to do outreach and to connect with the different bands for First Nations. Then again, the collaborative meetings are built in with multiple partners — which, again similar to Richmond and Vancouver, reinforce that collaborative nature and the outcomes and problem-solve those challenges.

I just wanted to quickly highlight the child and youth continuum as well. Obviously, for transitional youth and youth involved in substances or early psychosis, we have those tables as well. You can see that for Vancouver, there are a number of different meetings that are multi-agency, and there is an escalation of opportunities for clients to be discussed at different tables. That tier 1 table that you see as the third bullet is the table where some of the most clinically complex clients with multiple social and health issues or with criminal justice involvement would come to.

Then there are similar structures, again, for Richmond, except that we are starting the youth ICMT team again, with new funding coming in, where the formal RCMP will be attached to that as well. Then, in Coastal child and youth, we have a number of overlap programs as well.

[11:40 a.m.]

Given that we’re in the midst of the overdose crisis, I did just want to highlight — because we’ll have time for questions across those continuums — that we have worked very closely, and this is in our addictions services within Vancouver Coastal Health, to support clients at high risk of overdose.

Similar as Dr. Taylor was saying with the AOT team with the connection to ASAP from discharge from acute, the goal of the OOT, outreach overdose team, is to connect with one day of referral and to facilitate care — to provide that care but also to network to services. They’re expanding it, as you can see, across various catchments and geographic regions within Vancouver Coastal.

As I mentioned in my introduction, there’s also the direct-referral route, so that the police department can immediately connect with clients that have come across their desk.

Then similar with my comments that have been on a number of the slides is the importance of those structures to reinforce the relationships, to information-share and to problem-solve.

I’m going to just quickly highlight…. And I know I’m a little bit ahead of schedule here. I wanted to put in a plug with the audience and the members here with the special committee that B.C. requires an effective and comprehensive mental health crisis response system that is available both in urban and non-urban. I had mentioned that in my earlier slide.

That slide that I shared with you highlights the benefits of partnership and the need for information-sharing. I say here with the police, but it’s not just with the police. It’s with other health authorities. It’s with B.C. Corrections. It’s with our partners in the forensic side of the system. We all need to be working together because going back to the old way of the silos was not an effective way to deal and support clients and their families that interface with all different parts of our system. I think those documents that I showed you earlier really highlight the importance of us continuing that path and that journey.

As I mentioned, we grew organically. We had new funding come in at different times, but we also had the spotlight on some of the changing dynamics with drug use, for example, that Dr. Taylor mentioned. And the SAMI population with a lot of work, provincially and municipally, back in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

One of my key takeaways for the table is the importance of the provincial leadership around provincial standards for crisis response, where each of the health authorities and our partners would have the standards to follow and the corresponding accountability about how we’re allocating services, how we’re working in partnership and, most importantly, how we’re providing care and support to people in mental health and substance use crisis.

Again, we see more opportunities within the health sector for programs such as Fox 80 and Car 87. As I mentioned, we see formal partnerships would need to reach beyond just with the police, given these populations. As you saw with our North Shore: increase in collaboration with Indigenous populations and leadership to ensure that all our health services are culturally appropriate, effective and aligned with community needs. The importance of the information-sharing agreements and MOUs — that we think there should be consistency across the province.

I’m going to wind up there. There’s some further data attached to the slide deck if folks are interested. I think if it’s all right with the folks, we’ll hand over to you for any questions you may have of Dr. Taylor or myself.

D. Routley (Chair): We’ll go to questions now from members.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thank you both for your presentation. Lots of good information on the slide deck.

Just around your Fox 80, Car 87, those kind of teams approaches. We’ve heard from a number of organizations over the past month or so. For the most part, I think people are appreciative of the initiative, but there is some hesitancy. The police aspect of the car is a barrier, in itself, in accessing people that need that support.

[11:45 a.m.]

I’ve got two questions. I would like your thoughts around that. Closely tied to it is another…. Something that we’ve heard a number of times is the mental health paramedics that they have in Sweden. Kind of tying those two together, is there…? I would love your thoughts on both of these programs, and some of the public perspective around the Car 87 program, where the police are the barrier, as well as your perspective on the mental health paramedic car that we see over in Sweden, if that is something that looks pretty favourable.

A. MacFarlane: Dr. Taylor, do you want to tackle that first, and then I can hop in?

C. Taylor: Sure. Well, the crisis response model of police and nursing together is used around the world. It’s got a lot of support, as far as good outcomes. In mental health, there’s always going to be a spectrum of people who will not want to have the police involved. But when it’s a chaotic crisis situation, if it’s not possible to de-escalate with verbal skills or clinical skills, they have to be there as a backup. I know people are opposed to it.

I do think if we…. I don’t know a whole lot about the Swedish model, to be honest. I think that would be a wonderful addition to our system — that there be two mental health clinicians that can go out together and assess situations, with immediate police backup, if needed.

Mental health and public safety. This is the interaction between those two things, and trying to keep them both well attended to is our challenge. A different aspect to the model with two mental health clinicians — I think that’s a really good idea. I don’t have anything else really to add.

A. MacFarlane: I’ll just talk with some of my thoughts around that. I just want to be clear that my driver for any of this is that clients and their families in need of care get the appropriate care that they need. Unfortunately, a crisis response does require a multifaceted approach and a multifaceted assessment to help support that journey into care. That’s my overarching goal — that people who need mental health support or substance use support are able to access that.

One of the things that is frequently on my desk, because of some of the programs in my portfolio, is the safety of my teams and team members. Given the unpredictable behaviour in some of the crisis response, I think it is absolutely paramount that the police are alongside the mental health folks. In that moment, how that assessment actually takes place, who takes the lead — I think there would have to be work, and there is work, done around how that happens.

I’ll just flag, for example, that with our ACT clients, and some of our AOT clients in joint programs, the approach of a police officer responding to those situations, depending on their level of involvement and awareness of mental health, will change correspondingly. If there’s more education and support…. By support, I mean, perhaps a paramedic, perhaps a mental health nurse. Obviously, the model I’m most familiar with is having a mental health nurse or a social worker there who can take the lead, given those particular behaviours.

But I do think a factor that we have to consider is the safety of our staff, safety of the family and the safety of bystanders. I guess I’m championing mental health first, and then recognizing that there are potential implications in these situations. I think that there are different ways that the society can mitigate those factors.

G. Begg: I thank both the presenters for the context you helped bring to this discussion.

[11:50 a.m.]

We are looking at the provincial regulations governing all of British Columbia and, of course, if you’re not in a densely populated geographic area — in a rural or a remote location — the difficulties are exacerbated by not only the lack of psychiatric and medical services but, in some cases, the realization that the only response will be, at least initially, a police officer.

I’m wondering about — Dr. Taylor, you may have some knowledge of this — the level and quality or quantity of training available to police officers throughout the province to stabilize the situation, to de-escalate a situation. I know you can’t be specific, but are you aware, generally, of the ability or the capability of the police to respond?

C. Taylor: Yes. I’ve had a couple of conversations with the different officers I work with about what their training has been. CIT is crisis intervention training. That’s a really, again, widely spread police model for dealing with mental health issues. The newer recruits will have more extensive crisis intervention training.

Officers that have been around longer have annual de-escalation, crisis intervention updates that they — I think have to — do and certainly are able to do. There there’s further training beyond the required updates that they can get involved in if they’re interested. They do have some amount of — I’m quite sure it’s mandated — crisis intervention training each year. I think it’s only about half a day a year, but nonetheless, it’s an update.

There’s more available to them if they want more. All the officers I’ve worked with want to do this work. They’ve chosen, and no one has to work in mental health if they don’t want to. So I’m probably talking to a different breed as well.

The rural problem of not having anybody out there. I don’t know if it’s possible to have a mental health professional embedded in a crisis call centre or at 911. I don’t know if there’s ever been consideration of that, but that is a model that has occurred elsewhere — having a mental health professional either at the police station or at 911 or somewhere, where they’re accessible and available.

G. Begg: Just a quick follow-up, Chair, if I may.

Your program obviously emanates from the health region, and health regions across the province are very different. Is it a reasonable expectation that each health region in the province should be mandated to have protocols in place — similar, but perhaps not as extensive as yours — so that this committee can have some confidence of the availability of that type of service?

A. MacFarlane: I would be completely supportive of that. I do think there will have to be geographic differences. The ACT team, which we have referenced, has standards provincially for urban areas and rural areas. So there have been adjustments. I think that the same thing would be possible.

I will just highlight — sorry for the repeat if you have this on your radar — that the Provincial Health Services Authority, PHSA, is already doing work, not formally around the crisis for police but with the crisis lines — which is part of that continuum of services. That has been one of our pieces of feedback for them — that we think that that should be included with provincial standards.

The work in Vancouver is consistent across the province. There seems to be an appetite across the health authorities for that.

A. Olsen: Thank you, Dr. Taylor and Mr. MacFarlane, for your presentation. Just a question. I guess the position that was taken was that police presence provides the mental health worker or the psychiatrist with security, which has been your experience. Can you perhaps see, or do you have any data that shows…? I guess I can see that the other side of it is true as well — that that police officer’s presence might be an agitating factor that actually increases the situation.

[11:55 a.m.]

Maybe, from your clinical perspective…. You’ve certainly come here with a specific approach. However, can you maybe talk about how an armed police officer or a police officer’s presence, maybe even plainclothes, agitates a person further so that it then increases the volatility of the situation?

C. Taylor: Fair question. I must say I’ve not had that experience, where things get worse, because I’m always embedded with a nurse and a police officer and myself. I’ve not witnessed a police officer making things worse. I have witnessed a patient saying: “I don’t want to talk with him here. I don’t want to talk with her here.” We’ll have them step aside and go farther away, and that will de-escalate it, sometimes.

I don’t doubt without more skills that an armed police officer could make things more difficult. But I would say when they’re embedded with mental health professionals, I haven’t seen it go bad.

Now, if there was a nurse here, who is on the street a lot more than I am, they might have a different opinion of that or a different experience. But at this point, my experience and the literature review is that generally the officer and the mental health professional, together, make a calmer situation.

In my experience, it’s that presence that allows the assessment and allows people to calm down and be able to actually have a discussion and for me to be able to do an assessment. So there is some containment that comes just with the presence of police or security. It’s a similar thing in the hospital. If people are really agitated, sometimes that show of, “We are here; we’re in control,” will actually make things — well, in my experience, it always calms it down, without having to go hands-on.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Adam, Rick has to leave the meeting, and he has one question. Could I get that in first and then have you go after?

Go ahead.

R. Glumac: Thank you.

I wanted to acknowledge that…. You mention that having greater access to mental health professionals is important. That is something that was brought up with the previous presentation with E-Comm. They mentioned that in New Zealand, they have a dedicated phone line that, when they’re triaging calls, if it’s a mental health–related call, it could go directly to a mental health professional.

I wonder if you had any experience with that, any thoughts about that.

C. Taylor: I have no experience. I do have thoughts. It is in the literature. I do think it’s a great idea. It’s another route or another avenue to try to get someone talking to a mental health professional sooner rather than later. So I think it’s a great idea if we can embed them in call centres or other places like that, rather than us having to physically go and find someone. I think they’re a great idea.

A. MacFarlane: I would be aligned with that as well.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. And thank you, Rick.

Go ahead, Adam.

A. Olsen: Just back to Dr. Taylor. In your experience, which is what you’ve been presenting on today, do you show up at a meeting with a client without police, or are you always there with a police presence?

C. Taylor: In AOT, we’re always together. It is a team of three. Well, it’s a team of two when I’m not there, so the police and the nurse do the vast majority of the work. I want to make that clear. I mean, we have four half-days a week of physician time. The rest of the seven days is covered by nursing and police. So it is how our team is presented.

One of the criteria for being seen by AOT is that there will always be an officer and always be a nurse and then sometimes we’ll bring the physician in. Patients know that. Our clients know that upfront. They don’t have a lot of say in seeing us, most of them, if they’re on extended leave. I mean, there are conditions of their leave. If the condition of leave is to AOT, then it is a police officer and a nurse and a psychiatrist, when needed.

[12:00 p.m.]

But the goal is always to move them from AOT. We are not trying to keep people long term. We’re trying to stabilize them and move them to a less intrusive care model, where they will not be involved with police, and the people who are working with them will be safe in seeing them, as they’re more stable. It’s no one’s preference to always have the police there, for sure. That’s not the goal.

A. Olsen: Yeah. I guess I’m just trying to reconcile it. There’s an academic, who presented to the committee before, who has shared alternative experiences of clients, from the people that they actually studied. So I’m just trying to reconcile this.

I recognize…. I’m not here to try to undermine what your feeling of safety and security is. I’m just trying to understand what, in actuality, is happening at that moment, on the street, when these interactions are happening — whether or not it is increasing security, or if it’s a perception of that. What is the perception of the client, on the other side? What’s the prime mover when it comes to the agitation or escalation, if that is…?

I’m just wanting to make sure, as we prepare our recommendations, that we’re doing our best to reconcile these conflicting testimonies that we’ve received. Thank you for your presentation today.

C. Taylor: You’re welcome.

A. MacFarlane: I’ll just add that I think it’s important to acknowledge, as well, that people enter the health care system in crisis in different ways. Through an interaction with the police, which is quite a visible one…. That is only one way that folks come in to the system. Parents bring their children into the hospital. People are recalled through the mental health teams that they’re already seeing. That doesn’t necessarily involve police officers.

I know that this is about the reform of the Police Act. For crisis and for the health side, we’re thinking about a continuum of how people access that mental health and substance use support.

C. Taylor: Can I add something I just was thinking about? The other angle on this is that sometimes patients are vehemently opposed to psychiatric treatment and psychiatrists. Psychiatry and medications have ruined their lives. They want nothing to do with us. At times, people have refused to see me. They don’t want to talk to me, but they’ll have a relationship with the police officer or with the nurse. So the three of us, being present…. Sometimes it’s not the police. Sometimes it’s us. Mental health is persona non grata completely.

It can go both ways in the population that I work with. So it’s clear. This is one spectrum of the mental health situation. I just thought I’d point that out: sometimes it’s us.

D. Routley (Chair): One quick question for me, Dr. Taylor. Are you familiar with Dr. Allan Wade?

C. Taylor: Allan Wade?

D. Routley (Chair): Yes.

C. Taylor: No, I’m not.

D. Routley (Chair): He’s a psychiatrist who does work in the Northwest Territories with police, as well as in Sweden. He was involved in some of what has been discussed here.

To other members of the committee, he’s an old family friend. I’ll recommend him to submit to the committee. What we’ve been saying has really brought him to mind.

On behalf of the committee, I want to thank both of you for this excellent presentation, for the insight that you’ve given us. You expand our understanding not only of what’s happening on the street, in your lived experience, but also of how the interactions between police, mental health policy and institutions work. I’m sure we’ll have more questions. In fact, one of the members has already sent me a chat that they are going to have more questions for you. I’d ask, as I do most times, if you’d be willing to help the committee, should we have those further inquiries.

A. MacFarlane: Absolutely.

C. Taylor: Yes.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. That goes both ways. If you have anything you want to submit to us, please feel free. You know where we are.

A. MacFarlane: On behalf of Vancouver Coastal Health, thank you so much for the opportunity to present to you all. The impact of your work is, potentially, profound for the clients in need of mental and substance use support. Thank you very much.

D. Routley (Chair): The committee members all feel that way, definitely. We’re looking forward to making a positive difference.

C. Taylor: Thanks for your work.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you for yours.

Members, that brings our meeting to a close. We’re almost on time today. With that, I would ask for a motion to adjourn the meeting. I’ve got one from MLA Begg, seconded by MLA Sandhu.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 12:05 p.m.