The committee met at 9:35 a.m.

Election of Chair and Deputy Chair

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): Good morning, everyone. My name is Karan Riarh. I am the Clerk to the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act.

I am joining this meeting from the legislative precinct, which is located on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-​speaking peoples, now known as the Song­hees and Esquimalt First Nations.

As this is the first meeting of the committee for the sec­ond session of the 42nd parliament, it is my honour as Committee Clerk to oversee the election of a Chair.

Do we have any nominations for Chair of the committee?

R. Singh: I nominate Doug Routley for the Chair.

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): Doug, do you accept the nomination?

D. Routley: I do. Thank you.

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): All right. Do we have any other further nominations? Any further nominations? And a third and last time, any further nominations?

All right. So the question is that Doug Routley take the role of Chair of the committee.

Motion approved.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): Congratulations, Chair.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Thank you, Members.

I guess the next order of business is the election of our Deputy Chair. Are there any nominations for Deputy Chair?

K. Kirkpatrick: I’ll nominate Dan Davies.

D. Routley (Chair): MLA Kirkpatrick nominates.

Second?

Mr. Davies, do you accept?

D. Davies: Let me think about that for a minute. Okay.

I do. I do, Chair.

D. Routley (Chair): I believe I should have asked for more opportunities for nominations. I apologize. I’m not sure what to do about that.

Karan, are we okay to just proceed, or should we redo that? Okay.

The question is that Mr. Davies take the role of Deputy Chair.

Motion approved.

D. Routley (Chair): Congratulations, Mr. Davies. This marks a real turning point in our committee, I think. Thank you.

Now we will move on to the next item on our agenda, which is presentations. I will take this opportunity to in­troduce myself to those listening to today’s meeting. My name is Doug Routley. I’m the MLA for Nanaimo–North Cowichan and the Chair of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act, an all-party committee of the Legislative Assembly.

I would like to acknowledge 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 to and participating in this meeting.

Our committee is undertaking a broad consultation with respect to policing and public safety in B.C. We are taking a phased approach to this work and have been 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 for this phase of the consultation is 5 p.m. on Friday, April 30.

In terms of the format for today’s meeting, each presenter has 15 minutes to speak followed by time for questions from committee members.

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

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

[9:40 a.m.]

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I look forward to the presentation this morning. My name is Dan Davies. I’m the MLA for Peace River North.

I’m coming to you from the territory of the Dane-zaa.

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

I’m joining you from the shared territories of the Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Katzie, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations.

R. Glumac: Hi. I’m MLA Rick Glumac, representing the riding of Port Moody–Coquitlam.

I am on the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

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

I’m joining you from the traditional territory of Semiahmoo.

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

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

Thank you for joining us. I look forward to your presentations.

G. Begg: Good morning, everyone. 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 peoples, including the Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Katzie First Nations.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi there. Honoured to have you presenting to us today. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

We are located on the traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish First Nations.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

I come to you from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation. I believe I said that, but I’m not certain.

Assisting the committee today are Karan Riarh from the Parliamentary Committees Office and Billy Young from Hansard Services.

For our first panel, we will be hearing from the Hon. Wallace T. Oppal and Dr. Benjamin Goold from the University of British Columbia. I’ll now turn it over to Mr. Oppal for his presentation but not before giving him a personal welcome as a fellow Cowichan Valley native.

It’s very nice to see you again, as a former colleague in the House. The institution misses you and your snappy dressing, my friend.

I’ll hand it over to you with that.

Presentations on Police Act

WALLACE OPPAL

W. Oppal: Thank you. At the outset, I want to acknowledge that I’m speaking on the traditional territory of the Coast Salish Nation.

I want, at the outset, to thank you for inviting me to speak on this most important issue. I also want to commend the government for embarking on a much-needed examination of the Police Act. I’ve prepared a written submission for you, and I’ll follow it in general terms, but I’m probably going to be diverting from it.

[9:45 a.m.]

Back in 1992, the government of the day appointed me to conduct a commission of inquiry into policing. The terms of reference were wide in scope. We were asked to study and report back to the government on such issues as: how do we select police? How do we promote them? How do we train them? How do we reach the communities that they’re serving? How do you select a chief of police? What about the use of force — high-speed chases, neck restraints, weapons? All of those factors.

Diversity in policing. Do we have enough women in policing? Do we have enough visible minorities in policing? What about the Aboriginal communities? What about weapons? All of those things the government asked us to investigate and report back on.

We garnered a tremendous amount of publicity and attention in the public. We travelled the whole of the prov­ince. Much of what we said at that time resulted in the changes in the Police Act of 1998 and the work we did, particularly in the area of public complaints. That was, perhaps, the major issue the public was interested in: who polices the police? The 1998 act recognizes the recommendation we made at that time that the police, in the area of public complaints, ought to be governed by an independent complaint commissioner.

The Office of the Public Complaint Commissioner came out of our recommendations in 1994. That was when the report…. The report is entitled Closing the Gap: Policing and the Community.

I’m mindful of the fact that you’ve already heard from different people on different issues. So I’ll try not to repeat and get into areas that you’ve already had the benefit of hearing on.

I’m going to deal with governance. There’s no area of policing that’s more important than governance. Governance really defines the relationship between the police and the community. Governance in Canada has evolved by three different levels of government. The federal government, the provincial government and the municipal government are all involved in governance. Governance is a neglected area, because it just doesn’t have the same kind of appeal that other issues regarding policing do have.

There are two fundamental principles of policing in a country that’s governed by the rule of law, and they are related. The first is that the police must be accountable to civilian authority. That’s a fundamental principle of any liberal democracy that distinguishes itself from other nations. Independent civilian oversight is a fundamental process, a fundamental requirement of any democracy.

If you want an example of a society that does not have independent oversight in policing, look to the south of us, where the police forces have become, generally, a law unto themselves. There is virtually no independent oversight in any of the policing agencies. I’ve been to a number of different conferences down there. I speak to police in America, and to legislators, and they just don’t have independent oversight.

If you’re going to have credibility in your policing, you are going to need independent police oversight. The Office of the Public Complaint Commissioner in this province has such a mandate.

We have three different sources of oversight. You have police boards at the local level. You have the IIO, which is involved in the oversight of policing where there’s bodily harm or death. Then, where there are violations of the Police Act, the Office of the Public Complaint Commissioner is the governing person that oversees all those complaints.

I’m going to get back into this in a minute, but the sec­ond principle that’s fundamental to policing in a democracy is that the police must be independent operationally. In other words, the decisions to investigate, how to conduct investigations and whether to recommend the laying of charges to Crown counsel must be totally free of political influence or even the appearance of such influence.

[9:50 a.m.]

The police cannot be a law unto themselves. They must have the necessary independence to conduct investigations.

The province, as I said, has a benefit of the office of the public complaints system. The system has worked well. The weakness in our system of public complaints in this province is the unwillingness of the RCMP to be involved in public complaints.

We said this in 1994. At that time, I made a recommendation to the government of the day that if the RCMP did not want to come in to our independent complaint process that had the necessary transparency, we should then, maybe, embark upon establishing our own police force. That wasn’t done, of course, and to this date, the RCMP has their own complaint system. That’s not acceptable.

If you want to lay a complaint against a member of the RCMP, what you have to do is you have to lay a complaint under the civilian review board of the RCMP. It works well, except it has no power. It is an advisory body, and that’s it.

I’ll give you an example in the Colten Boushie case that we’ve all heard, of the young Indigenous man who was shot to death in Saskatchewan. The RCMP investigated. The officers attended at the residence of the Indigenous mother whose son had been killed, and the first thing they asked her was whether she had been drinking. Then the officers asked her…. She went to pieces and fell to the floor sobbing when she was told that her son had been killed, and the officer said: “Get it together.” They would not have done that if that was a white woman. But they did that.

The civilian review board did an investigation. They criticized the RCMP officers, and that report sat on the commissioner’s desk for a year. That just isn’t acceptable. That can’t happen in this province, because in this province, we have time limits. There are strict time limits under the Police Act when complaints are dealt with. They have to come in within a statutory period of time.

The RCMP, if they’re going to be the provincial police force, have to adhere to our complaint process. They have not done that, and I see no willingness on the part of the RCMP, to this date, to become a part of our process.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is that the…. We have three bodies here that investigate public complaints. Police boards deal with service complaints. The office of the public complaint commission deals with complaints under the Police Act, and as I said a moment ago, any issues regarding criminal law are dealt with by the IIO.

Now, I think the IIO and the office of the public complaint commission ought to be amalgamated. I don’t think this province needs two different independent bodies that investigate public complaints. They can be amalgamated, and they ought to be.

I’m going to talk about police boards. Now, police boa­rds are the governing body of any independent municipal police department. The problem is that three quarters of this province is policed by the RCMP. They have no police boards so there is no governing local body that deals with the RCMP. That debate is now being played out in Surrey, where you have the establishment of an independent police department, and they have a police board.

The police board is the governing body of any police department. The police board, really, is a voice of the public. They have the function and the duty to reach out to the public to tell the police what the priorities are of any given jurisdiction, any given body, any given area. That’s the advantage of having local input into the governance and the management of police departments.

[9:55 a.m.]

The police boards generally work well, but there is a criticism that the boards become too close to the police. I think that, in my respectful submission, there ought to be recommendations made where there ought to be further education to police boards. Boards are an important role in the democratic process, and they give input to police chiefs and police officers as to what the respective priorities are in any particular jurisdiction.

That said, the RCMP doesn’t have them. I think that’s a fundamental weakness when it comes to the relationship between the community and the police in those areas that are policed by the RCMP.

I want to move on to something else, and that is the area of mental illness and police. This is a huge issue, and I know that you’ve heard other people come before you and give you advice as to what ought to be done. One of the most difficult tasks of any police officer in this province is to deal with social issues, and no issue is more important than the issue regarding mental illness.

In 2019, the government appointed me to chair a study group to decide what ought to be done at the Justice Institute Police Academy. Our fundamental recommendation is that officers need better training in areas of mental illness, so that they can recognize when a particular subject is suffering from mental illness, particularly in the areas of violent crime.

I’m an adjudicator under the present Police Act. I dealt with a case recently where a young Aboriginal man, suffering from mental illness, was involved with an altercation with a knife. The member of the police force came and shot the man with bean bags in order to subdue him. In my view, what ought to have taken place is some kind of dialogue, and the police need to be trained in that particular area.

I don’t blame the police, in that the police have an al­most difficult task in dealing with social issues. They do the best they can under the circumstances, but I think that’s one thing this committee ought to recommend, strongly — that the police have training in mental illness issues so that they can better deal with volatile situations which inevitably are the product of people suffering from mental illness.

I want to move on to racism and demographics, and you will note that I’m glossing over these issues. I have dealt with them in a little more detail in my paper, and I would suggest that you take the time to look at them. But racism, demographics — that’s a huge issue, because over 40 percent of the city of Vancouver is now foreign-born.

Many of these people come from jurisdictions where policing does not have the same type of relationship be­tween the community as we do here in Canada. What we need to do is become more user-friendly when it comes to multicultural communities, so that they better understand what our system of policing is about, that our police are officers who assist communities and are prepared to work with them in a proactive way.

Now, at the end of my paper, I have made reference to what’s called community-based policing, which is a philosophy of policing. What that really means is police officers react in a proactive way, as opposed to a reactive way. You work with communities. My respectful submission to you is that you recommend a philosophical approach to policing where police are less militaristic and more proactive when it comes to social issues and more proactive when it comes to dealing with communities.

It’s common knowledge that the police get to a scene of crime after the crime has been committed. That’s important to remember. The damage is already done by that time. What we need to do is to be more proactive in policing and in crime control, because we need to have socially oriented policies that not only involve the police but also the community at large.

[10:00 a.m.]

I know I’m over my limit. I’m quite prepared to ans­wer…. I’ve rambled on here because I’ve tried to hit a number of different issues. I could probably do this for another hour. I’ve been doing this now since 1992. People actually think I know a lot about policing. I have strong views on this.

I want to commend you for being involved in this. There’s a lot of work that you need to do. The Police Act needs to be amended. It needs to be more proactive. We need to become more proactive with communities.

I’ll stop there, in the event that you have questions.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Oppal.

Next we’ll hear from Dr. Benjamin Goold.

BENJAMIN GOOLD

B. Goold: I want to begin my presentation by acknowledging that I’m coming to you from the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Many thanks to the members of the special committee for the invitation to speak today. This is incredibly important work, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to present.

I am currently a professor at the University of British Columbia Peter Allard School of Law, where I teach criminal law and jurisprudence. Prior to arriving in Canada in 2010, I worked for the University of Oxford, where I was a member of the faculty of law in the Oxford Centre for Criminology. I also have experience teaching and undertaking research in law and criminology in the United States and Japan, and I have been a visiting professor at a number of universities in Australia.

In terms of my research over the past 20 years, I have written on various issues relating to privacy, surveillance and policing. More specifically, I have a long-standing interest in police governance and the organizational structure of law enforcement agencies and how these things have an impact on the relationship between the police and the public.

Before I begin the main part of my presentation, I want to start by making two observations about policing in British Columbia. First and foremost, I want to say that it is my view that there can be absolutely no doubt that systemic racism exists in municipal police forces and the RCMP in British Columbia, as it does in law enforcement agencies across Canada. This is a problem that is long-standing and persistent.

I am certain this special committee has already heard a great deal about the problem of systemic racism in B.C. policing from subject-matter experts, advocacy groups and community representatives. I want to note at the outset that this is a problem that has, in recent months, also been publicly acknowledged by the police themselves.

As Chief Bryan Larkin observed in his presentation to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on August 14 last year, we have “study after study, including government-commissioned reports, that de­monstrates we have an issue with systemic racism throughout our justice system, which includes our legal system, our courts and our police” services.

Speaking in a similar vein, Vancouver police board Chair Kennedy Stewart, in a statement from the board on the 22nd of June, 2020, acknowledged that there is “systemic racism in all our public and private institutions, including police services.”

Further, RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki stated in June of last year, as well, that systemic racism exists in the RCMP and that there had been a failure, in her words, “to treat racialized and Indigenous people fairly.”

The second point I wish to make is that there is clearly a great deal of work that needs to be done to ensure that policing in B.C. is subject to effective, efficient and accessible independent oversight.

I take note of the findings of the Special Committee to Review the Police Complaint Process, published in 2019 — in particular, its recommendation that the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner “increase engagement and outreach activities to inform and educate British Columbians about the police complaint process, with a particular focus on agencies that serve Indigenous people living in urban areas, settlement service organizations and organizations that serve vulnerable communities.”

As the First Nations Leadership Council noted in their presentation to that committee, there is “the potential for systemic misconduct, bias or discrimination which may go unaddressed in the current police complaint system” in B.C. Systemic change is needed to ensure that Indigenous people have confidence “in the police complaint process and policing in B.C. in general.”

With regards to the independent investigations office…. While the establishment of that office in 2012, I believe, marked a step towards greater police accountability in B.C., I continue to agree with the Braidwood report’s recommendation that the office of the provincial Ombudsperson should have been given jurisdiction over the IIO.

I now want to turn to what constitutes the main part of my presentation. Here my aim is twofold. First, I want to highlight for the committee three key features of policing which I believe need to be understood and part of any conversation about police reform in British Columbia. Second, I want to draw attention to the importance of introducing substantial and ongoing anti-racism and cultural competency training for all serving police officers in British Columbia.

[10:05 a.m.]

As I will note in the rest of this presentation, improved oversight and transparency, as well as more effective and efficient complaints procedures, can only take us so far when it comes to ensuring that the police in British Columbia are held to the highest professional standards and acting in accordance with the law. In addition, we need to ensure that all police officers are provided with meaningful, mandatory and ongoing training that makes clear how systemic racism operates in policing and which provides police officers with the tools they need to work with Indigenous communities, visible minorities and other vulnerable populations in British Columbia.

Let me start by briefly noting three key features of policing, all of which apply to municipal police forces and the RCMP in British Columbia. First, unlike many other organizations, where the extent of an individual’s authority and discretion tends to increase as they become more experienced or more senior within the organization, a great deal of police discretion is concentrated at the base of the organizational hierarchy and is often entrusted to relatively inexperienced officers.

For example, an officer may spend the first years of their career engaged in general policing duties, which necessarily involve the exercise of broad powers of discretion when it comes to interactions with members of the public. If police organizational structures look like pyramids, while authority, in terms of strategic direction, policy and re­sources may come from the top, most of the actual day-to-day decision-making power resides at the base of the pyramid and is in the hands of street-level officers.

Second, in many cases, particularly when it comes to street-level policing, the day-to-day exercise of police discretion as it directly impacts members of the public is not transparent or subject to meaningful oversight. This is especially true when the police decide not to act.

For example, while it’s absolutely right that a great deal of attention is being paid to police street checks in B.C. in recent years, particularly given the overrepresentation of Indigenous and Black people when it comes to these checks, it is also to be remembered that the decision not to check somebody is also an exercise of police power and is subject to the same systemic racism and biases that inform positive decisions to check someone else. Crucially, the vast majority of decisions not to check and not to intervene are not recorded in any way and are subject to even less oversight.

A third point to note about the exercise of police discretion is that it is a crucial factor in determining who comes into contact with the criminal justice system, under what circumstances and what happens next. As front-line agents of the state, the police are the gateway to the justice system, and their discretionary decisions about who to stop, question and arrest have enormous impact on everything from perceived rates of crime, arrest statistics, rates of charge in criminal prosecution and, ultimately, who ends up being punished.

Taken together, these three features of policing point to one thing: the overarching need to ensure the police exercise their discretion in a manner that is consistent with their obligations under Canadian law, actively combats long-standing problems with systemic racism and the ongoing harms of colonialism and does not discriminate against visible minorities and vulnerable communities, such as those living with mental health issues.

Broadly speaking, there are two main ways to approach the challenge of regulating police discretion. The first is to strengthen the existing systems of police oversight, conduct regular audits and independent reviews of police for­ces and improve the efficiency, effectiveness and independence of police complaint processes. The second, which is the one I want to concentrate on for the rest of my presentation, is to take seriously the importance of police training.

Given the difficulties associated with monitoring what I’ve referred to as street-level discretion, it is vital that pol­ice officers understand their legal obligations and are committed to the proper exercise of that discretion. Furthermore, it is also important that officers recognize how the exercise of their discretion can contribute to problems of systemic racism, discrimination, profiling and a lack of confidence in the police.

As far as I can see, the Police Act is silent as to the content and frequency of police training in British Columbia. There is no clear obligation placed on police forces to provide mandatory, substantial and ongoing anti-racism and cultural competency training for serving officers.

As my colleague Patricia Barkaskas at the Peter Allard School of Law noted in an interview with the CBC last June, current training to address anti-Indigenous racism, such as requiring officers to watch a 45-minute video on Indigenous relations with the police or holding one-off sessions with Indigenous community members and Elders about the impacts of colonialization, is, in her words, “woe­fully inadequate.” There’s a clear need for greater levels of cultural competency in policing at all levels in B.C.

[10:10 a.m.]

While I understand that some forces are in the process of updating their officer training, this cannot be something that is left to the discretion of individual forces. There needs to be consistency in the way in which police forces throughout British Columbia approach anti-racism and cultural competency training, with such programs being developed with substantial input from Indigenous people as well as representatives of racialized and vulnerable communities in B.C.

Anti-racism and cultural competency training also needs to be ongoing, with all active officers, regardless of rank, being required to undergo such training on a regular basis. It is not enough that police officers only receive this training at the beginning of their careers. Instead, it must be ongoing, with a view to promoting career-long learning with regard to the problems of systemic racism and the promotion of cultural competency.

In making this recommendation, I would direct the committee to the report of the B.C. Special Committee to Review the Police Complaint Process and the final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Both reports point to the need for cultural competency training for police officers, with the national inquiry report being especially clear in calling for all police recruits to be given training that includes reference to the history of the police and the oppression and genocide of Indigenous People, anti-racism and anti-bias training and culture and language training.

I also think it’s important here to refer to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action, most notably call 57, which calls on federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments to provide education to public servants on the history of Aboriginal peoples — including the history and legacy of residential schools, the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law and Aboriginal-Crown relations — and its acknowledgment that this will require skills-based training in intercultural competency, conflict resolution, human rights and anti-racism.

Before I conclude, I just want to say two final things. First, I want to stress that requiring police officers to participate in ongoing and meaningful anti-racism and cultural competency training must be part of a broader strategy when it comes to ensuring that officers use their discretion appropriately and that that exercise of discretion is not perpetuating problems of systemic racism.

Obviously, training alone is not a panacea, but it’s im­portant not to ignore the importance of anti-racism and cultural competency training. One of the reasons I decided to focus on this today is that I think training is an area that is often neglected in discussions about police reform.

Second, I want to reiterate the need for training to be developed in conjunction with those who are most often at what I would refer to as the sharp end of police discre­tion, most notably Indigenous People, visible minorities and vulnerable people, such as those living with mental health issues.

Thank you very much for giving me the time to present to you this morning.

D. Routley (Chair): Members, we have lost Mr. Oppal, but we’re trying to reconnect. As we move to questions, if people have questions for Dr. Goold first, I’d like to hear those.

R. Singh: Thank you, Dr. Goold, for your presentation and for the way you’ve described the systemic racism.

I think the words really matter — what you have said to­day. We have heard from a number of stakeholders, a number of presenters, especially about the issues facing our Indigenous communities. We have also heard a lot about the lack of training, and you have emphasized in your presentation about that.

One thing has also come up, and I would really like to check with you. Along with the training, especially, some Indigenous stakeholders have also mentioned that before the police officers are hired, they need to have some criteria, some body of work. They need to demonstrate that they have these values, the human rights values, or that they have some information or knowledge, especially about the Indigenous populations and their history.

Would you like to say something about that?

B. Goold: Thank you very much for the question.

I would thoroughly agree with that statement. I think it’s vitally important, when police officers are recruited, that efforts be made to select them thoughtfully and, to be clear, that it’s the case that people who wish to be police of­ficers have to understand the problems of systemic racism and their position as front-line agents of the state in relation to groups like Indigenous communities, vulnerable populations and racialized groups.

[10:15 a.m.]

I decided today to focus on the question of training. As I said, I think it’s an area that’s often neglected in these conversations. Over the last 20 years, I’ve had lots of conversations about governance around policing, and it has led me to the view that governance can only ever be of one piece. I think training is vitally important, but I also think selection and recruitment are important. That requires you to be very thoughtful about the sorts of values you want people to come into the institution with.

There’s a lot of research to suggest that people learn values on the job when it comes to policing, which is why ongoing training is vitally important. It’s also important to select people who are committed to, among other things, combatting the problems of systemic racism, acknowledging the history of colonialism and settler-colonial relations in this province, and in Canada generally, and also being committed to human rights.

It’s not something I touched on particularly much in this presentation, but as someone who writes on human rights, I think that’s a fundamental aspect of policing: the police, in many respects, are one of the most important up­holders of Charter values in this country. I think it’s very important that anyone we select to become a serving police officer understand their role in that constitutional framework.

R. Singh: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I have just one follow-up question.

We have also heard about broken trust between the In­digenous communities. We still have to hear from other communities as well, especially the Black communities, but a number of stakeholders from the Indigenous communities have talked about this lack of trust. Moving forward, what kind of recommendation should this committee come up with to build that trust?

B. Goold: Thank you for the question. Actually, trust is another area I’ve been interested in a great deal over the years. Maybe I can say a couple of things about trust generally, given the opportunity to speak to it.

One is that I think it’s important to remember that in policing, the police can’t undertake their job without trust. It’s often forgotten that the great majority of the information that comes to the police is actually coming directly from members of the public and members of communities. This image we often get on television, that the police go out and actively gather information and investigate, is somewhat misleading.

I think most studies show that between 80 and 90 percent of the information that’s in front of the police is brought to them voluntarily by members of the public. Obviously, if trust doesn’t exist between members of the public and communities and the police, those sources of information dry up and the police’s job becomes exceedingly difficult.

The other thing to say is that I am a firm believer in the notion that policing is by consent, that policing can only be effective when they have the trust and support of the communities in which they operate. One can understand…. I’m not in the position to speak for Indigenous communities, obviously, but I think there’s a long history of mistrust between Indigenous communities and the police in this province and in Canada generally. I think that’s one of the most fundamental barriers to effective community policing in relation to those communities.

I think it’s a matter for extensive consultation with those communities, between Indigenous communities and the police. I really encourage this committee to provide opportunities for Indigenous communities to provide information and representation about how they would like those conversations to proceed. I don’t think anyone can tell anyone else what they need to do in terms of developing trust. I think we actually have to hear from the people who suffer from a lack of trust about what they need, in order to move forward on that front.

R. Singh: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thanks, Dr. Goold. That was very interesting. I’m going to ask probably a bit of a micro-question. I was fiddling for a few minutes with technical issues. So I’m sorry if I’m asking something that we talked about.

With respect to discretion, I know it’s not all police officers. There are certain people or certain subsets that maybe are not as good at dealing with some of these systemic racism issues as others may be. Is there data gath­ered that takes a look at particular police officers and how many arrests they’ve made or street stops they’ve made, to get a sense of it from an individual perspective? Maybe there’s targeted training. Does that kind of data exist?

B. Goold: I’m not entirely sure, actually. I imagine that there are forms of data that the police collect around these things in British Columbia. I’m not aware of longitudinal, empirical studies that have attempted to look at that in B.C., although as a researcher, I’m always conscious of the fact I don’t have full knowledge of everything that has been written. So I hesitate to say that definitively.

The one thing I would say is that it’s exceedingly difficult to study street-level discretion. This is the point I made about it. It’s not just about the decision to stop someone to question them and potentially arrest them, but it’s the decision not to do those things. For obvious reasons, we’re not going to have data on that.

[10:20 a.m.]

If we take the example…. I will use this as a sort of very simple but important hypothetical. A police officer is walking down the street and sees two people on opposite sides of the street doing things that may be regarded as criminal. Their choice about which one they wish to direct their attention to, particularly if it’s driven by perceptions in relation to their age, in relation to their race or their gender…. We might have data on the person they speak to and stop, but we’ll have no data on the person they didn’t. That’s really one of the problems, in terms of thinking about this.

I want to sound a note of caution. I think even when you can do those sorts of data-driven studies about who gets stopped, and the like, it doesn’t tell you a great deal or, in some cases, anything about who isn’t being stopped and where resources are not going.

One of the things I speak to my students about is that in many respects, what we understand as crime is a reflection of what we choose to look at. So by directing our attention in one place and not another, we’ll inevitably find crime in the first place and not in the other. So criminal statistics and rates of arrest — all of these things flow from a fundamental question about where we direct our attention.

As front-line, as I’ve said, representatives of the state, where police officers direct their attention is enormously important. It structures so many things that come after it.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

A. Olsen: I really appreciate your presentation, Dr. Go­old. In all of these meetings that we have had and presentations that we’ve had, I don’t think — and I’m open to being corrected in this, of course — anybody has raised this really important point around discretion.

I don’t even know, really, how to dig in and ask these questions, but I just recognize the importance of them. There’s both, I think, an opportunity to create training programs, to the other side, to make people aware of….

A lot of these are just biases that we carry around with us every day, and we may or may not know or understand that we carry that specific bias. As a result of something that you heard when you were a younger person or something that you picked up from one of your friends, you may make a decision to do or to not do something one day, and that might have really, really extreme consequences on many people in society, if not just on the individual who is making the decisions.

I’m just wondering, from an academic perspective, if there’s any way for us to be able to help, in our recommendations, and where we would point to, I think, to give the people on the street making these decisions a better understanding of those biases that they carry and the decision-making process.

It’s almost like…. I think that before the pilots were al­lowed to get back in the Boeing 737 Max, for an example, they had to spend a certain amount of time in a flight simulator. That would then give them an awareness, a 360-degree awareness, of what might happen and how they would then respond to that in a fraction of a second. It’s almost like if we could have these simulators, where you could simulate certain decision points and then give people the…. Not necessarily tell them what their discretion should be but to highlight that.

Anyway, I’m obviously just kind of rambling around here, but what you’ve raised, I think, in the way you have raised it and articulated it, is the first time that I’ve heard this in this committee. I think it’s a really important point that needs emphasis, and perhaps, I would like to investigate how it is that we can introduce people to maybe some of the biases and those discretion and decision-making points.

I’ll leave it at that. I don’t know if I’ve got a question as much as just, I think, a discussion.

B. Goold: Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming back to this question of discretion. Maybe I can say a few general things about discretion in policing, just to elaborate on what I said in my presentation. Then we can come back to this question about how one addresses these things.

[10:25 a.m.]

One of the things I didn’t point to in the presentation but expected may come up in questions, or at least an op­portunity to speak to this in questions, is that whilst it is true that we all carry biases of various kinds, the difference is that when I exercise my discretion in the context of my workplace, for example, I don’t do so with the right to use force.

One of the things that is almost unique to the police — and I say almost unique, because I think it extends to people, say, in CBSA and other law enforcement agencies — is that they have the right or the opportunity to use force in the execution of their duties. When they make discretionary decisions, behind those is the capacity to use force against members of the public. So that makes it….

In my view, and I have written about this, I think that fundamentally changes the obligations on the police, their role in society and how we should look at them, scrutinize them and think about discretion. So that’s just to say…. As I said, I didn’t focus on that in the formal part of the presentation, but I do think it has to always be front of mind that we’re talking about people who have the opportunity or the legal authority to use force in certain situations.

With regards to anti-racism and cultural competency training, I am not a subject-matter expert on either of those things. I have gone through various training programs in the course of my career. I have interacted with colleagues who teach in those areas. What I would say is that my professional impression is that there is a vast body of literature around these training programs, and the like, and particularly in relation to policing.

I don’t think there’s any shortage of materials that the police could draw upon. I don’t think there’s any shortage of subject-matter experts they could look to in formulating programs. I don’t think that’s the problem, to be frank. I think there’s a wealth of resources. I think, if I’m being blunt, it’s a little bit like the question about systemic racism in policing. In my view, I don’t think it’s valuable or even meaningful to have the conversation anymore about whe­ther it exists anymore. It clearly does.

I think that it’s not productive to continue to go back to the question of: is there systemic racism in policing? In my view, there is. By the same token, I don’t think that it’s necessary to ask, “What do we do about it?” in terms of training and cultural competency and anti-racism training and the like.

There are years and years of training programs being de­veloped. I think there’s a lot of data around them. There are plenty of resources the police could draw upon, and doing that in conjunction with the communities most affected by the exercise of biased discretion. I think that would be the best way forward.

I appreciate you bringing us back to the question of discretion. I do think, as I’ve said, it’s a fundamentally important one. I think it’s also, just to say, a slippery thing to get hold of. I think it’s just the same as someone who’s done empirical work around policing for a long time. Even in the academic literature, we struggle to think about how to regulate discretion, right? So it’s difficult, because for the most part, it’s opaque, and it’s very difficult to hold people to account, particularly at the street level, in terms of street-level policing.

It’s partly why I think training and, as mentioned earlier, recruitment are vitally important in making sure police discretion is exercised in a way that’s consistent with Canadian law and thoughtful about problems with systemic racism and the need for cultural competency.

T. Halford: Thank you for the presentations.

This was going to be more of a question to both of the presenters. I see that Mr. Oppal is still not able to join us, but if you’re able to answer this or comment on it, great. If not, I completely understand. And just to pick up on MLA Olsen’s point, maybe in a different view in terms of biases and discretion.

One of the things…. We’ve seen a couple very horrific examples of this. I just wanted your views on where you’ve seen things evolve or not evolve. Particularly when we’re talking about issues of sexual assault and sexual harassment, I think that we talk a lot — and we need to talk more — about racial bias, and I agree with everything you said.

When officers are dealing with issues of the nature that I just said, whether it’s sexual assault or sexual harassment…. In terms of what you’re seeing — areas where we can better protect individuals that are going through those experiences…. We have seen, in the past, some very, very horrific examples, predominantly with women, with young women, and with devastating consequences. Maybe if you’re able to give a comment on that? I’d ask the exact same question to Mr. Oppal if he were here as well.

[10:30 a.m.]

B. Goold: I just want to be clear that my comments that follow…. I’m not a subject-matter expert on questions of sexual assault and, particularly, criminal justice responses to sexual assault. If it’s helpful to the committee, I’d be very happy to provide names of people who are subject-matter experts, both in B.C. and in Canada, around these issues.

I would say there are a number of my colleagues at the Allard School of Law at UBC working directly on these issues who have appeared before committees like this and the like over many years. I think there is a great deal of expertise in British Columbia that this committee and other bodies could draw upon in relation to exactly the questions you’ve just asked. So just to say that I speak not as a subject-matter expert on this. I think that’s important.

A couple of things to say. One is that for the purpose of my presentation, I really focused on questions of racism, because I see that as particularly present in the terms of reference for this special committee. But everything I’ve said would also apply to the way in which police are trained to handle issues around sexual assault, both in terms of their dealing with victims of sexual assault, survivors of sexual assault and the way in which they respond to complaints in relation to sexual assault and [audio interrupted].

Canada, like most other jurisdictions — actually, every other jurisdiction — I’ve worked in, has an appalling attrition rate when it comes to complaints — what we know about the level of sexual assault versus the number of peo­ple who are successfully prosecuted for sexual assault. I have not looked at the most recent statistics, but my memory is that the attrition rate is in the high 90 percent — 97, 98 percent — when we would look at the number of complaints, based on self-report surveys like the GSS, and then we look at the number of people who are convicted, nationally, of sexual assault. So it’s a huge problem.

Policing is a large part of that. The way in which the police respond to complaints, the way in which they manage those complaints, the way in which they deal with victims and survivors and the way in which they collect evidence around those complaints — all of these things are part of that systemic problem. So I do think it’s an incredibly important part of all of this, and I would say that everything I’ve said about the need for training around anti-racism and cultural competency seems to me, albeit not as a subject-matter expert, would apply to how they deal with questions of sexual violence.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Dr. Goold. A quick comment and then a question. I certainly want to recognize where you said that police can really only be effective if they’ve got community support and trust. We’ve heard that theme throughout all of our presentations. So again, thank you for raising that.

In your involvement in this, in policing and justice and such, a question…. I’m sure you’ve looked at other jurisdictions, not only within Canada but around the world, in policing. If you were to make a recommendation of a service that we should look at, maybe, for best practices, what would your suggestion be?

B. Goold: Are you talking about a police service outside of Canada?

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Outside or even a jurisdiction within Canada. Just something that we could possibly look at for some best practices.

B. Goold: That’s a really good question. If I sound hesitant, I guess it’s because of the academic instinct to not generalize about what best practices look like. So I apologize in advance if I seem hesitant around this.

Most of my experience in policing was in the United Kingdom. I was there as a graduate student for approximately seven years and then just under seven years working at the University of Oxford, in the law faculty there, where I did a number of empirical studies of policing in the United Kingdom. I also worked closely with various policing agencies and, in some contexts, provided…. I worked as an adviser in those contexts.

One of the things I would say about the U.K.’s situation is that they have been, I think, wrestling with issues about trust in communities for some time. Certainly, I lived in the United Kingdom post-9/11, where I think it’s right to say the concerns about terrorism really changed the way in which police underwent or considered information-gathering and intelligence development around certain communities. That led to huge problems of mistrust.

[10:35 a.m.]

I think the U.K. police would acknowledge that some of the steps they took in the early 2000s undid enormous amounts of work that had been done with certain communities in terms of building community trust. In hindsight, I think there was a lot of regret about that.

I look at surveillance, for example. The police in the United Kingdom subjected various communities to quite intensive forms of surveillance in the early 2000s, with the effect that it really damaged community relationships and undermined trust. I think the police recognized the need, in the years that followed, and that actually that sort of proactive, surveillance-based approach was really a mistake — or at least, I’d like to think that’s what they concluded.

I think there has been a lot of learning in the United Kingdom. I think when you’re looking at, say, forces like the Metropolitan Police, which obviously deal with a very large diverse urban community, they’ve had a great deal of learning to do. But if I sound hesitant, I would say that every jurisdiction I’ve lived and worked in has wrestled with the sorts of problems that your committee is considering in the course of its deliberations.

Systemic racism is a problem in every police force I have ever encountered, in every jurisdiction I’ve lived in. To some extent, I think it’s right to say none of those jurisdictions have successfully tackled that problem. This is partly why I hesitate about best practices. I think if you’re talking about learning, I think the United Kingdom has gone through significant learning over the last 20 years. The question of whether things have improved or not is a different one.

The other thing I would say, and this is to maybe to give a slightly more academic perspective…. I am very conscious of the fact that, actually, the amount of what I would consider to be — what would be the right term? — participant or semi-participant or empirically based independent police research in Canada is relatively thin. There’s not a particularly developed tradition in Canada of the police giving access to researchers to allow them to do the sort of work that they’d like to do around things like police discretion, systemic racism and the like.

I’ve heard from lots of colleagues over the last ten years that the police are largely resistant to attempts to find out how they do their jobs. This is consistent with other jurisdictions I’ve worked in, but it strikes me as particularly prevalent in Canada. So one of the things I think would…. That has not…. That has, though, I think, changed in the United Kingdom at various points, in the 1980s and 1990s, partly in response to some very serious sort of public discussions around very serious forms of police misconduct.

One of the things that has always surprised me in my time in Canada is that there’s just not enough independent research about the police. I think it’s really important that police services, at every level, are willing to allow independent researchers, particularly researchers based at universities, to actually do the sort of research that enables them to speak to committees like yours.

In the United Kingdom, I was able to spend hundreds of hours in police stations, interviewing police officers, wat­ching them doing their work. I had colleagues who were able to do first-hand observational work of sensitive covert operations in the United Kingdom, including watching stakeouts and seeing how the police planted various surveillance devices and how they used that information to develop intelligence around very serious forms of crime.

When I tell my colleagues in Canada I did that work in the United Kingdom, they are shocked that I got that sort of access. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s extremely difficult to do that sort of research in Canada. In any respect this committee could recommend that the police are more open around that, I think that would be a good thing.

R. Glumac: On the subject of training, many of the pre­senters we’ve talked to have recommended that the training needs to improve, and it needs to be ongoing training, not only in areas of anti-racism but trauma-informed training and other areas as well.

I’m interested, much like MLA Davies, in looking at: what are some good examples of where things are working? Maybe it’s not the whole solution.

[10:40 a.m.]

For example, we talked to Island Health about the integrated mobile crisis response team, and their approach of kind of putting an officer in this team for a period of time, like a couple of years, gaining knowledge on a trauma-informed approach and working with a diverse team of mental health professionals and others and then taking that knowledge…. When they return back to the police force in a sort of a more general role, that knowledge gets propagated in an ongoing way with other police officers.

That’s one example, I think, of a good way of perhaps trying to keep training ongoing. I wonder if you had any comments on something like that in this context.

B. Goold: I would say maybe two things. One is to agree, I think, that ongoing training of the type you’re describing is extremely important — not just training that encompasses, say, doing a course over the course of a week or repeating that course every year or being required to read or engage in certain types of materials or even to meet members of certain types of communities.

I think embedded training, the type you are describing, is also extremely important. I think people being able to observe the conditions of the people that they police is very, very important. I would say that what you’re describing seems to me to be a very thoughtful approach to one of the aspects of training.

A couple other things I would say. I have a certain hesitancy about going to the conversation about what works and what doesn’t, partly because measuring these things is exceedingly difficult, particularly measuring them in the short to medium term. When we’re talking about systemic problems — for example, systemic racism — seeing what works and what doesn’t is extremely difficult. I think it’s very important to have long-time horizons when we think about these things and to be willing to take a very holistic approach to the question of: is this working or not?

The other thing I would say. I didn’t say this in my presentation because I didn’t want to overemphasize it, and I think it’s important not to. Whilst I think the fundamental reason to engage in training is to change behaviours, it’s to actually ensure that police officers exercise their discretion in the ways I’ve described and to be actively working against problems of systemic racism and, hopefully, becoming more culturally competent in the way that they deal with Indigenous People and racialized communities and vulnerable populations.

There is also a piece — and this goes back to the question of trust — about showing a willingness to do those things, right? It’s part of what is happening when police services engage in training, engage in cultural competency work, engage in dialogue with communities about the content of those programs and how to make them more meaningful. That is a very clear way of demonstrating a commitment to those communities.

Or the opposite might be said to be true — that a failure to do those things might, I think, quite rightly be interpreted as a failure to take those communities and the is­sues that they face seriously.

Whilst in my presentation I emphasized the importance of training because of the problems around discretion and particularly the way in which discretion contributes to problems of systemic racism and the lack of cultural competency, it’s also the case that engaging in the sorts of things I was recommending is also a way of institutions publicly demonstrating their commitment to the communities they serve.

As an academic, for example, I go through cultural competency training to change my behaviour in the hope that in the process of doing those things, I learn. I am able to reflect upon my own behaviours and to see ways in which I can change to be more thoughtful about the people I teach and work with. But by the same token, I hope that the fact that I do that cultural competency work and training, I am signaling to my students and my colleagues that I take those things seriously.

That’s another reason to continue doing it. It’s not just about: “Well, I’ll reach a certain finite point where I’m culturally competent.” I don’t think that’s actually the metric. I think it’s an ongoing process both of learning but also of reiterating one’s commitment to those values.

[10:45 a.m.]

R. Glumac: Thank you. Just to follow up. Not to put you on the spot, but on the topic of training, if you have any recommendations of people we should talk to that might be able to offer some perspective on ways to improve training, I certainly would welcome that.

B. Goold: Thank you. I’d be very happy to do that.

D. Routley (Chair): I don’t see any more questions. Members, if Mr. Oppal rejoins us, we will have him join the next presentation for questions, if that’s possible.

Thank you, Dr. Goold. Very informative. Great questions from the members. I really appreciate your contribution. As I ask all presenters, we hope that you might be willing to be a resource for us should we need further help. If you have anything you want to offer, we are always open to accepting that.

B. Goold: Thank you very much, and thank you again for the opportunity to speak today. I appreciate it enormously, and I wish you all the best with the work that you are doing in the coming months.

D. Routley (Chair): We’re all very determined to make a positive difference. Thank you very much.

With that, Members, we will take a short recess now for, I think, ten minutes. Let’s come back right on the hour, at 11 o’clock.

The committee recessed from 10:46 a.m. to 11:02 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Welcome back to this meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. For our next presentation, we will be hearing from the Líl̓wat Nation, who will have 15 minutes to speak, followed by questions and discussion with committee members.

I’ll also remind everyone that all audio from our meeting is broadcast live on our website. A complete transcript will also be posted.

Now I will ask members of the committee to introduce themselves.

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

Today I’m joining you from the unceded territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.

Thank you, Dean, for joining us. I look forward to your presentation.

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

I’m coming to you from the traditional territory of Semiahmoo.

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

I’m joining you from the territories of the Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Katzie, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations.

R. Glumac: Rick Glumac, the MLA for Port Moody–​Coquitlam, on the traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good morning, Dean. I’m Dan Davies, the MLA for Peace River North, living in Fort St. John, on the traditional territory of the Dane-zaa.

K. Kirkpatrick: Hi there. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I’m the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

We are on the traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

D. Routley (Chair): Normally, MLA Begg would be with us at this point, and he may rejoin the meeting.

Thank you, Members.

Now, I’ll introduce to the committee the Political Chief, Dean Nelson, of the Líl̓wat Nation, for their presentation.

Thank you for joining us, Chief.

[11:05 a.m.]

Líl̓wat NATION

D. Nelson: Thank you for the opportunity, Mr. Chair. I’m just going to go through some of the subtitles that I’ve been looking at.

The first one is the role of police with respect to complex social issues. I find the biggest thing — we still have that problem today — is the understanding of the people you’re dealing with, and not to group everyone in one understanding, because we’re all different. Even First Nations…. We all have different histories. It’s a major undertaking, for any agency that’s coming to work in the community, to understand the history of that community, that group of people and the history with the relationship to RCMP or just to policing in general.

The first understanding is that there has to be some un­derstanding of the Indian Act itself where we are presently, because it is still here. It’s very dysfunctional legislation, act or policy, or whatever you want to call it. It’s very demeaning. We ask for that understanding. From the general public, there’s very little knowledge of the Indian Act and what it was meant to be. Stemming from that is the residential school and what that was. There was policing there as well, and there was enforcement there. That still remains. That’s the stigma that remains — that the police were there to remove children from…. That has to be changed.

I think there needs to be greater positive relationships and acts of positive relationship-building. There needs to be an orientation to the community and to the needs and concerns of that community, making positive change at every opportunity, which includes new policing members in the area and educating them. I think there needs to be something, not only in policing but in public schools, on the history of that. Everyone has stated here that they’re on the traditional territories, but it has to be understood, too, what their history is.

We need to look at what has worked and what does not work with the trials. Just like I said, that stigma between the First Nations and policing is still the same. It hasn’t really moved that much positively. There needs to be that work done. It needs to be communicated what is actually…. Take an opportunity that if there are changes — if there are member changes or leadership changes — then the positive steps need to be communicated, along with all the policies and political views.

[11:10 a.m.]

In looking at examining the scope of systemic racism, I just used one example. I can’t make these changes, but there are inferred assumptions from new members in the community, like new policing members, that all First Nations are the same. Like I said, we need to be understood and not to be inferred.

I had an example where…. This was not too long ago. And I don’t know if the COVID really put more stress on racism. I’ve seen it in different places, but I don’t think this one was. It was a new police member that stopped one of our Elders on the highway, and the very first question that came out was: “Have you been drinking?” It could be just a basic question from an RCMP, but to an Elder, that is an insult, or hits very close to home for someone who might have struggled with addictions. There needs to be an understanding of those things.

I’ve always pushed for education in the community and any agencies that are working with First Nations on understanding the traumas that have taken place and are still evident in the communities. Ensuring consistency of a modernized Police Act. I just took one article, and it’s second bullet was: “Indigenous people have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct people and shall not be subjected to any genocide or any…act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group.”

I just used that one as an example of where we have been and where we not so much still are…. But in a greater sense, yes, the stigma is still there that the Police are still there to remove someone and not to be a part of the solution, I guess. We are all working through that.

We have had some successes with certain police leaders. I can’t remember what the term is for somebody that’s in charge of different departments. We have challenges thro­ugh jurisdiction when things do happen that…. For us personally right now, the high traffic is upon us through our community. We’re looking for a very positive precedent-setting, where we have high volumes of traffic, but we also have the high speeds with the motorcycles and sports cars.

I ask for one time to set the tone for…. Because we are on reserve doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all place to drive and act as…. We have not seen that yet. I was thinking. Like, a weekend of high-traffic time to set this precedence of speeds. And even so much as volume, pollution — with the heavy, bigger motorcycle-type things. There are groups of them that come through. We’ve voiced it, and I hear it as a leader for my community. “What are we doing about this?”

[11:15 a.m.]

I’d really like to see some…. That would be a very positive thing, to set that. I did talk with SafetyBC on that, and we have not…. Well, I guess, based on the COVID thing, we haven’t really been moving that much, but that would be a great thing to see. Just some of the positive things that can be done that asks of the community, saying that…. Just stating that they are being heard.

In looking at tripartite agreements, and we have our tribal police, we have the court systems, and we still haven’t really…. We have gained some strength there and some voice in the court systems, but again, it’s very slow in recognizing the needs. Since there hasn’t been any change in the stigma of the policing, then we are looking at having our own police force and that. But again, it’s a political struggle, I guess, that…. Again, jurisdiction would come in there and be questioned on who has the power to deal with things.

Again, recommendations regarding opportunities for reform and a cultural awareness component to training would make a major change in who you are working with and what the protocols are, realizing there is a difference in the nations — and understanding that.

Just to reiterate: what are the success stories of the police in relation to First Nations? These need to be emphasized. Maybe they are few and far between, but they need to be communicated. That’s basically what I have today. The emphasis is on understanding the people that you’re working with — that there are very vast differences in First Nations communities and their relationship to policing.

Thank you again for your time.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you, Chief Nelson. Very much appreciate your views being shared with us.

Members, any questions?

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Dean, for your presentation. Again, a lot of the themes you’ve touched on we certainly heard from other groups that have come here. So thank you for that.

Just a question — and carry us around the…. You have your own police, the tribal police, and agreements. I’m just wondering if you can talk a little bit about the relationship between the tribal police and the local RCMP. Are there arrangements? Do they support each other? Does it work well together? Any insight that you can provide would be appreciated.

D. Nelson: Yeah. As of late, we have had a relationship with the RCMP and the tribal police. They have done…. We have an agreement with not only policing but with emergency response between the communities here. I’m talking fire departments and stuff. It’s been building to a better relationship and understanding of, again….

[11:20 a.m.]

There’s still the jurisdictional thing. I think a big one is the traffic stops and fines and stuff, like I was saying before, about setting precedent. The thing about that one is that if tribal police stop and do a fine to a person, the funds that are generated through that aren’t going back to the tribal police. It’s never…. We’re doing the work with the police. But it’s not…. There should be some investment there on that.

The relationship is getting better, on all fronts. That was the biggest thing I’ve seen, the traffic fines and stuff that are handed out. There’s nothing going back to the tribal police.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much, Dean. Dan did ask some of it. You had said that you have had some success with some of those relationships with some of the superintendents. I don’t know the word either. Can you tell me what that looks like? For you, what is success and what did that mean?

D. Nelson: Outright, it’s the communication from the superintendent or the detachment heads, just talking abo­ut and understanding — that if they don’t understand something, then they ask. I’ve had that recently here. It is a good, very positive thing, the understanding of any kind of concerns dealing with police and their roles in the community.

An example of that one would be a traffic accident. What are the protocols? What needs to be done? We have had that communication, which is good. The spiritual and ceremonial parts are being paused for and the respect to families and the communication there on what needs to be done.

When they have to do a…. If there’s a fatality and they have to do…. I’m at a loss for words. They have their protocols too, and then creating that communication to the family. We’ve had one recently where we’ve lost two youth. There was great despair in the community, but there was also an inspection or…. I’m sorry. I don’t have the words for that.

K. Kirkpatrick: That’s fine. What we have heard, I think, consistently through this is that communication is a big issue. It’s such an important piece of it, and very often that communication isn’t happening and you wouldn’t be told or be given information about something relevant to your community. So it’s good that it sounds like, in some ways, that’s working.

Then is there an issue, also, with response time and just getting the attention of RCMP to come and deal with an issue?

D. Nelson: We don’t have that part. It’s getting better. The response time was never an issue. It’s just basically the jurisdictional part on who is taking things on.

[11:25 a.m.]

There are things in First Nations communities that…. There are different things, social issues and things, that need to be understood. But yeah, the response time and everything is getting better, but there still are new members coming that aren’t informed on where they are and who they’re working with. That communication needs to be done with the new recruits.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Mr. Nelson.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. Do I see any more questions?

I’d like to ask the Chief…. The local knowledge that you talk about, connecting with people and the community and understanding their history in the territory they police — we’ve heard that theme quite a bit — also goes hand in hand, often, with the short tenure of an officer in a region. They’re not there for very long. You build a relationship, and then they move on to another assignment. I guess that’s less of a problem with the tribal police, but it certainly must be an issue outside of that, I would think.

If you were to recommend that, how could there be an improvement in that knowledge-building, even though they’re fairly short-term assignments?

D. Nelson: It needs to be at the highest level, as part of the…. Not to recommend it, but it needs to be done.

We have our own community school. We try and do that, with our new teaching staff, about things. But it needs to be done in the public schools as well. For the history part of the thing, it just needs to be done. It needs to be something that…. I’m sorry that I’m at a loss for words today. Not to recommend it, but it has to be there as part of the….

D. Routley (Chair): Like a mandatory part of…?

D. Nelson: Yeah. “Mandatory,” yes. That’s the word I was looking for. It needs to be part of the mandatory qualifications. “Have you done your First Nations community thing?” And not just overall but in that particular area. It’s different, I’d say, from Vancouver to here, to up in northern communities. That has to be undertaken.

D. Routley (Chair): Do you have, in your nation, regular Elders’ lunches and that sort of thing? If so…. In Cowichan, I know, the police have been trying to do outreach through those kinds of channels. Do you see that happening at all?

D. Nelson: A bit, yeah. Again, it depends on certain members. Like I said, overall it’s been encouraging that they have reached out. Lately we haven’t gathered, but I’ve seen it starting, so yes.

D. Routley (Chair): Do you think, maybe, that there could be a structure that could be taken from community to community, where the police have these sorts of recommended avenues to engage with the community that way?

D. Nelson: Yeah, and I encourage it, too, even to our tribal police, with the schools — getting out there and building those relationships and, like I said, breaking that stigma, that enforcement-only kind of stigma.

D. Routley (Chair): Mm-hmm. Thank you.

Members, I don’t see any more questions.

With that, I will thank Mr. Nelson for the presentation. We really appreciate it. We’ve got a big task in front of us, and the experience you bring, particularly given that you have the tribal police in your communities, is really important for us to consider. We’re very thankful to you for your time today. I hope you’re willing to be contacted again should we need more information from you.

D. Nelson: Absolutely. I’m always open to any questions or for any clarification on anything. Thank you for your time today.

D. Routley (Chair): As are we. We are always open to hearing more, should you decide you want to get some more information to us. We really appreciate your contribution today. Thank you.

D. Nelson: All right. Thank you, everyone.

Deliberations

D. Routley (Chair): Members, I think it’s time for deliberation. With that, I’d ask for a motion to go in camera. From MLA Halford, seconded by MLA Sandhu.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 11:30 a.m. to 12:01 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Welcome back to the meeting. I think, at this point, we will take a five-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 12:01 p.m. to 12:11 p.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Welcome back to our meeting of the special committee to reform the Police Act in B.C. We are joined again by Mr. Wally Oppal, for some questions from members.

Presentations on Police Act

WALLACE OPPAL

G. Begg: Thanks, Wally, for your presentation and for all you’ve done for policing.

W. Oppal: I don’t know if I can give you any more ad­vice than you already have, Garry. [Audio interrupted.]

G. Begg: You’ve been great for policing and for the ad­ministration of justice in B.C. I know I speak for all of the committee. We hold you in high regard, and your recommendations are very important to us.

I don’t want…. This may be outside the realm that you want to discuss, but I’m interested in your thoughts about compelling the RCMP to be part of the provincial complaint process. I, too, see that as a necessary thing. Would that be an appropriate discussion to be held at contract renegotiation time?

W. Oppal: That’s a really good question. What the government should’ve done over the years is…. When they entered into the last contract, that was my recommendation. At that time, they should’ve put the complaint process, our complaint process, into the RCMP contract.

You know, we’re the largest user of RCMP resources in Canada. We sometimes don’t realize that when we’re bargaining with the RCMP. We’re in a strong political position to bargain with them, and they should be a part of our complaint process.

I’ve already given you an example of the abuse under the system that happened in Saskatchewan recently. That’s just one of many concerns that I have: how the RCMP are so indifferent to public input and public comments.

G. Begg: To be clear, is that something that could be negotiated into a contract, do you think, with the RCMP?

W. Oppal: I think it could be, very easily. I don’t think any serious negotiations…. When I did the first inquiry, I dealt with Phil Murray and Norm Inkster at the time. They were always open to these ideas, but the provinces have never been aggressive enough to take on the RCMP.

I mean, you were in the force a long time. You know that [audio interrupted] individual members are. But the fact is that they need to be accountable under the complaint process, which is transparent and fully accountable.

G. Begg: One more quick question, Chair, if I may.

You’re also recommending, for municipal police boards, that the mayor ought not to be the chair, and you list a number of reasons for that. That was going back to, I think, 1994.

Has anything happened in the meantime that has chan­ged your view on that, or is that still your recommendation?

[12:15 p.m.]

W. Oppal: If anything, I feel more firm about that. Actually, I told the minister about that. When I was doing the Surrey project, I mentioned that to him. I said: “You need to do that.”

The mayor becomes an inordinately powerful member in the room. Members of the police board have a challenge as it is. They’re brought in…. They’re volunteers. Few of them have any kind of a policing background. We need to respect them. I think the mayor in the room poses an inordinate power position. I think that the mayor ought not to be on there and, in any event, should never be the chair.

D. Routley (Chair): Just before I go to Dan, what would you suggest in its place? Should the mayor be excluded from being the chair? How would you recommend the chair be chosen or elected?

W. Oppal: I think city council could have somebody sitting in, as being a member, ex officio member on the police board. I think that would be a satisfactory alternative.

I think the city should have a role to play in this, in the police board, but I just don’t think that the mayor should be the chair. Other people have echoed that same sentiment over the years.

D. Routley (Chair): Would you support a designated position on police boards for a First Nations person?

W. Oppal: I never thought about that, but I think that would be a good idea. I really do. With the historical in­justices that the criminal justice system has inflicted on Aboriginal people, I think it would be good. It would be a way to reach out and get the participation of First Nations people in the governing process.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Sorry, Dan. I inserted myself there ahead of you. Go ahead, Dan.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Mr. Oppal. I appreciate your insight.

Garry asked a number of the kinds of questions that I was angling toward. I guess to build on that, since 1994, I believe, when you first made recommendations to the RCMP…. I’m curious. How were the conversations when you were talking to Ottawa? Was it just complete disregard for the desires to have more provincial oversight, or was it just that our policies don’t allow for it? How did those conversations go?

W. Oppal: I can tell you what they said. Norm Inkster said to me…. He was a commissioner at the time, and he said: “Seriously, do you expect the RCMP, the mounted police, to have 12 different complaint processes that our members would face across the country?” So I said: “Is it okay to have two different ones for the people of British Columbia?” His response was: “When you get the RCMP, you have to take it with its warts.” That was his exact res­ponse to me, and they had no real movement at that time.

Having said that, in 2019, the present commissioner of the RCMP asked me to be a part of her management committee, as one who would give her advice. I said yes, I would. But I had to resign, because I started doing the Surrey project, and I had a perceived conflict there. But that’s one thing I would have said to her, and she was quite open to different suggestions.

The RCMP now are very defensive because of the different criticisms that they’re getting across the country. Some of the criticisms are unfair, but a lot of it is fair. I think the RCMP would be amenable to that. Lots of change since 1994. We live in an era where the public wants accountability from our institutions. I think the RCMP, operationally, do a good job. I’ve prosecuted probably 50 murder cases of members of the RCMP.

[12:20 p.m.]

They are excellent as far as policing abilities are concerned, but we are talking here about accountability and cre­dibility with the members of the public, and that’s something different.

We have a multicultural community. Visible minorities don’t understand a lot of this. We need to have an RCMP, a national police force, that’s friendly to our First Nations people and to our visible minorities and multicultural groups.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

R. Singh: Thank you so much, Mr. Oppal. It’s so good to see you. Thank you for your presentation. You touched on it before too. With your vast experience, I would really like you to touch on the systemic racism issue.

You have brought it up, but we have heard about broken trust. Moving forward, what would be your recommendations? What would you like to see? You have talked about how they need to be more culturally sensitive, but we are hearing that it is so deep-rooted and that it is so imbibed. The present commissioner of the RCMP herself has acknowledged that systemic racism is pervasive in the RCMP. So there’s no question about that — whether it is there or not. It is there. But how do we move forward?

W. Oppal: In what particular area?

R. Singh: We have heard from a number of Indigenous stakeholders, Indigenous communities, that that relationship is broken. When we heard from the police — we still have to hear a lot from them — they are talking about what they are putting in place, but somehow it is not working practically. There is a gap in between. That’s where we would like to explore.

W. Oppal: I think the police, as well as other institutions, need to reach out, in an extraordinary way, to First Nations people to correct the wrongs that have been done over many, many decades and many, many years. That needs to be a priority. The justice system is doing a lot of that now, and I think the policing profession has to do the same.

I have a lot of confidence in the members of the public who are now going into policing. You need post-secondary education. You have better-educated officers now than at any time in the past. I just think that we need to be firm with what needs to be done. You know, in many ways, we have the best policing system in the world. If you talk about democracies and what happens, and compare us to the Americans, we do a pretty good job.

But you know what? The times are changing. There’s a greater demand for sensitivity to the needs of Aboriginal people, multicultural people and visible minorities. We have to reach out. We need to do that. I think that the police need to get closer to the community. I told Norm Lipinski in Surrey. I said: “Look, you need to get decentralized. You need to have police stations in various parts of your community, so as to get people on side. You have to do that.”

I think the police forces are paramilitary in nature, particularly the RCMP. I think they have to flatten out the organizations, maybe have not so many ranks. You know, you have a lieutenant, corporals, sergeants, staff sergeants. Do we need that many levels? Why don’t we flatten out the organizations, get into the communities, do some walking in the communities? The police chief for Surrey has assured me that that’s the direction in which they’re going. So will we. I have a lot of confidence in what’s taking place in Surrey.

R. Singh: Thank you.

[12:25 p.m.]

T. Halford: Mr. Oppal, we are talking about the Police Act here. I’m sure you’ve seen firsthand that, I would say, we have a very out-of-date Mental Health Act. When we’re looking at reforming the Police Act, I just wanted to get your perspective on how, maybe, there are areas in the Mental Health Act we can look at that would actually enhance some of the work that we’re doing today in terms of the Police Act.

W. Oppal: I think that’s a really good question. It’s an issue that really needs to be dealt with. We cannot expect the police to solve all the mental issues on the street.

A suggestion may be that where there is a call that re­quires some kind of sensitivity, maybe have a mental health worker riding with the police. We need better education at the Justice Institute for police on how to deal with mentally ill people.

You see it in what’s happening in the U.S. now where police officers inevitably come upon a volatile situation involving someone who is obviously mentally ill. Instead of having any kind of dialogue, the guns come out. We don’t want to go down that route. I think we have to teach the officers some more fundamentals about mental illness, mental health, so that they are able to recognize that and then get involved in dialogue with the people who are involved in volatile situations.

I just had a case as an adjudicator last year where a mentally ill person, an Aboriginal man, was waving a knife around. The officers came to the scene. They pulled out the beanbag shotgun, and they shot him eight or nine times. They yelled at him, “drop the knife, drop the knife,” instead of approaching it in a soft manner, a friendly manner, and then escalating after that.

Those are things that need to be done. I don’t blame the officer. The officer didn’t have the necessary training. But we need to give them more training, because that’s a huge challenge.

I talk to police officers on the streets of Vancouver all the time, who come over and talk to me, and particularly those working the Downtown Eastside. So many of the challenges that they face have, in their sources, mentally ill people.

D. Routley (Chair): We are scheduled till 12:30. I have one more question from MLA Sandhu.

H. Sandhu: Thank you, Mr. Oppal. I just want to say that I highly admire the work you’ve done, especially the advocacy work you’ve done around domestic violence and violence against women.

When we are providing recommendations to revise the Police Act, what are your thoughts about…? I see that we have lots of areas we can improve on.

The reason why a lot of violence incidents end up in homicide…. Often women, when they are in that moment of facing the violence, their phones are taken away. Their partner takes away their phone when they are trying to dial.

Often I’ve heard, from my advocacy work with women facing violence, that by the time — say, it’s the next day or that evening when they are able to get their phone back — they call the police, and the police come, they can’t do anything because they didn’t call them in that moment. Or the mental abuse or verbal abuse or mental violence is not even considered a crime. So nothing happens when they report that ongoing abuse, whether it’s financial….

There is no such language right now. What I’ve heard from women is that when they call, a partner will say: “I didn’t lay a hand on her.” He was totally verbally abusive, or she was, vice versa.

How can we make some recommendations? Do you see the room there? Because I think that by making some improvements, we can save many lives, from what I’ve heard with my work and experience. I would appreciate your words of wisdom on that.

W. Oppal: I didn’t fully hear. You were cutting out there. Are you able to summarize that for me? I didn’t completely hear.

H. Sandhu: Okay. My apologies. Maybe I was trying to speak fast, given the time.

I was wondering, in regard to addressing the domestic violence, especially adding the mental health and verbal abuse and the situation women are in when they call in that moment…. A lot of women, a large number, are not able to seek help when they are actually being physically abused because their phone is taken away. But by the time they are able to seek that help, there is no proof that vio­lence was happening.

[12:30 p.m.]

Would you have any suggestions for us, when we are making recommendations, to address these very serious concerns?

W. Oppal: That’s a good question. It’s a very valid issue that we need to deal with.

The police need to recognize the dynamics of domestic violence. One of the things we recommended in 1994 was a domestic violence response team — which means that, where possible, there ought to be a social worker, a psychologist or someone with that background and that type of qualifications who would attend at the scene, so as to protect the victim.

Spousal domestic violence has an entirely different dyn­amic. Inevitably, the poor woman, who is usually the victim of these things, is economically and socially dependent upon the abuser. What has happened is that the directive most police forces now have is: “You remove the offender.” That’s only the first step. There has to be subsequent follow-up with that. I think that’s where you, as MLAs, can make a recommendation that there ought to be some ongoing training and that there be some treatment — both of the victim and of the offender.

Inevitably, what happens in these cases is that after the police attend there and remove the offender, the victim, usually the woman, does not want to proceed anymore because someone got to her now. So the poor Crown prosecutor sits there. She doesn’t want to testify any more, and she’ll say: “Well, I overreacted. I shouldn’t have called the police.” Or something like that. This is a classic example of where we, as a society, have to give the police advice and also deal with the victims of spousal violence.

H. Sandhu: Wonderful. Thank you.

D. Routley (Chair): That brings us to the end of our meeting.

Thank you very much for returning to entertain our questions, Mr. Oppal. We deeply appreciate that. We also would very much appreciate being able to contact you for any further queries that the members might have, if you’re willing to entertain that.

W. Oppal: I absolutely am. I have a real commitment to this. As I said, I got involved with this in 1992, when I was on the Supreme Court. What happens with this, Doug, is that people think you’re an expert when you keep doing this stuff. [Audio interrupted] I’ve told a lot of people over the years or something.

Seriously, I would very much like to get further invol­ved, if you think that I can be of assistance.

D. Routley (Chair): Absolutely. Your commitment to the issue is very obvious to all of us. To answer your question, no, nothing has changed since 1994 — particularly, not you or I and our presence of age, right?

Thank you very much, Members. With that, it brings our meeting to an end.

I’d like a motion to adjourn the meeting, please. From MLA Kirkpatrick. Do I have a seconder? There’s Mr. Begg.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 12:34 p.m.