The committee met at 9:35 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

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

I would like to acknowledge that I’m joining today’s meeting from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation.

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

Our committee is undertaking a broad consultation with respect to policing and related to systemic issues in B.C. We are taking a phased approach to this work and are meeting with a number of organizations and individuals to discuss the ideas and experiences they put forward in written submissions earlier this year.

We are also hoping to learn more about British Columbians’ perspectives on policing, including hearing from those working on the front line of several fields, including policing, public safety, health care and social services. Interested individuals can fill out a survey to share their views with the committee. Further details are available on our website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/rpa. The deadline to complete the survey is 5 p.m. on Friday, September 3.

In terms of the format for today’s meeting, presenters have been grouped into panels based on theme. For our first panel, each presenter will have five minutes to speak, followed by around 25 minutes for questions from committee members to the entire panel. We kindly ask that presenters be respectful of the time limit. There is a timer available to assist, as you can see when you’re in your gallery view.

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

Now I’d like to ask members of our committee to introduce themselves. I’ll begin with my friend MLA Singh.

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

I am honoured to be joining you from the territories of the Katzie, Kwantlen, Kwikwetlem, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen First Nations.

Welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m very happy to be working from my constituency office today in beautiful Sidney by the Sea in the W̱SÁ­NEĆ territory.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Hi. Good morning, everyone. Dan Davies, the MLA for Peace River North. Looking forward to today’s conversation.

I come to you today from the Dane-zaa territory.

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

I’m proud today to be joining you from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Kwantlen, the Semiahmoo and the Katzie First Nations.

G. Lore: Good morning, everyone. Nice to be here. Glad to have you presenting to us.

Grace Lore. I’m the MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill.

I am on the territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking peo­ples of the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations.

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

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

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

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

I welcome you all. Thank you so much for joining us.

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

Assisting our committee today are Karan Riarh and Mai Nguyen from the Parliamentary Committees Office and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard Services. We thank them very much for their support, as always.

Now I would like to introduce Deputy Chief Michelle Davey from the Delta police department, for their presentation.

Go ahead.

[9:40 a.m.]

Presentations on Police Act

DELTA POLICE DEPARTMENT

M. Davey: I’m just going to share my screen. I’m wondering if the host can enable screen-sharing.

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): Sorry. Screen-sharing is not enabled for the meeting.

M. Davey: All right. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today.

I would like to acknowledge that I’m presenting to you from the shared, traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Tsawwassen, Musqueam and other Coast Salish peoples.

There are many areas where the Police Act and, more broadly, policing in British Columbia can be modernized — from how we interact with people living with mental illness in our communities to the oversight with which our officers are held accountable to how we interact with people of colour and our Indigenous peoples to extending that examination to other sectors, such as health, education and social services. There is always room for growth. What the Delta police department has chosen to present to you today is just that: an opportunity for growth.

There are two areas of focus for my brief comments this morning. The first is to highlight the work of the Delta police department that it’s doing with its Tsawwassen First Nation. Secondly, I will talk about how our officers interact with youth and their families. Finally, I will pull it all together with a proposal we’re about to test in Delta — a new and innovative idea that will see integration with other support services in our community in partnership with policing.

Our partnership model with the Tsawwassen First Nation is unique in that it is focused on a restorative model using traditional accountability practices within the Indigenous culture. It is a community-based model with relationship-building, trust and becoming part of the community as its foundation. This relationship is rooted in understanding culture, trauma that has been passed on through many generations and learning about the social, economic and historical factors affecting police and First Nations interactions.

Our officers take the time to learn, understand and work hand in hand with service providers at the Tsawwassen First Nation not to solve the community’s problems but to work together to provide support. As trust has built over the many years we have used this model, the community has accepted us and agreed to work with us, because we have not taken a traditional policing style that has a clear power imbalance. Instead, our officers act as a resource to the First Nations people as they support their people through creating programs and diverting them away from the criminal justice system.

We’ve taken the same approach in interactions with our youth. Our goal is to build relationships through a wide range of interactions we have with youth — through our youth liaison officers, our school liaison officers working closely with school counsellors with the ultimate goal of connecting youth with the right resource to keep them on a successful path in life and only using the criminal justice system as a last resort.

Our youth officers work with high-risk youth and their families to connect with city of Delta services that will better support them and meet the unique needs of that particular child. Sometimes that involves the work of a triage consulting team, which sees a police officer partner with a child psychiatrist, a medical doctor, a mental health clinician and a school resource representative to ensure that care is delivered to children from kindergarten to grade 12 who have mental health needs in our community. Again, this model points to a police officer acting as a navigator to connect people in need in our community with the right services at the right time.

These two philosophies and programs lead me to introduce a unique opportunity that we will be activating in the city of Delta at the Delta police department. The common theme in working with our Indigenous community and with our youth at risk is a need for someone to help them navigate the system. Right now, police officers play this role, and we feel strongly that this role is better served by a non-police professional or a service navigator.

Oftentimes families are unaware of the available resources that they have available to them in our community. The resources are many, but the access to these resources can be complicated, confusing and intimidating.

A non-police service navigator can develop a good sense of the needs of individuals and/or their families and the particular barriers they experience in accessing services. Then the service navigator can identify a range and combination of resources required, share that information with the family and provide consistent, personalized support to assist with accessing these services, acting as an advocate through the process. The system navigator is also in a good place to identify gaps in service delivery and work with stakeholders to fill those gaps.

[9:45 a.m.]

The Delta police department will be hiring a service navigator in September and will be deploying this resource to connect clients that the Delta police department comes into contact with, with appropriate services, to reduce the need for police and potentially increase the community’s safety and well being.

In addition to approving funding for us to hire a service navigator, the Delta police board has recommended that the city of Delta conduct a social impact audit. Social impact audits are a systematic approach to capturing and analyzing all funding sources at the service delivery level in a region, assessed against key performance indicators, and also allow for identification of overlap and gaps.

In closing, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee two partnerships that work in Delta and a new program that will see greater opportunity to connect people in need with the right resource at the right time, not necessarily by a police officer but by somebody well versed with the system.

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

Next I would like to introduce Chief Officer Dave Jones from the Metro Vancouver Transit Police.

Go ahead, Chief Officer Jones.

METRO VANCOUVER TRANSIT POLICE

D. Jones: Thank you very much.

I’d like to acknowledge that the Metro Vancouver Transit Police police 22 different communities throughout the Lower Mainland on the unceded, traditional territories of the Coast Salish and that my presentation today is actually coming from the Syilx Nations of the Okanagan, where I’m currently located.

Thank you very much for this opportunity. As I have presented here before on behalf of the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police, I’d just reiterate, if there are any questions on that, that the support for the recommendations of the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police and the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police…. However, I will speak to issues that are directly related to designated policing units, such as the Metro Vancouver Transit Police.

The submission that has been brought forward to the special committee is made jointly by many of the governing bodies or entities involved, known as the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority police service, or under the branded name Metro Vancouver Transit Police.

Currently we see that there is the TransLink board, there is a mayors council, there is a police board, and there’s a company called TSML that all have a governance structure that falls in line with what we would call designated policing. The Metro Vancouver police department is a designated policing unit established under the Police Act and has a mandate within the transportation service region, as I mentioned, which services 22 communities, to prevent crime and offenses against the law and the administration of justice and enforce the laws of British Columbia. We work in cooperation with the jurisdictional police agencies and other specialized units.

We provide a supplemental to jurisdictional policing, which means that our coordinated efforts are actually driven through a memorandum of understanding that we have created with each of our jurisdictional partners.

Transit police officers have the full powers vested in any police officer in the province and, together with additional powers, uphold transit regulations and bylaws established by the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Act.

In this submission to this committee here, which has provincial oversight over designated policing units, there has been a constant call to treat the designated policing units, and in particular the Metro Vancouver Transit Pol­ice, in the same manner, when it comes to governance structure, that we see within most independent or municipal police departments.

In the submission, they are requesting the special committee to consider four specific changes to the Police Act. They specifically impact our unique organization but, in our view, would make the Police Act more consistent in the standards applied to all law enforcement agencies.

One is consistent governance. The Police Act is speci­fically geared, or primarily geared, to municipal policing as a primary model for delivering public safety. The sections of the Police Act relating to designated policing units generally attempt to mirror those of municipal policing, but they’re highly prescriptive and rigid. In a fundamental way, they fall short of achieving full consistency, including in the important area of governance.

To illustrate, the current governance structure of the Metro Vancouver Transit Police has numerous limitations which undermine our independence and public accountability. Under the Police Act, the Transit Police, the Transit Police Board, TransLink Security Management Ltd. and TransLink all have some statutory responsibilities. This creates governance and operational complexities and risks where responsibilities are overlapping or conflicting.

[9:50 a.m.]

Further, the statutory responsibilities granted to both TransLink and the Mayors Council under the Transit Act place the control of budget and operations within the TransLink corporate structure, rather than in the hands of the police board and the province, as per the municipal policing model.

The primary governance change that we would seek to address is to make the Transit Police Board the employer of all sworn members and civilian employees and bring the board structure and the designated entities’ accountabilities and liabilities closer to that of the municipal police board. We believe these changes will significantly improve the operation, public accountability and independence of the Transit Police and bring the structure closer to that of municipal police agencies, which is predicated on civilian oversight and control.

The other one is changes to the designated policing unit. For this, I’ll use an example where the Transit Police are currently engaged with looking at what I will refer to as a tiered policing model. This is the creation of designated law enforcement officers, an unarmed layer of policing that will relate to the more minor community needs throughout the system and in the region.

However, in a similar vein with the other one, the current Police Act requires that an extensive application process and even a reapplication of the designated policing unit be resubmitted. We are hoping that when we look at the Police Act and the ability to make change and create reform in terms of how we deliver policing and public safety services throughout the region, the ability to flex and change the application process for designated policing units or designated law enforcement units is streamlined and structured so that it can be an amendment, as opposed to a whole new application.

With that, I thank you very much for your time and the opportunity to speak to you here today.

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

Next we have Chief Constable Donovan Fisher from the Nelson department.

Go ahead, Chief Constable Fisher.

NELSON POLICE DEPARTMENT

D. Fisher: Good morning. Thank you to the members of the special committee for allowing myself and the other members of the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police to speak to you today on this important matter.

I also acknowledge that I am on this call from the traditional homelands of the Ktunaxa, the Syilx and the Sinixt peoples as well as the home of the Métis.

First, I’d like to advise that myself and the Nelson police department fully endorse and support the recommendations on changes and additions that have already been submitted by the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs. It is not my intention to repeat all of those submissions today, and I see my participation in this meeting as being some unique perspectives as they relate to smaller departments and, in the case of Nelson, geographically isolated departments.

I’d like to acknowledge some great work and recommendations submitted by police boards and various citizen groups as well. We wholeheartedly embrace many of the recommendations and changes that have been put forth.

As with all departments, resources are stretched and time is at a premium, which requires the prioritization of tasks and requirements, always at the expense of others. OPCC public trust complaints are mandated to be one of the top priorities, with strict timelines. Although these have significant impacts on all departments, I believe there is a significant impact on the smaller departments, taking a significant portion of the workforce out of operational policing to complete investigations and final investigative reports, review of these with decisions and written adjudications, and preconference hearings and discipline meetings.

Currently there are limited provisions to deal with minor infractions, resulting in many person-hours being spent going through the above noted process — both, I believe, wasteful and irresponsible. Dealing with minor infractions should be immediate and at the discretion of the discipline authority. In my opinion, this would also make the corrective action discipline imposed to be more meaningful and impactful at the time. The present system creates extra work, delays, stress and frustration on the subject members and a sense of “let’s get this over with” by the time the hearing, conference or discipline meeting finally arrives.

I would also suggest that the current process has unintended consequences where often, due to the cumbersome and lengthy process, the departments don’t have the time or resources to commit to minor infractions, and issues that should be dealt with often are not. This is not in keeping with the spirit or the intention of the acts, where timely accountability and corrective action should be taken. These small infractions tend to continue and often grow into bigger and more problematic situations that could have been prevented.

[9:55 a.m.]

There needs to be the discretion and the ability to deal with the matters in a timely, effective and, I would argue, more impactful way. This should be the process when an infraction is obvious and the discipline authority is comfortable in coming to a decision without a lengthy investigation occurring first. This is especially true when the subject member recognizes their error and wants to take ownership and deal with same. In my opinion, the current system is equivalent to an accused pleading guilty and then insisting on running a long and expensive trial anyways.

I also believe there needs to be more ability for departments to address issues around third-party complaints — those advocating on behalf of third parties or adult relatives who are capable of making complaints or speaking on their own behalf but seemingly not wanting to take part in the complaint process. These complaints are often billed as service complaints, but this situation makes it difficult for police to address the core issues, and the complainant does not have standing, due to privacy laws, etc., to receive specific information related to the investigation or the circumstances around the party they claim to be representing.

Without sufficient justification or rationale made by the third party as to why the party involved cannot or will not participate in that process — and to me, that would also have to include some mechanism where private information can be disclosed and shared to this representative — I believe the complainant should be determined to be inadmissible or the investigation discontinued.

My final point. In regards to the recommendation that the province take leadership over the structure of policing services, I’d like to emphasize the need for this legislation to set out defining features of adequate and effective policing, including minimum resource levels in all municipalities. This need should be based on a formula that not only looks at the population of the community policed but the crime severity index, calls for service and the workload of those departments’ members.

Small resource fluctuations and shortages are significantly impactful on smaller departments, and the time and effort and research required to make submissions for additional resources are also significant and hold no requirement for the police board or the municipality to follow suit. By doing this, it would ensure consistency across the province and ensure policing levels and service deliveries were enjoyed the same by all.

In closing, I would like to thank, again, the officers and the departments of the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs who have already completed and submitted some very well-thought-out and needed recommendations for changes to the B.C. Police Act.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Our next presentation is from Chief Constable Adam Palmer from the Vancouver police department.

Please go ahead, Chief Constable Palmer.

VANCOUVER POLICE DEPARTMENT

A. Palmer: Thank you and good morning. Adam Pal­mer from the Vancouver police department.

I am speaking to you today from Vancouver, on the traditional, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

I really appreciate the opportunity to address the committee and thank you for the important work that you’re doing. I think this will make a significant difference to public safety and our communities in British Columbia. So thank you for your work on this.

In my role as chief of the largest city in British Colum­bia, I routinely hear from every corner of our community, and people have all different sorts of perspectives and views on public safety. I think it’s important to bring all those different views to the table.

As a departure, I think, somewhat from what you have been hearing in some of the presentations over the last few months, instead of just focusing on what’s wrong with the system or what’s working well, I just want to give you four concrete solutions today for your consideration.

I do think we have an excellent policing model here in British Columbia, and we’re starting from a good place. We’re ahead of many other countries and provinces within Canada. So this is a golden opportunity where we can make it better. I also think that we do have incredible men and women, people working on the front lines of our police services and behind the scenes, who are doing a great job every day ensuring community safety at great personal sacrifice to themselves and their families.

Now, VPD submitted ten reports to you, almost 500 pages in submissions, but today I just want to boil that down to four simple things that I think will provide an increase in public trust, confidence, accountability and better outcomes for the public and also for public safety.

One, body-worn cameras. Please make them a provincial policing standard. My first recommendation is that all police agencies in B.C. be mandated by the province to adopt a body-worn camera program for all of their front-line officers. Given the current landscape surrounding policing, I feel the advent of body-worn cameras will strengthen the trust and confidence in policing.

This has evolved significantly over the past decade across North America, and we know that in adopting body-worn cameras, it will be important to develop provincial standards, consult with community, consult with police unions and police leaders and also provide adequate funding, most of which, of course, would fall to the municipalities. But there are examples of higher levels of government, including the Barack Obama administration, who did so in 2015 down in the United States.

[10:00 a.m.]

Over the past eight years, the VPD has conducted two complete examinations of body-worn cameras. We’ve looked at other agencies in North America, looked at the research and efficacy of the programs, as well as emerging technology and associated costs.

The main barrier has always been the high costs. How­ever, there have been some recent changes that have worked out some of the bugs and concerns over body-worn cameras that people have had previously. They do provide additional transparency. They do provide additional context surrounding incidents and may also help to prevent misinformation, misreporting and an increased public trust in police but also in the system, providing that important context.

Right now we are just seeing snippets of citizen iPhone videos from events that often take place over many min­utes or sometimes hours. This will increase public trust, confidence and police legitimacy.

We know the overwhelming majority of police interactions are handled professionally and appropriately. The use of force in British Columbia is very infrequent and much fewer than 1 percent of all police interactions. The number of substantiated complaints compared to the total number of interactions we have with people is a very, very small decimal point number.

However, there is a dramatic increase in videos of police interactions that always leave out that important context, so I think the evidence is now here that we do need to move towards establishing that in British Columbia. It will benefit criminal investigations. It will provide an objective look at the event and the actions of all parties involved.

Some of the cons in the past to do with costs, hardware, software issues — those have all been looked after in the sense that it has been simplified that many of these programs are now like purchasing a cell phone program.

There are staffing implications, especially on the civilian side for disclosure to Crown, information and privacy issues and FOI issues. However, all of these things can be worked out because they’ve been worked out by other jurisdictions. I just think that implementing that, making it a provincial standard and allowing a reasonable timeline to allow municipalities and police departments to prepare for this would be beneficial.

Number 2, civilian oversight, a more unified approach. In this next recommendation, I propose a more unified, coordinated and independent approach to police oversight. When we look at the oversight model in British Columbia, we see the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, the independent investigations office and a number of professional standards sections in all police agencies throughout British Columbia, including the RCMP.

What I’m suggesting is amalgamating and coordinating a lot of these entities to provide a more robust civilian in­dependent oversight body. Currently, policing has more oversight than any other profession. More than doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots and other high-risk occupations. We should have that oversight, given the extraordinary powers granted to us by the state. We carry firearms. We have the ability to use force, and we have the authority to arrest people.

We still hear concerns over and over again from members of the public about police officers and the system and its fairness, consistency, confidence in that system and the timeliness of investigations. I recommend that a complete, unified oversight body be administered by the province under one comprehensive umbrella and command structure.

I actually find it hard to believe that in 2021, we are still having this conversation about police investigating police. I am saying to you: please take it. The public doesn’t want the police doing it, and from my perspective, we are happy to give it up. People regularly complain about the current construct. The reality is that the solution is actually quite evident and very possible to enact through provincial leadership and will.

We have the IIO model, which got off to a rocky start in September of 2012, but I would say is working very well now. But why, in 2021, do we still have police investigating allegations of sexual assault, domestic violence and serious misconduct involving police? The oversight body should be taking all of that. I think you would be well-served by a large office in metropolitan Vancouver and a sub-office in Victoria. They can take on all of these complaints from municipal departments.

While the RCMP have a different system when it comes to professional standards complaints, it would also be able to take referrals from the RCMP when they wanted an independent investigation. It could be under one chief or CEO or civilian director of police conduct and discipline oversight for the province of B.C. and then two deputy directors: one on the IIO side and one on the OPCC side.

There are legal hurdles that could be addressed and overcome. It would be more efficient. It would get more timely results for the public and the officers involved. It’s ridiculous that in today’s day and age, we still have events that are dragging on for years — some for many, many years, even long past the retirement of some of the officers that are involved.

For minor offences, the police could still do it. For ex­ample, if the officer was rude to me when they gave me a ticket. Those sorts of things we could still do. But I think for the more serious public trust complaints and all criminal complaints, they should be removed from the police, and the entire investigation is handed over to an independent, third-party, civilian-led agency.

[10:05 a.m.]

Number 3, funds for mental health and the health system in general. That is a provincial responsibility, and I will tell you that the health system in this province needs more support, specifically mental health and addiction.

D. Routley (Chair): Excuse me, Chief Constable. I really hesitate to interrupt. But if you could just list off the next…? Because we do have presentations that we have read, and I know the members are itching to have as much question time as possible.

A. Palmer: Fair enough. I will wrap up very shortly, then, for you, sir. Thank you.

This No. 3 is more funds for mental health systems to support all the work going on in the community. To re­move police from some of that work, the health care system needs more funding. I can elaborate that during the Q and A.

The fourth recommendation is better consolidation and coordination of the Downtown Eastside. I will just say that while that is a very vibrant community in many ways, the Downtown Eastside also represents very troubled and complex social issues and failings where we see disproportionate deaths because of opioids, high rates of crime and violence, a prevalence of organized crime and drug trafficking, insufficient housing, high rates of poverty and substance use, and mental health and physical illness. That is a neighborhood in this country that is universally recognized as a community in crisis.

I will leave it there. I have much more to say, and I look forward to the questions. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to present to you today.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. We appreciate all of the insight very much.

Our final presenter in this panel is Chief Constable Del Manak from the Victoria police department.

Please go ahead, Chief Constable Manak.

VICTORIA POLICE DEPARTMENT

D. Manak: I come to you from Victoria, British Columbia, this morning on the lands of the Lekwungen-speaking people, Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, for which I am extremely grateful.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you again. Like chief officer Dave Jones, you would’ve heard me present on behalf of the B.C. Municipal Chiefs of Police, but this morning I’m presenting as the chief constable of the Victoria police department.

I’m aware that you’ve received a tremendous volume of important information that you’ll consider when making your decision, and I would like to reinforce our desire for the committee to make evidence-based recommendations that can be realistically implemented. Like you, we value continuous improvement and view the reform of the Police Act as an opportunity to do just that.

At the Victoria police department, we pride ourselves on creating opportunities to hear from all of our commun­ities, including our diverse communities, so we can adjust to meet the needs of everyone. Listening to our communities and adjusting is an ongoing process at the Victoria police department, and this will continue.

I’m proud to share with you that the Victoria police department is part of the Greater Victoria Police Diversity Advisory Committee. This committee, commonly referred to as the DAC, has been formed for the last 20 years, since 2001. The purpose of this committee is to improve relationships between many of our diverse communities and our local police organizations in the south Island.

I wanted to just quickly share with you a couple of the new initiatives that the Victoria police department is going to be pursuing. We are creating an outreach program to recruit from all of our diverse communities in an aggressive plan that allows us to do that to make sure that we have people from all our communities reflected in our police organization.

We’re also looking in this budget submission for 2022 to create a position that’s called a cultural liaison officer position that will allow us to better connect with our diverse communities.

Also, through our Diversity Advisory Committee, we’re starting, in September, to engage with our Black, Indigenous and persons of colour communities to really lead honest, authentic discussions just on how we can do better and how we can build trust between our diverse communities and our police organization.

[10:10 a.m.]

One of the key questions in our submission that we submitted was: what do we expect from our police service in 2021 and beyond? That’s a critical question that we’re all trying to answer, and I know that’s something that’s important to the special committee. Over the many years of quality service, we have responded to the demands from the public for a wide variety of services — and, as you all know, well beyond traditional law enforcement. In fact, we’ve adapted and evolved to excel in our ever-changing role.

Our mandate has become impossibly broad. Despite this, our officers do a remarkable job under difficult circumstances.

Now, I believe policing is defined by what the public asks us to do. If the public asks us to step away from certain roles, I think it’s important to have thoughtfully planned conversations that are needed. The committee and the previous special committee reviewing the Police Act complaint process have heard various inputs on this topic. I won’t go into great detail on this, because Chief Palmer already discussed this in great detail earlier.

We’ve also made recommendations regarding govern­ance. As the only municipal police department serving two different municipalities and working in a relatively small region with three municipal police departments and multiple RCMP detachments, these recommendations are founded in our experience navigating unique complexities.

I would like to reinforce that the greater Victoria region would benefit from a single regional police service. Now, while not everyone will agree with this, through the lens of providing public safety, this will provide an equitable and cost-effective way that I believe is the best path forward.

I’ll close with a comment about funding. It’s vital for the police boards and municipal councils to work together to support policing and the pursuit of public safety. Each has a critical role in our society and our systems of police governance. It’s fair to say that all of the police chiefs desire to be cost-effective in our service delivery, but we must have the necessary funding to ensure that we meet the needs of our growing communities with an increasingly complex social and legal environment.

Chief Palmer touched on the body-worn camera program. If we’re going to initiate that, that cannot really come at the expense of our police operations, to make sure that we can maintain the awesome, great, connected police service that we currently provide and the trust that we enjoy with our communities.

Thank you for your time this morning.

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

I will now open the floor to questions from the members. If you could raise your hand electronically, I’ll make a list.

I’ll begin with Trevor.

T. Halford: Thank you for the presentation.

Chief Palmer, to you: I don’t want to put you in a tough spot. We’ve talked and we’ve heard often about the structure of police boards — what’s working, what’s not — and I wonder if you have any comment there in terms of oversight and structure. We do understand how it’s the direction given from municipal officials. Some may not have policing experience; some may have. Just any comments on that.

Then the second is just in terms of the mental health supports, some of the programs that you guys have working, whether it’s the different Car programs — any gaps in the system that you see that the province should be immediately acting on that would make your lives and, more importantly, the people that are suffering from mental illness in a much better position when dealing with law enforcement.

A. Palmer: Thank you very much for those questions. Those are both very meaty questions, so I’ll dive right into them.

The first one — thank you, sir — is your question about police boards. What I will say is that there are multiple oversight levels of policing in British Columbia. The boards are one — OPCC, IIO and then all the other regulatory boards like WorkSafeBC, different inquests, the Coroners Service, special interest groups, media. There’s a lot of oversight on policing in British Columbia.

With respect to boards, they provide governance over the police for strategic direction, for finance, for service or policy complaints, for hiring and firing the chief — those sorts of things. They do play a very crucial role, and they are the employer of members of the police department.

I know there’s been a lot of discussion about the role of cities versus boards and who should be in control and who should be reporting to who. The one thing I would just like to mention to the panel is that the Canadian system that we have of police governance across this country is set up specifically so that the police do have a governance structure that is overseen by civilians.

There are elected officials that are represented on boards. In British Columbia, it happens to be the mayor. In other provinces, you will see models with one or two city councillors. There is a mix across the country, but the recurring theme is there’s always an incredible amount of civilian oversight from people from the community that make up the boards.

[10:15 a.m.]

The reason we have that in Canada is to stop the advent of political interference, and that is a real concern. If you do go to a model where municipalities or mayors have more control, you’re really adopting an American model, because that is the model they use in the United States, where a chief reports directly to a mayor or to a city manager and is influenced by the political flavour of the day, whatever that happens to be.

Personally, if you’re asking my opinion on that — which you are — when it comes to police boards, I think we have, actually, a very good structure in British Columbia, where we do have strong civilian oversight. We do have politicians represented on the board who provide that insight and also a conduit to the city. We do have to consider city priorities as well as provincial priorities. That is mandated to us, and that is something that we do. But that civilian oversight, with the cover from political interference, is quite beneficial.

With regard to mental health programs, that is such an important issue that we’re talking about here today. Some of my fellow chiefs also touched on that. We do have a number of programs underway in Vancouver, including very long-standing ones, since 1978 — including Car 86 or Car 66 — that you’ve heard of, where you have police officers working with mental health workers. We’ve been doing that for 43 years, so that’s nothing new. You’ll hear, in other jurisdictions, especially in the United States and in other parts of Canada, where they’re just starting to do things like that now, but we’ve been doing that for many decades.

To me, those are reactive ways of doing mental health work. Some of the more interesting ones to look at…. Some of my other fellow officers here, like Victoria and Del Manak, do also a similar program, with assertive outreach teams or assertive community treatment teams, where you have plainclothes police officers embedded with mental health and psychiatric professionals proactively helping people before they get into crisis — not waiting until the 911 call comes in but actually dealing with things in an advance capacity.

We have information-sharing agreements in place be­tween police and health in Vancouver. Every day from seven in the morning until 11 o’clock at night, we will sit down at a table like this, similar to how we’re all sitting, and we will share data, based on information-sharing agreements, and look at the people that are having the most contact with police or with health authorities. Those two populations intermingle quite regularly in our communities.

We will send out, in a non-threatening and very sup­portive way, an officer in plain clothes and a psychiatric or mental health professional and visit people, knock on their doors, check in on them, see how they’re doing and make sure that they’re staying on track. If they need any help, in many cases the mental health professionals can give assistance right at the door and can give medication. We can drive people to appointments. These programs have led to over a 50 percent reduction, for that cohort of people, in police calls for service and over a 50 percent reduction in emergency visits. These proactive programs do work, and they have a lot of efficacy.

A lot of the discussion…. Going more directly to your point, where we’re talking about ways to improve the system even more, I firmly believe that when you look at the total number of calls for service that police attend in this province, there is a percentage of calls to do with mental health–related issues that we don’t have to attend to. The way that I would sort of summarize it best is this. If you think of a circle or a pie, and you think of that circle as being 100 percent of all the calls that police attend that have a mental health component to them, there will be a certain percentage of those calls that we will always have to attend.

Those will be ones, for example, where somebody is a victim of a crime, is a suspect in a crime, is a reportee in a crime, is a witness in a crime. If they have any involvement — either victim, witness, suspect — in any sort of criminal investigation, that is our job. We have to investigate criminal activity in our community. So we will still be going to those types of calls. That’s one type that you would take out of the pie.

Another one you would take out of the pie would….

D. Routley (Chair): I’m going to have to jump in again. I’m very sorry.

Right now I have five members on the list, and we’ve got about 12 minutes left. If members could keep their questions as short as possible.

Presenters, if you could address them as quickly as you can. There will be opportunity for follow-up as well, but I want to ensure that all the members get a chance here.

If everybody is okay, we’ll move on.

G. Begg: A quick question for Chief Fisher, from Nelson. You alluded to the requirement, or your desire, to see what I would call a minimum staffing level set for policing agencies. Could you expand a bit on that?

D. Fisher: Sure. Currently the system, as I understand it, is basically left to the…. It would start out with the police board and a presentation and gathering support for the police board.

[10:20 a.m.]

Then the committee, the police board and the chief of police generally would make a presentation to city council as to the needs of the police department, generally based on research we’ve done about where we sit on the crime severity index, the calls for service, increasing population, increasing strain on the members around things such as mental health calls and that, on top of all the criminal in­vestigations that we do.

Basically, the city council has the final say in what they are willing to fund, and they certainly should have a significant amount of say in what the police department’s makeup and priorities are. But also, I think that there needs to be a standard set across the province where a lot of time and energy that’s spent on trying to justify or ask for additional resources, again, could be better used. In the meantime, the police departments are struggling. Service levels, I believe, decline at times, and often the community and then the police departments and their members themselves suffer from health and wellness issues.

G. Begg: Thank you.

A quick question to Chief Palmer.

Adam, you talk about body-worn cameras. I wonder if, during your review, you’ve looked at the impact on disclosure and subsequent best-evidence rules, trials, that sort of thing, and the potential implications of that.

A. Palmer: Thank you, sir. That’s a very relevant question to that topic. I appreciate the guidance earlier. I will keep my answers shorter.

That is a very complex area for sure — disclosure to Crown, the requirements under Regina v. Jordan. The other thing we’ve seen in other jurisdictions is a vast amount of FOI requests, which also bog down the system significantly. So you would have to put in processes.

There are technical solutions to some of those, and then some of them can be handled by civilian professionals. So there are workaround solutions for all of those. It is doable. We have seen it work in other jurisdictions, and while there are hurdles, we could definitely overcome them and make it work in British Columbia.

G. Lore: I have a general question. I’m interested in hearing from whoever wants to answer it.

One thing we have been hearing a lot about is additional training needs, training on a variety of topics — mental health to disability to sexual assault response — and it’s not something we’ve heard here from you. So I wonder if you have, as chiefs of your various departments, thoughts on whether there are pieces where your departments and members would benefit from additional training.

D. Manak: It’s Chief Manak. I can comment.

D. Routley (Chair): Go ahead. Thank you.

D. Manak: I will just offer one comment that we have in our submission, and then I’ll open it up to my colleagues if they want to add on to anything.

One of the things that we requested the special committee consider is embedding a properly resourced centre for policing excellence within the Police Academy. We know that training is critical to make sure that all of our officers have that high level of training. That’s what the public expects. That’s what our communities are asking for us. What we know, though, is that it is not funded adequately.

There needs to be and could be much better coordina­tion within our Police Academy to provide in-service training for all of our officers. Not just recruit-level training — there needs to be a clear, sustainable funding model for that — but also, moving forward, for officers incrementally as they move throughout their career. Having a centre for policing excellence that’s well coordinated with a provincial lens on it would provide [audio interrupted.]

D. Routley (Chair): I think we may have lost the audio.

D. Manak: Well, I’ve finished, and I’ll open it up to my colleagues if they want to comment on anything.

A. Palmer: I could add a quick comment, if it’s permis­sible. I agree with the comments that Chief Del Manak made.

The other thing I would just point out is that over the past several years — four years, to be exact — there have been four or five different reviews done of the Justice Institute of British Columbia. I’m not sure if the panel has ac­cess to those reviews, but it has been reviewed extensively, and the chiefs, including the people that are on this call today, have raised various concerns with regard to the training at the JIBC. Steps have been taken through police services to address those, and police services has been very responsive to that. However, there is still a gap, in my estimation, on some of the basic training that officers need in this province.

[10:25 a.m.]

What it’s led to is individual departments like my own providing almost an additional six weeks of training to officers, on top of what they receive at the academy. Then you get into a bit of the haves and the have-nots. Not every police agency in the province is able to do that. We provide significant additional training to officers they don’t receive at the Police Academy, and I think the academy needs to up their game in that regard.

A. Olsen: Thank you for your presentation. I have a bunch of questions here, but I’m just going to ask this one.

The third point we have to be looking at in our mandate is around systemic and institutionalized racism. I’m just wondering. None of the presentations this morning ad­dressed that. I just wanted to give you all an opportunity to perhaps, as briefly as this subject can be touched on, characterize the extent of systemic racism within the institutions that you operate, that you run.

D. Manak: Sure. Chair, if I can just start answering that question. Again, I’ll open up to my colleagues.

D. Routley (Chair): Please go ahead.

D. Manak: Thank you for your question. This is something that is highly topical, and this is something I can assure you that every police leader is looking at, inward to our organizations and outwardly with our own diverse communities — to have these hard discussions about how police can be better, how we can build better trust and what we need to do.

When it comes to an internal focus, I can share with you that, as one of the few police chiefs of colour in this country, I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racism. I know that in Canada — and this is my personal view — we, as human beings, are not perfect. We all have our implicit biases, and those biases are carried by every individual who wears the uniform.

We are looking inward. We are looking at training. We are looking at how we can build better, healthy organizations. I do believe it starts off with who we hire. If we make sure that we’re hiring the right quality people with the right competencies — people who are inclusive, people who have a diversity of opinion and are bringing that leadership quality to the organization — we’re going to be stronger.

My current assessment is that it’s a work in progress. There is work that is being done, and there is work that needs to be done.

D. Jones: Just to follow up on Chief Manak’s comment also…. We’ve heard, in the prior question, talk about training. I think that you need to also add in the word “education.”

I’m very fortunate to have several First Nations officers who have engaged in a program with youth, say, from the Metro Vancouver Transit Police. Part of what I would say is the education I’ve learned and we’re now delivering to our members…. I mean being educated on the issues of systemic racism so that there’s a self-awareness — an awareness as an individual, an awareness of the institutions, an awareness of policies, practices, things that have led to these concerns.

To me, training is teaching a skill set. It’s putting something into somebody so that they’re able to accomplish it. Whereas education is that understanding of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. I think when we look back, there was a real lack of that. So our systems — and, some people will even argue, even our laws — that were created were racist in the way that they were created and where they emphasize parts of it. Right?

Then you take…. We keep calling this police officers when they’re law enforcement officers. So when law en­forcement officers are enforcing a law that is systemically racist or takes away their discretion to say no — that offends the standards or is inappropriate — that puts police officers in a horrible position. It starts to label them as the individuals who are potentially not of good character or being systemically racist, if that’s the case.

I agree. There is a long way to go. So when you talk about this and you’re concerned about training, I’d really ask that you also start thinking of education.

How many of us truly knew what the residential school systems were like until it came to light recently? I certainly didn’t learn it in school when I grew up. I’m quite shocked by it now, when you hear things that have gone on.

[10:30 a.m.]

It’s improving yourself along with it and being able to speak up where it’s wrong.

A. Palmer: Thank you, sir, for asking the question. These are very complex issues, and I know there are various definitions. But what I want to do is take a second and just answer this question very thoroughly for you, because I think it is such an important discussion.

Unfortunately, sometimes we live in a place where everybody’s looking for yes-or-no answers, or ten-second soundbites in the media, and this is really a complex and important issue that needs to be discussed in depth.

I want to fully acknowledge all the historical wrongs and many shameful things in history in Canada, with residential schools and the Indian Act and the Sixties Scoop and Komagata Maru, the Japanese internment, the head tax on the Chinese, the Hogan’s Alley displacement here in my own city and, recently, the horrific situation up in Kamloops with the 215 children, and other communities across Canada that have gone through similar discoveries. It’s just absolutely heartbreaking.

I think all government institutions, whether federal, provincial or local, and whether we’re talking about health, criminal justice, the education system, social services, employment, housing…. Racism is something in all those systems that can never be tolerated, should never be tolerated, in our communities or in our institutions. We have to recognize that it does exist in society and people are not immune from it, by any means.

I also want to mention that it is a continuous journey to ensure that we have fairness, equity, diversity, inclusion, belonging and compassion towards all people. Various people and various institutions are at different places in that journey. We’re not at the beginning of that journey. We’re well along that, and have been for many years, and have come a long way from where my particular agency and other agencies started on this journey. Not all police are at the same baseline when we’re talking about this.

I just want to make sure that…. Broad, sweeping statements, sometimes, on this issue, or characterizations, are sometimes not fair as well. Totally recognize unconscious bias, implicit bias exists in all human beings, and also recognize that policies and practices can be biased, too, and institutions. It’s so important to take great effort over many, many years to address this, because policing has evolved considerably over the past decades. When you look at the solutions or remedies or paths forward to address racism, you will see that a lot of the things that are suggested and recommended to find those paths forward are things that have been happening for many years, and that we’re continuing to do.

When we’re talking about some of the things like my fellow chiefs mentioned about hiring standards and processes, when we’re talking about diversity, when we’re talking about training, education, policy and procedural reviews — to make sure that we’re looking at it with an EDI lens. Community engagement and relationships. Bias and stereotyping training. Making sure we have inclusive workplaces and also accountability processes in place to hold people accountable if things go astray.

In closing, I’ll just say that it is incumbent upon all of us to address this important issue and remain steadfastly committed to reconciliation as well as racism in our institutions, and to always do better. So important to listen to our communities and what they have to say. We can’t sit back and be complacent. Racism is insidious, it’s evil, and it’s destructive. We have to do everything we can to root it out.

D. Routley (Chair): I’ll ask Karan if she could ask those in the waiting room if they have flexibility in their time. I see us going over time. I want to allow the questions. We’ve got three more people on our list here.

If you could check that, Karan.

If we’ve got an extra 15 minutes, we’ll take that out of what deliberation time we were going to have at the end of the meeting.

Members, comfortable?

Okay. Then we will go on to Rachna, please.

R. Singh: Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all of you for the presentations. We have heard from…. My colleague Adam has already asked the question I had in mind.

Chief Jones, I think you made really good points about the systemic…. We have heard it from a number of stakeholders here about the colonial structures we have in place and the impact that it is still having on the communities, especially Indigenous, Black and people of colour.

You talked about education, which is definitely the key. Whenever we were hearing, it is…. A lot of times, what we have seen is the defensiveness that comes within the police forces because they think it is an attack on an individual police officer, which it is not.

[10:35 a.m.]

We have a heard a number of times that there have been officers who have tried their best to build those relationships, to mend the fences — everything they have done. But it is the system that is so structurally racist.

You talk about education but also the key challenges that you are facing. That’s one of the biggest mandates of this committee. We would really like to have a little bit more feedback on that, Chief Officer Jones, if you can shed light on that.

D. Jones: Sure. It starts with, as I’ve indicated there…. Policing has been a creation over time, right? The role of police officers has changed significantly. Some of us, you’ll hear, will say…. This isn’t just unique to Vancouver. It’s across the country or the Lower Mainland. Eighty percent of what police officers deal with today has nothing to do with traditional crime.

When you’re looking at structures, we’re dealing with things such as mental health, homelessness and addictions. But in the past…. I’m going to go back years. Years ago when we talk about structures, we saw criminal law as the way of getting ourselves out of this, right? It wasn’t a prison system. It was called a correction system, as if we were going to rehabilitate individuals through forced programming.

We didn’t spend enough time looking at, I’m going to say, the impacts of how someone got there. Mental health issues were not criminal issues, or addiction issues. A person who was using drugs shouldn’t be criminalized because of a substance matter that they’re addicted to, which led them into, perhaps, criminal activity and that.

Our structures, for the longest time, were set up, and one of the things that you find, still, in policing is the inability to perhaps make a referral. Police officers generally, and genuinely, want to help individuals. The majority of police officers are not interested in taking someone to court. They don’t see that — I’ll call it — the justice system is the answer to solving a problem for that.

You look at our structures. If it’s not going to be…. Are we replacing the court system with a system that allows us to make a referral to somebody, get somebody into housing, get somebody a referral to a physician, so that we look at it differently, and we see it’s coming?

You have, in today’s generation…. I’ll admit that a majority of chiefs here probably have over 30 years of policing experience. Even though I like to think we’re educa­ted, and we see where it’s coming from — some may argue differently — you have a whole new generation of police officers and people who come from…. Whether they be Gen X’ers or millennials and all that stuff, they see things differently. They’ve experienced it. It’s being in touch with it.

The structures that we have in place…. Policing is changing, but there are those around us, such as yourselves, who create laws, who have the ability to amend the laws and the ability to implement new systems that have to — I almost say — keep up with what we’re willing to do.

Police will do what’s necessary, but we need the assistance of those around us, from every level of government.

K. Kirkpatrick: I found these all very interesting. For time, I’m just going to actually ask, through Karan, if I can submit some questions directly, but I will tell you what they will be about.

Questions to Deputy Chief Davey, in particular, with respect to restorative justice, how your officers actually access that process. I am also curious about the integrated model, if it’s done with Fraser Health, and what the funding model is. I’m very interested in the service navigator proposal that you are giving, and just also the cultural liaison position in Victoria for Chief Const. Del Manak. I will follow up with those, because that alone is a 40-minute conversation.

I appreciate your time and all the work you’re doing.

D. Routley (Chair): I hate to have to police the time the way I have, but we have little time. I appreciate it.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): I do plan to reach out. I have a number of questions, so I’ll reach out separately.

Maybe, since I think we have a couple of minutes, just to get some input on…. We’ve had a lot of discussions over the past months now around E-Comm 9-1-1 delivery and how that system works.

[10:40 a.m.]

I’m just wondering if I can maybe get some input from a couple of the members. First of all, thank you all for your presentations today. Really appreciated; very informative. But a little bit of input, maybe, from a couple of you folks around improvements that 911 dispatch could be making that would improve the overall policing in our province. I just wonder if I could get a couple of comments and angles from there.

M. Davey: If I can start, Mr. Chair, just briefly from a smaller police agency perspective.

In the Delta police department, we have a “community first” approach, a “no call too small” approach. Therefore, many calls coming through the non-emergency line that are not answered for a significant amount of time through our partnership with E-Comm create a tremendous amount of frustration for our citizens in Delta. It also frustrates our efforts as a police department to provide that timely service for whatever the call is, regardless of whether it’s serious in nature or not, because that is our policing philosophy here in Delta.

It’s certainly been frustrating for quite some time now through our relationship with E-Comm and their inability to provide that level of service for a smaller department that actually has the time and personnel to be able to deliver that service model to its community.

R. Glumac: A question for Chief Palmer. I was curious to hear your answer. You were talking about the pie of dealing with calls related to mental health issues. I’d like to hear the full answer on that, that you were starting.

In that context, what kind of data do you have on this or any of the other police departments? A lot of the structures that have been set up, have been set up at a time before we had the understanding, perhaps, of mental health issues and how…. We just have a lot more understanding of that now, and one of our roles here in this committee is to think about how we modernize things to deal with this adequately. So I’m very curious to hear your perspective on that in terms of how much of the work you’re doing is related to mental health issues.

If you could complete that answer, that would be great. Thanks.

A. Palmer: Yes. Thank you very much for the clarification.

With that pie, as I mentioned…. A certain amount of, percentage of, those calls will be involving criminality — various roles. I’m not suggesting people with mental health issues are in the suspect or accused sphere. But victimization is very high for mental health — in fact, 15 times higher chance to be a victim of crime in Vancouver if you have a mental health issue and 23 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime. So victimization is huge. That would be a chunk of those calls that you would take out.

Another chunk would be the current provincial construct with provincial legislation under the Mental Health Act. There are certain powers granted to police where if somebody is suffering from an apparent mental health disorder and they’re a danger to themselves or others, the onus is then on police to apprehend that person and take them forthwith to a physician, to a hospital, to get checked out. So that would be another bucket of types of calls that you would have to remove.

There’s also another bucket of calls where there is any sort of…. A crime may not have been committed yet, but there is information about a weapon being involved or violence at the scene. So those would be other ones you would have to take out.

Then finally, the other ones you would have to take out, at this point in time, is that…. So 26 percent of the calls that we’re getting right now for mental health are coming from the mental health system to us. In Vancouver, over one quarter of the calls are doctors, nurses, psych professionals calling VPD and saying: “Please go to this call in the community, because we don’t have the resources.” In many cases, they don’t have the training. They have the mental training, but they don’t have the ability to deal with somebody who is overtly aggressive. So those are the sorts of things we’re dealing with.

As far as the analytics and the data, I can tell you right down to the exact number of calls in Vancouver that apply to each of those categories. We have very advanced analytics. I can tell you the exact number of calls that may be left over.

We get about 740 a calls a day for police service in Vancouver. There are probably six to eight of those calls we don’t need to go to, in the mental health sphere. So 740 is all calls, not just mental health. But there are six to eight of those calls that we don’t need to go to all, by our analysis.

All of that information is included in one of the submissions we did, in the report called Our Community in Need. If you go into that report, it will have a detailed breakdown of all the data and the analysis.

[10:45 a.m.]

We’ve broken it down not only by number of calls but how many FTE police officers that would be and the dollar amount that, if there was an alternate response model from Health that could take on those calls, is how much we could reduce the VPD budget by. We’ve done that analysis, and it would be in that report for you, sir.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. I don’t see any more names on the list for members.

I appreciate all the panellists. You, as much as anyone, understand the broadness of our terms of reference. We’ve heard the reference to education here. We do have the Mental Health Act in our terms of reference. I’m encouraged by the broadness of the topics that we were able to discuss. I think it’s going to help us get through the work we’ve got in front of us.

Did you have your hand up, Adam?

A. Olsen: No. I was just thanking my constituency ad­vocate for bringing me water.

D. Routley (Chair): Okay.

Thank you to the members for their questions.

Thank you to the panellists for your great contribution to the work we’re doing. As you heard, we’ll have follow-up questions, and we appreciate everything that you have offered us.

Okay, Members. If anybody needs a quick break, we can do a one- or two-minute recess. Otherwise, we’ll just invite the next guests into the room. We’ll just go ahead, then. Thanks, everybody.

Welcome to our new set of panellists to this meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. It’s our pleasure and opportunity to hear from more voices.

I’m Doug Routley, MLA for Nanaimo–North Cowichan and the Chair of the committee. The members will introduce themselves when they ask questions.

Just a quick reminder to the panel. Each presenter will have five minutes to speak, followed by a period for questions and discussion with the entire panel. There is a timer available to assist. Presenters can see that when they’re in the gallery view.

First, I’d like to welcome city of Delta mayor George V. Harvie for their presentation.

Welcome, Mayor.

CITY OF DELTA

G. Harvie: Thank you. Can you see me okay? It’s blank on my screen here.

D. Routley (Chair): I can’t, but I’m not sure if….

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): We can hear you, but we can’t see you.

G. Harvie: Have you got me blocked there for starting the video?

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): No.

D. Routley (Chair): We have good imaginations, and I think every one of us knows your face, actually.

In the meantime — we’ll try to address that — please go ahead.

G. Harvie: Okay. Thank you.

Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from the shared, traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the scəw̓aθən, Tsawwassen, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Musqueam, and other Coast Salish peo­ples. We extend our appreciation to these First Nations for the opportunity to be here today.

I’d first state that I am making this submission as the mayor of Delta, with the support of council, not the chair of the Delta police board, nor does the submission reflect any opinion of the Delta police board members.

Dear committee members, thank you for the opportunity to speak about the city of Delta’s submission to the committee and for undertaking Police Act reform board to ensure that it meets the needs of current social expectations and standards. As mayor, I am pleased to support the leadership of the Delta police department, as well as our outstanding sworn members and civilian staff. They do an outstanding job protecting our community.

I also want to thank the current Delta police board members who have volunteered to serve their community. They are committed to working with our police chief to make Delta safe.

Now I’d like to speak about the current limitations on a police board chair’s role under the current province of B.C. Police Act. In my almost three years as board chair, I have found the role extremely frustrating, as I sit only as a figurehead. I have no ability to vote or participate in meaningful debate. My time has not added value to the oversight of the city of Delta police department.

[10:50 a.m.]

When there is public apprehension related to police services in Delta, the public always turns to their elected officials to respond to public safety or other police-related community issues, not the provincial appointees. The Delta public expects their elected officials to have meaningful oversight of the city police department. The general public does not understand or accept that the mayor, as board chair, does not have the same rights and power as appointed board members or that an elected councillor has no involvement with their police department.

Accountability and transparency are fundamental to public confidence in government institutions. Elected representatives are accountable to the community through the electoral process, but with the current board structure, such accountability and transparency is lacking. I recognize, and agree with, the need to limit the potential for political interference in policing operations but still believe there is room for improvement to enhance the overall governance of municipal police departments, to provide the public with greater confidence in the system and to better reflect the diversity of the communities being served.

In addition to accountability and transparency — challenges with the current structure of police boards — the system provides limited ability to ensure that the diversity of the community is reflected on the police board. Changes to the governance structure should be considered to ensure that a community’s diversity in race, age and other key factors are appropriately reflected on a police board.

I would greatly request committee members to review the board structure that exists in other provinces in Can­ada, including Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. All of these provinces’ police boards have elected officials and appointed citizens. I truly believe that a police board composed of elected officials and provincially appointed citizens would create a strong partnership for the benefit of our police services.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to make a submission to the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. As you review the evidence and consider recommendations to modernize the act, I know that there are many important issues and areas that deserve attention. As part of your assessment of potential reforms related to the “independent oversight, transparency, governance, structure, service delivery, standards, funding, training and education” portions of your mandate, we encourage you to consider our proposal to improve police board governance.

Thank you very much for your time.

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

Our next presentation is from the mayor of the city of North Vancouver, Linda Buchanan.

CITY OF NORTH VANCOUVER

L. Buchanan: Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, everyone. I would like to thank the committee for inviting me to present this morning. It is an honour to be here. I am deeply appreciative of the service you give British Columbians as elected officials. I’m Linda Buchanan, the mayor in the city of North Vancouver.

I’d like to start by acknowledging I am speaking to you from the traditional territories of the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh nations. I thank them for sharing their lands with us.

First and foremost, reform of the B.C. Police Act must be formed with the principles of equity, inclusivity, intersectionality, responsiveness and competency in mind. Prior to being elected mayor, I was a public health nurse for nearly 30 years. Looking at policing through the lens of public health is crucial in understanding how we can do better for all people. Addressing the social determinants of health — such as education, primary health care, child care, racism, housing and food security, to name a few — is fundamental in improving health and reducing inequities.

Building more equitable communities requires the province to create interministerial policy and be intentional and strategic in their investments. This is part and parcel to modernizing public safety. This must be a key recommendation. COVID-19 has lifted the veil on inequities and has only increased stressors on people. Police are increasingly responding to mental health calls because they are the available resource but not necessarily the best-suited or the most economical one. Public safety is a local government responsibility, but it is delivered in partnership with other stakeholders.

[10:55 a.m.]

The RCMP is a contracted organization that delivers services to deal with both criminal and non-criminal issues. On the criminal side, standardization across RCMP detachments is critical. On the non-criminal side, policing services must be more integrated with local government, other public safety agencies and people with lived experiences. This would create a framework that allows for local context. Non-criminal and wellness-based responses should be developed in ways that minimize police intervention and prioritize health care professionals funded by the province.

I’d be remiss if I did not mention that we need trauma-informed and anti-racist education in policing, a competency that requires ongoing professional development throughout one’s career. This will lead to better outcomes for the community.

Public safety is largely supported through local governments’ budgets. Cities are mandated to be responsible for policing. In fact, the largest portion of the city of North Vancouver’s operating budget, over 30 percent, is directed to police and fire. While public safety already represents a significant portion of our annual budget, year over year these costs increase. Over the past five years, our police budget has increased by over 20 percent. As municipalities, we have little say in police budget increases.

The rate of increase is unsustainable. To put it simply, the cost of policing will soon have serious impacts on municipalities’ ability to deliver other core services. In the city, we are committed to delivering housing and child care for working people. Increasing policing costs impact our ability to deliver services and infrastructure that support better health outcomes for the community. The current governance mechanisms do not create an opportunity to correct budget imbalances. Recommendations on reform must include reviewing the financial mechanisms for funding policing services.

While I appreciate there are protocols to follow when convening these committees, municipalities and First Nations must be a voice at the table. Given that this table cannot accommodate local governments as equals, I res­pectfully ask that you recommend that any future updates to the Police Act include our voices as equal partners in the process. Systemic reform of the Police Act should be addressed more regularly, rather than during periodic legislative reviews. Scheduled reviews would create a venue for ongoing improvements in emerging areas of concern.

In conclusion, as mayor, the deliverables I would like to see come out of this work are the following: (1) interministerial policy work that prioritizes upstream, preventative measures; (2) better integration of the RCMP in a public safety framework; (3) the ability for local government to have more control over policing costs; and finally, the establishment of a process for ongoing, regular reform of this piece of legislation, inclusive of local government, First Nations and people with lived experience.

I want to again thank you for inviting me to present. I look forward to taking your questions.

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

Our final presenter in this panel is the mayor of the city of Richmond, Mr. Malcolm Brodie.

Welcome, Mayor.

CITY OF RICHMOND

M. Brodie: Good morning to all of you. Thank you for allowing me to present on behalf of the city of Richmond.

Let’s face it. Everybody involved in policing is facing more difficult challenges every day, but the sole goal is to reduce crime and to make sure that we preserve our safe communities.

You have our written submission, and I just want to highlight one that’s not in the written submission and one that is. The first thing I want to highlight is not in your written submission: the issue of crime-reduction technology. Let me be very specific in what I’m saying. We have spent, as a city, millions of dollars on traffic cameras for 110 different intersections. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has mandated that we cannot use the images for any purpose in such a form that they are in high definition. You cannot identify people in those pictures and you cannot identify licence plates in them.

[11:00 a.m.]

Now, if I take the same picture with my iPhone, with my tablet, if I go into a 7-Eleven store and they have a closed-circuit TV — any number of devices — they can use the images, but for some reason, a local government cannot.

What I am suggesting on behalf of the city is that there be a program set up for judicial review of the potential use of images. Just as with a search warrant you can invade someone’s privacy, so with a judicial process you should be able to mandate production of these pictures in a form that they can be used as evidence against the bad guys.

We had a situation in Richmond. We have on camera where the bad guys were shooting at the police. The cameras, the pictures and the images cannot be used as evidence, because they have to be brought into low definition. To me, it just makes no sense at all. We fully recognize that there needs to be some judicial oversight of it so you don’t just have the avoidance of people’s right to privacy.

The other issue that I want to address is in the written submission, and that’s the issue of the police auxiliaries. I am, frankly, dumbfounded that after so many years of trying to figure out how to manage and form an appropriate auxiliary constable program, the programs have now been terminated. We don’t seem to have any substitute being brought into place for those auxiliaries. In our city, we had a very large crew of them. They supplemented the police officers, they were highly trained, they were motivated, and they were locally based volunteers.

They did many, many different services for our city, and I do not understand what has happened to that concept. So my submission, on behalf of the city, is that we should create a new provincial auxiliary program that is authorized under the Police Act — similar powers as the RCMP auxiliary program prior to the previous iterations with the restrictions.

Now I’ll conclude by talking about the mental health–​related issues. I heard what Mayor Buchanan spoke about, and I certainly agree with those comments for the mental health–related duties. I’m also a part of the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus, which has been or will be presenting to you at length on the mental health issues as they relate to policing. We fully support the position of the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus.

In our city, we have the Fox 80 program, combining the RCMP and the mental health professionals. That should be expanded. The funding should be sustainable, and it should be expanded throughout the province.

Those are the items that I wanted to highlight. Thank you for allowing me to present my thoughts on behalf of the city of Richmond.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. Thank you to all the presenters for your presentations.

I’ll open the floor now to members for questions. If you could electronically, Zoom-style, raise your hands.

Go ahead, Karin.

K. Kirkpatrick: I can’t go without acknowledging Mayor Buchanan, who is my neighbouring mayor. We do share the RCMP detachment.

This is a little off what we were speaking about. But Mayor Buchanan, I do think that the district of North Vancouver, the city of North Vancouver, is unique in that approximately 70 percent of the workforce on the North Shore actually comes to the North Shore from somewhere else, yet the policing costs are borne in a more traditional model. I don’t know if this is a concern for the city and if you do feel that there is an additional burden from a cost perspective, where you’re in a unique situation in that you’ve got a number of people coming onto the North Shore every day who are actually not resident there.

[11:05 a.m.]

L. Buchanan: Well, thank you very much, Karin, for that question — MLA Kirkpatrick.

I think, from a public safety perspective, I…. Of course, as mayors and as elected officials, we all want to have a safe and secure community. I think that throughout the Lower Mainland — throughout the province, actually — housing affordability is a huge crisis that we all face. Trying to find housing for people who work in our community is an ongoing challenge. It is something that we do discuss and look at different ways in which we can deliver housing, really, for those middle-income earners, which public safety people typically tend to be.

I would say that we continue to deliver. That’s why I said we are looking at ways in which we can deliver the kinds of things that support working people: housing, child care, public transportation. All three of us, as mayors, sit on the mayors’ TransLink council as well.

I would say that this goes to my points around the bud­get, in terms of how local government has very little say in the policing costs that come to us, and there are many aspects of the budget. A local government has to have a seat at the table where we can have those checks and balances. Again, I think it was Mayor Brodie or Mayor Harvie who said: “We don’t want to have input in terms of the operational sides, but there are many choices.” Budgets are about choices, and when we are given a bill which…. None of us likes to get unexpected bills.

We don’t have the choices. We have to be able to fund them. We want to be able to have more input into it, be­cause the escalating costs of policing are making it unsustainable for us to be able to deliver on those other things that support the working lives of people in our community.

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

Just for my colleagues, the city and the district of North Vancouver don’t participate in the E-Comm program, and have their own system. Perhaps for the committee, that’s something that we may look at after this.

G. Begg: My comments are directed towards Mayor Harvie.

Good morning, Your Worship. I’m interested in sort of fleshing out the issues that you’re having with police boards — or at least the composition of police boards. I am familiar with the Ontario model, which dictates three members if you’re under 25,000, five if you’re over and, in some cases, seven. There is municipal representation, of course, but not necessarily — almost always not — the mayor of the community.

What do you have as an idea of how the composition of municipal police boards should be?

G. Harvie: I’ve looked at the comparisons across Canada here, and based on my three years of experience and frustration as mayor, I serve no added value because of my restrictions in the role under the current PSEC.

I really believe, in talking to other individuals, that the best thing that could happen is…. We need more accountability for the elected officials to be involved with the fire-police department — very similar parallels to what Mayor Buchanan was mentioning.

We have a $50 million budget. That’s the largest expen­diture we have in Delta. I really believe that we could have a stronger partnership by doing what the rest of Canada has done and ensuring that there’s a proper combination of elected officials and the provincially appointed — not the way it is now, where they’re all provincially appointed.

I’ve seen a change over many years being in local government. When there’s a change of the provincial government — from the NDP, for example, to the Liberals and back and forth — there’s a flushing that happens, because every member that’s appointed to the police board goes through your vetting system of whichever government is in power.

I really believe that the elected officials and police and appointed people would serve the community much better. It would create more of a stronger partnership between the local government — in this case, Delta, which has its own police department…. Really, I think it’s time for a change, because the current system is not working.

G. Begg: Just for the sake of clarity, when you say elected officials, you mean already-elected officials or persons who would be elected to a police board?

G. Harvie: No, I’m talking about the city council members. When you look across Canada, it’s dominant with council members that are elected from the…. For example, Hamilton has the mayor, two councillors, one council appointee and three provincial appointees. So it’s the elected officials.

[11:10 a.m.]

I also believe that elected officials include a member of the school trustees. I think it’s extremely important that we bring elected officials from the school system into the police department through the police board. I think that would serve the community much better than it is now.

L. Buchanan: Could I just add to that? Is that possible? Is that okay, Chair?

D. Routley (Chair): Yes, please. Go ahead.

L. Buchanan: Thank you very much.

I just wanted to build on that. Mayor Harvie — because he has a municipal force — has a police board. Where other municipalities have…. Whereas in Richmond and my city, we have contracted RCMP, which doesn’t actually have a board. It has a policing committee, which has a different structure. We actually have no representatives from the public that sit on it. There is some disagreement or misinterpretation or different interpretation of the structure of that committee and who actually has responsibility in terms of creating the terms of reference and having input into it.

I do think there needs to be far greater clarity, not just for policing boards. Actually, that’s not my experience. But certainly, from the policing committee side and the way it’s written within the Police Act, it needs to be far clearer and, again, have representation of local government as well as our community members to be looking at.

We have a strategic plan from our RCMP, but again, there’s a lot of work between what they do from a criminal side. That is the operational side. That is their side. But there’s a lot of work that happens on that non-criminal side and the work that happens with other key public safety people, professionals, that needs to be incorporated into serving the public.

D. Routley (Chair): I have Adam on the list.

A. Olsen: Adam Olsen, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands. It’s wonderful to be with you, Mayors. Thank you for your presentations.

Just a couple of acknowledgments — not really a question, I don’t think. I just want to acknowledge Mayor Harvie — the long opening in which you had to define the role which you are presenting. I recognize and acknowledge the challenge that you are put in under the current board structure and making sure you that you’re very clear on who you are representing and what body you’re representing. I think that we’ve heard other similar challenges raised by your colleagues from other communities. As we’re talking about police boards and it’s been an issue that’s been raised several times with our committee, it’s important to acknowledge that I heard that challenge that you’re presented with.

I also want to acknowledge and to bring to further light the comments that were made by Mayor Buchanan just with respect to funding, services and access to these processes. This is a provincial piece of legislation, so it needs to be done through the provincial legislature. Ultimately, the minister will put together a new act or an amended act, and it will be the Legislature that votes on it.

However, I think that it’s important to draw the line and to connect the advice that we’ve been given from Indigenous leaders that they also would like a more integrated relationship with updating legislation that is going to directly impact them and their operations. Just so that it’s clear: it’s not just a mayor from a municipality that’s asking for a more integrated approach. It’s also a handful of Chiefs that have come in, as well, recognizing that the work that we do is going to have an impact on the community.

As well, I think that it’s important to acknowledge the point that was made around the fiscal relationship between local governments and municipalities.

I just wanted to draw attention to these. These are themes that we’ve heard a lot of and, certainly, something that’s at the centre of my thoughts as we work forward in this process.

D. Routley (Chair): I don’t see any more hands. Any more questions from members?

In that case, I will thank all of the mayors for their presentations. Obviously, a broad and difficult task in front of this committee to make the right recommendations. All the voices that come before us are highly valued, and yours are certainly that. So thank you so much for your contribution to the province and this committee.

The committee will recess.

The committee recessed from 11:15 a.m. to 11:20 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Welcome back to this meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act. Just a reminder to our next panel that each presenter will have five minutes to speak, followed by 15 minutes for questions and discussion with the entire panel. There is a timer available to assist, and the presenters can see that when they’re in the gallery view.

I want to thank you, also, for your patience with us running a little bit late.

I’d like, first, to welcome Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran, representing the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus.

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): Sorry, Doug. I think the mayor is still connecting. So perhaps we can start with the next presenter.

D. Routley (Chair): Thanks, Karan.

Then first up will be Coun. Nadine Nakagawa from the city of New Westminster.

Go ahead, Nadine, if you’re ready.

CITY OF NEW WESTMINSTER

N. Nakagawa: I am ready. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here.

My name is Nadine Nakagawa. I’m a councillor in New Westminster.

I’m on the unceded territory of the Halq’eméylem- and hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking people.

Too often when we do land acknowledgments of this sort, it really is a kind of check box in a list of things, but it feels really important in this conversation to acknowledge the role that policing played in the removal of Indigenous peoples on this territory.

As a municipality, of course, we deeply, deeply care about how contracts are negotiated with police unions, about police board appointments and accountability, and how police budgets are made, often with little to no input from the municipalities and cities themselves or the people who are elected to represent the community.

What I want to talk to you about today is alternative res­ponse to policing. I want to share a personal story with you. Just this past month, somebody that I know passed away from the poisoned drug supply crisis. It’s but one person in the thousands of people who have passed away, but his story really does highlight the nature and a lot of the problems with what’s happened. The problem is with the systems themselves.

About a decade ago, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He disclosed to close friends a history of childhood abuse and trauma. Since that time, he has been arrested — put in Surrey Pretrial with people who have been accused of very violent crimes. He’d be released, apprehended under the Mental Health Act, be prescribed lithium — which he told me did not make him feel good or make him feel like himself — be released, find himself homeless, and the cycle would continue.

Nobody who knew him was surprised to find out that he had passed away, but it didn’t have to be this way. What I remember of him is that he loved shooting pool with friends. He was an avid soccer player, and he had a very gentle smile.

Really, to me, this is a matter of choices. Municipalities often respond with policing because we don’t have other tools in our toolkit. In New Westminster, our police de­partment is responding to an average of four calls per day related specifically to mental health concerns. Our fire department is increasingly responding to incidents involving overdose and medical concerns, while our bylaw officers tell us that they have seen a 93 percent increase in calls to respond to issues directly relating to homelessness and poverty.

We are also feeling the impacts in our parks and rec department, in our community centres and in our libraries. We’re also hearing it from our business community, specifically in New Westminster’s downtown core, as well as the community itself.

We could make other choices. When I am walking through downtown New Westminster, I regularly see pol­ice responding to homelessness because there aren’t other services. We don’t have an abundance of housing. We don’t have an abundance of culturally appropriate health and mental wellness supports.

[11:25 a.m.]

I know it will cost money, but it’s an investment for the individuals who are most impacted by these systems. It’s an investment for the community. It’s better for businesses, who are often seeing these impacts right outside the doors of their businesses — people who are struggling to stay afloat through COVID. It’s better for the police officers themselves, and it is truly better fiscal policy, because we know that investing upstream in compassionate care will result in savings downstream.

We cannot do it alone in cities. The city of New Westminster has proposed being a pilot community to try out a different model of emergency response, one that would be based in care and compassion, not in punitive measures — one that would centre on supporting individuals and providing services that don’t currently exist.

We know that responding with housing, dignified food systems, social assistance and disability rates that are at a living wage, transportation that works for everyone…. These are the solutions that our community wants and needs, and we could choose that. We want to work with you to build this caring, compassionate community that I know we all want and that I know is possible.

I look forward to your questions.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Next we’ll go to Mayor Colin Basran, representing the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus.

B.C. URBAN MAYORS CAUCUS

C. Basran: Good morning, everyone. I’m here on behalf of the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus, which is an advocacy group made up of the 13 largest municipalities and the mayors from those municipalities, from across the prov­ince. We represent almost 50 percent of the population here in British Columbia. So we represent a large number of our residents.

My message is going to be quite similar. It’s centred around social issues. We have created a blueprint that I believe was part of our submission. Social issues, including mental health and addictions, are probably the…. It is the top priority. My submission is centred around how policing impacts that and the changes that we would like to call for as the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus.

Before I carry on, I do want to recognize that I’m speaking you today from the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan people.

For us, it’s about a health care–centred approach to mental health and addictions. Obviously, the current “pol­ice respond first” approach to mental health and addictions calls doesn’t adequately address the reality of complex care needs in our communities for people who continue to fall through the cracks and place an enormous strain on police resources.

This has resulted in an expensive download of health-related costs to police and, therefore, local governments. For example — I know Mayor Stewart will speak more about this — the Vancouver police department responded to nearly 5,000 calls for mental health–related problems in 2019. That’s more than double the number of ten years ago.

In 2021, the Kelowna regional RCMP will respond to an estimated 4,900 mental health–related calls, compared to almost half that in 2016. Between 2017 and mid-2021, Victoria has seen an increase from 17 percent to 25 percent of incidents attended by police where the attending officers assessed deteriorated mental health as being a factor in the matter giving rise to police attendance.

This magnitude of calls across all of our communities strains the primary functions of police. Police are used to fill the gaps where urgent social support and health care are actually required. This takes them away from more appropriate front-line responsibilities and serious crime and from proactive, intelligence-led policing.

Mental health and addictions services need to be better integrated into a continuum of care by the Ministry of Health and available on demand. Also, using front-line police services to address these issues can be stigmatizing and perpetrates the criminalization of vulnerable people while at the same time forcing police to deal with calls which other services are better equipped to address.

Access to mental health and addictions services needs to be consistent throughout the province and resourced by specialized health care teams available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a clear dispatch system so they’re easy to access. Currently, if someone is having a mental health episode in one of our downtown streets in the middle of the night, there is no one to call but police. There are no services at night, so police have to respond.

Current models, such as assertive community treatment, the assertive outreach team and integrated mobile crisis teams are making progress, but they need to have increased investment and capacity from the provincial government. Local governments primarily have property taxes to fund all services. This is not sustainable, and this funding source cannot meet the need that exists. Local governments are not responsible for health care provision through policing.

[11:30 a.m.]

In addition, the province needs to fund civilian-led health teams for when police are not required. Front-line police services respond to emergency calls in order to ensure public safety. Police can continue to play a role on these teams but should be actively involved in an incident only at the request of the specialized health team or if there is a risk to public safety. The wellness checks should always be performed by health care workers who have specialized knowledge and training.

I guess my final thought would be this: opportunities like this rarely come around. You are presented with a really incredible opportunity to do something bold and to really change the systems that are wholly inadequate in terms of how we are dealing with these social situations. First of all, thank you for taking this on. I would encourage you to be bold in your recommendations, because I think we need some pretty significant change in order to address the needs of our most vulnerable residents and our citizens at large.

Thank you for your time. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Our final presenter on this panel is the mayor of the city of Vancouver, Kennedy Stewart.

CITY OF VANCOUVER

K. Stewart: Thanks very much for the opportunity to speak to you today. I’m Kennedy Stewart, the mayor of Vancouver.

I’m speaking to you from the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

I want to begin by saying how important I believe this committee’s work is to fostering public trust in police and in those tasked with overseeing police services. As mayor of one of Canada’s largest and most diverse cities, I have developed a deep and abiding appreciation for the work, dedication and professionalism of the Vancouver police department and Chief Adam Palmer. I want to take this opportunity at the outset of my remarks to offer the city’s heartfelt gratitude for all that they do. We value their services very much.

I’m going to use my time today to focus on two issues. First, I want to speak about our collective responsibility to tackle systemic racism and bias in policing. Second, I want to offer my thoughts on the urgent need to reform the way Vancouver’s police department is governed to improve democratic accountability.

Let me start with systemic racism. Systemic racism is an undeniable fact in a society built on colonialism. By “systemic racism,” I mean the policies and practices en­trenched in all our institutions which disadvantage Indigenous, Black and people of colour or which advantage white people.

Now, let me be clear. Naming systemic racism for what it is and how it distorts our society is not saying that any one person is racist. What it does say is that we are obliged to confront and tackle the racism that threads throughout our institutions and cultures, including in policing.

As mayor, I am very heartened that after a robust and sometimes very difficult public discussion, the Vancouver police board has formally acknowledged systemic racism and moved forward with addressing this important issue. The board’s July 25 motion officially acknowledges that the Vancouver police department, like all institutions, “is built on a foundation of structural racism and colonization” and that the board and department have a responsibility to make anti-racism and decolonization a top priority.

This important board motion, and ideas contained in the submissions from the city I submitted earlier this year, lays the foundation for the work ahead. I invite you to read those. In my mind, we have started to turn the corner on this issue but still have a lot of work to do.

Next I want to talk about how we need to change how the Vancouver police department is governed. In the 2012 report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, the Hon. Wally Oppal recommended the province establish a greater Vancouver police service. This makes sense, as the changing nature of criminal activity, including organized crime, gang violence, human trafficking and cybercrime requires a more integrated approach to policing our region so that we can better combat complex criminal activities.

Of course, I understand that establishing one regional police force is a large job. If this government is not prepared to undertake this type of structural change, there is much we can do to improve our current model.

As you know, the Police Act delegates responsibility for policing in Vancouver to a police board. Composed of un­salaried volunteers, the police board is the direct employer of all Vancouver police department personnel. Although board members are talented and dedicated, the amount of work they are forced to deal with has grown to such a size and complexity that I feel it has outstripped what volunteers can reasonably be expected to undertake.

[11:35 a.m.]

At the same time, the mayor of Vancouver, who serves as the police board chair, has no statutory authority over police operations. Even though the city of Vancouver foots the bill for policing services — which consumes 21 percent of our annual budget — as chair, I cannot even table or amend board motions and only vote in the event of a tie.

I’d like you to ask yourself: is it reasonable that one of the largest independent police services in the country is overseen by an under-resourced volunteer board, chaired by a mayor who has negligible statutory authority? It is not reasonable. It’s a relic from another area, and it needs to change.

I’m here today to ask committee members to recommend changes to the Police Act that will improve democratic accountability. This would either require (1) shifting the Vancouver police department to be a regular city de­partment, such as Vancouver fire and rescue services, or (2) creating a new salaried police board that is directly appointed by Vancouver city council.

Bringing the VPD more directly under the purview of the city of Vancouver will allow council or salaried board members to access the considerable managerial, legal, human resources and financial resources built into our city administration to oversee a department with a $350 million annual operating budget and with a mandate to use lethal force in the execution of its duties.

I trust you will carefully consider these ideas. Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to your questions.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you to all of you for your presentations. We greatly appreciate it.

I’ll open the floor to questions from members at this point.

G. Begg: Thanks to all the presenters.

My question is to Mayor Basran. I’m intrigued by the possibility of change to the way police deliver or don’t deliver services to persons suffering mental issues.

First of all, it was an excellent presentation, by the way. I’m intrigued by your approach to it. I wonder if you have some examples of other jurisdictions, particularly other jurisdictions in Canada, that have adopted a model similar to any of your ideas.

C. Basran: We actually have some really great things in our province already. They’re under-resourced, and there’s not enough of them. For example, I mentioned things like assertive community treatment, the assertive outreach teams, integrated mobile crisis teams — for example, in Kelowna and other municipalities — where you pair a mental health nurse with an officer.

We have good programs in place, but they’re underfunded. Then what ends up happening is…. For example, in Kelowna, we have a mental health nurse with an RCMP officer. When they pick somebody up, oftentimes it’s the officer who has to spend time in the emergency room at the hospital or waiting for them to see a psychiatrist. It can be hours at a time that an officer is just sitting in the hospital.

I think it’s more a question of…. We have some of the tools here already in British Columbia, but they’re just not funded to a level that is needed to address some of these issues.

G. Begg: Just a quick follow-up. Your preference, then, is that the increase in funding be to mental health agencies, mental health professionals, instead of the police or in concert with the police?

C. Basran: I would say in concert. As our municipalities continue to grow, I believe we’re still going to need more officers to keep pace with growth. But we also need to see a significant investment in mental health and addiction resources. That would be the request.

Again, only speaking for the Kelowna example, our health authority has been very hesitant to add additional resources because that money has to come from somewhere else. We need new dollars. It can’t just be a shuffling around. It has to be new investment.

I understand why our health authority would be hesitant, because they’re going to have to pull from somewhere else that will then be shorthanded. It’s going to have to be new investment in mental health and addiction resources.

[11:40 a.m.]

This is something we talk about often with our Urban Mayors Caucus. I don’t know if Mayor Stewart wants to jump in here. I don’t mean to chair. I apologize. But I’m sure he probably has additional thoughts, too, from a larger municipality perspective.

I’m going to let the Chair invite Mayor Stewart in, if he so chooses.

D. Routley (Chair): I’ll follow your lead, then, Mayor Basran. I will invite Mayor Stewart.

K. Stewart: Thank you very much. Again, a great pleasure to address the committee. Great to see Colin here. It’s a great presentation.

I would concur. It seems like the shortage of funding is often not from the policing side. It is from the health authority side. And we know through our discussions that some health authorities are more willing than others to put resources into this.

Once you’ve brought somebody into care, the question is: where do you put these folks? Sometimes it’s right to the hospital. Sometimes folks are sectioned. But we are trying complex care models here in some of our modular housing, where we have counsellors, psychologists embedded in these units now for seven days a week, which helps people, say, if they’re having mental health breaks. Then it reduces the need for police or other professionals to attend.

It’s an evolving model, and I’m very grateful to Minister Eby and other ministers who are helping us through this. The good thing is that through our mayors caucus, we’re sharing information as to what’s working. We’re happy to share more broadly.

D. Routley (Chair): I think Councillor Nakagawa shared a link in the chat.

Would you like to make a comment?

N. Nakagawa: I would. Thank you. There are many different models throughout the United States, and some in Canada as well. What we see is that there are three different ways to look at these models.

I think the Canadian Mental Health Association has presented to you…. They have a really good way of thinking about this. One is police-led, one is co-led, and one is community-led. And what we are most interested in, in the city of New Westminster, is a community-led model. Yes, when there is a safety concern, police should attend, but when someone is having a mental health crisis, there is absolutely no reason for police to attend to that. That is not a policing issue. That is a health care and community care issue.

What we would like to see in New Westminster is a mix of different services that we could have that prioritize the community care and health care. It could be a mix. It could be elders; it could be outreach workers. There are lots of different ways that we could do that.

In the link that I shared…. Toronto is also trialling some non-police-led responses. Of course, when it’s a safety issue, police would respond, in concert with or lead. But we’ve become far too reliant on police responding when they’re absolutely not needed and they are not the best service, and they put people at risk.

A. Olsen: I just thank you, all three, for your very thoughtful presentations and for articulating any challenges that the province has been facing for a long time.

I have got a single question, but I think it’s important to acknowledge the very clear and coherent statement around the systemic nature of racism in our society. I’ve tried to ask that…. Well, I asked the question earlier. I got a far less coherent response than, I think, Mayor Stewart was able to articulate. I really thank you for that, and I hope that, actually, our policing institutions are able to articulate this as clearly as it needs to be articulated going forward.

I want to ask the question about the cost of services, be­cause there’s a similarity through all three of the presentations. The downloading of costs or the responsibility being picked up by a different level of government or a different service…. It’s really hard to quantify the impact that that’s having, because if we don’t pay it at the provincial government, we don’t provide the right level of service in our health care or our social services, it gets picked up by a different service somewhere else.

I’m wondering if the Urban Mayors Caucus or municipalities individually have done any work to try to quantify the costs. I really think that it’s important for the provincial government to see. We could look at almost every ministry and see the impact that it’s having, through decisions that are made at the provincial level, on local governments.

Is there any work to quantify, as impossible as that might be…? I think seeing the number will really shock a lot of people.

C. Basran: Adam, I apologize for not having that on hand, but we do have that. It’s part of the work the city of Kelowna has done on what we’re calling complex care, which Kennedy has already referred to.

[11:45 a.m.]

There is a clear cost savings, in terms of the status quo — as opposed to housing people and wrapping them around with the appropriate supports, which is far less expensive than the status quo of incarceration, court time, RCMP or policing costs.

Yeah, you will be astounded by that. We have that, and I can get that to you as a part of our submission. Apologies for not having that on hand, but yes, you’re right, it is quite astounding how much money would be saved if we utilized the community care model or whatever you want to call it — basically, getting people housed and getting them supported.

A. Olsen: If I may, just one follow-up on that.

I don’t know the number of presenters that have talked about the number of times that a police officer will attend with somebody at the hospital, and they have to wait until the handoff. So it could take hours and hours. We’ve had a number of presenters give us that scenario. I just can’t think of the number of hours that are spent sitting in a hospital waiting for the handoff and how much of our police resources are being expended sitting in a space that they shouldn’t be, doing work that they shouldn’t be doing, instead of work that they should be.

I’ll just leave it at that.

K. Stewart: If I could add that just a rough calculation is that 80 percent of our VPD calls are not related to criminal activity. For example, we have 5,000 missing person case reports every year, the vast, vast majority of which are not related to criminal activity. They’d be related to, say, elders wandering off if they have Alzheimer’s or dementia, missing teenagers.

The vast majority of police work is not directly related to criminal code enforcement. That gives you some sense. So we have a $350 million budget. You can do the math on that one about what the costs are. But there is significant room, in my mind, and I think the police would agree, for re-tasking some of this work to more appropriate services.

R. Singh: Thank you to all the presenters. I really appreciate what you have said today.

Sister Nadine, so good to see you and all the comments that you have made.

Mayor Basran, what we have heard in the last few months from different stakeholders is how more community services are needed. You made a really strong point about how there are services, but those services need to be strengthened. So thank you so much for that. This is really important information for us.

I just have one question for both of you. We hear a lot about defunding the police, but what you have said is putting the resources and the services to assist the police services. So how does that messaging need to be conveyed to the public? The common person just gets really scared when they hear the word defunding. They don’t understand the concept. So one thing on that.

For Mayor Stewart, always so good to hear from you. I really want to applaud you for taking on such a difficult issue as systemic racism. Nobody has the courage…. A lot of people — I won’t say nobody, but a lot of people — don’t have the courage to say things the way you have articulated or to even talk about systemic racism. We have heard it in different presentations before. People just get scared when it comes to talking about systemic racism. So when you talk about those challenges, I’m really glad that changes are happening in the Vancouver police board also.

I asked the same question in the morning as well. We know about the systemic inequities and that it’s really the colonial structures. What do you suggest needs to be done? I know we don’t have a magic bullet for it. It will take time. It is very challenging. But what would be your recommendation?

K. Stewart: Thanks very much.

Talking to community members has been very helpful, but what really kind of pushed me is going through anti-racism training myself. This is something that’s been in my office at the mayor’s office. We’ve had a very good consultant come in and take us through, basically, the practices in our own office and having quite, I think, difficult discussions about systemic racism.

[11:50 a.m.]

What that revealed to me is my own privilege. I don’t think I ever internalized how…. Who is more privileged than me? Straight white guy in mid-50s, highly educated, right? I didn’t recognize the barriers as much as I should have, so that was the starting point for me. I then realized that I have to do everything I can to bring equity to every organization that I’m in. That’s been very helpful.

How we do it is I think we get that kind of training for police board members and executive members of the police services. So that is what the Vancouver police board has agreed to: to bring in consultants to take us through that training.

I have to say though, again, that these are volunteer boards. Not only are you overseeing a $350 million budget in Vancouver. You’re dealing with all the stuff that hits every week in the streets, but now you’re expected to do all this additional training. I, frankly, think it’s an unfair ask of volunteers to do this. We have a $90,000 budget at the police board to oversee a $350 million police service. There is a mismatch on the structure. The board members are awesome. They’re very good people and very highly competent but just being asked to do too much.

On the defunding question, I actually don’t find that term very helpful at all, so I don’t use it. But the retasking, I think, is very important, because there is overlap with agreement with police as to what they want to do and think they do very well, which they do very well, but what other stuff has to be done by other services.

I think there is an overlap there that can lead to productive discussions. That’s where I want to start. I don’t want to hog all the time. Thank you very much for your questions.

D. Routley (Chair): Go ahead, Rick.

R. Glumac: My question was mostly answered.

I just want to acknowledge, Councillor Nakagawa, how you frame this in terms of community-led or police-led. It does seem at this point that a lot of it is police-led. Mayor Stewart, I think, characterizing it as “retasking” — to have some of that be more community-led or led by mental health professionals and things like that — I think is a good way to talk about it.

My question was just around that same topic. I know Mayor Basran mentioned that he wouldn’t like to see a reduction in the police budget, but I think retasking is…. Once you start talking about defunding or reducing police budgets, it’s not really a constructive way to have that conversation. I think we have to talk about what are the police currently taking on that could be better facilitated by working with others and being led by others perhaps.

I guess I don’t really have a question, but if there’s anyone that wanted to weigh in further on that, I certainly would be willing to hear that.

N. Nakagawa: I would love to respond.

Many of you will know that we had a massive fire in New Westminster back in Septemberish — anytime before now seems like a big blur — where a big portion of our waterfront went up in flames, and it was very devastating to the community in a very hard time. A big public park in our very dense downtown was closed.

What it looks like happened is somebody was burning copper off wires and accidently started that fire. We may never know because we can’t even arrest them because that person died of overdose in the poisoned drug crisis.

What does that lead me to think about? Would it be helpful, though, to have charged that person with arson? Would that have helped rebuild the waterfront? Not at all. What strikes me is that person needed housing, and they need to not live in dire poverty — that they were doing that on an evening in September — that led to that result. A lot of the crimes that we see are crimes of poverty, of dire poverty and desperation and of addiction and people who are homeless.

If we could solve those problems upstream by providing necessary safe supply, by providing adequate housing and food and cultural and community support, I personally don’t think we would need as many carceral systems — policing, prisons, that sort of thing. I think that we would see less demand for that as a result, because what you are hearing from us is that so much of our police response is based around mental health and poverty.

[11:55 a.m.]

If we actually just focused upstream more, that question might resolve itself on its own, right? That might seem very idealistic and naive, but I think there is lots of evidence to support that from jurisdictions around the world, in which they actually take care of their community and they don’t need police in the same way that we need police.

I think the question around defund, to me right now, is…. We’re really focusing on the reallocate conversation. I don’t think that just pulling policing out from our communities will be the answer without other resources to support. But if we do that, I think then we can start moving toward that conversation and bringing more people into that, because it is a more caring way to resolve the issues that we’re feeling in our communities.

C. Basran: Those are great comments. If I could just add to that.

The last few years the provincial government has done a very good job of, through supportive housing, getting people off of our streets. But unfortunately, the reality is that those with the most complex needs do not fit within that supportive housing model. So that’s why the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus’s top priority has been what we’re calling complex care housing and supports.

We’re really encouraged by the fact that Minister Eby has brought together a cross-ministerial committee that includes Health, Mental Health and Addictions, and Housing for the first time ever, working together to work with the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus on a model of care for those on our streets who are a harm to themselves and the public and have no place to live.

We’re really encouraged by the fact that they’re working on a model of care that will hopefully be designed by the end of the summer. They’ve set some really ambitious targets, and the work is progressing quite quickly. We’re really thrilled with that. There are going to be a number of pilot projects rolled out throughout the province.

The people who will be housed in these pilot projects…. We know that there are hundreds and hundreds more who will need similar types of housing and supports. We are making progress, but it’s going to take a lot of time. At least we’re heading in the right direction, finally.

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

T. Halford: Just to Mayor Stewart, just in terms of the volunteer for the police board…. My understanding is, though, that even for four hours of a police board meeting, there’s compensation of over $500. Is that correct? I just wanted to make sure we’re clear on compensation for board members.

K. Stewart: Sure. There’s a per diem, but the level of work…. For a vice-chair, you might be looking at 20, 25 hours a week. If you’re doing media work, there’s just not the support there. Again, it goes well beyond the monthly meeting. There are subcommittees.

What’s been happening, too, is we’re having things like more FOI requests. We have to screen hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, and we have an FOI committee to do that.

T. Halford: Yeah. Sure. But just to be clear, if you were there for four to eight hours, there is an over-$500 per diem that members receive. I just want to be clear on that point.

K. Stewart: Yeah. I was clear. I was talking about salaried. These folks are not salaried.

H. Sandhu: My questions are answered, but I want to thank the mayors and councillor for their amazing discus­sion and presentations. The concern that I was going to highlight, Mayor Basran touched on: hard-to-house peo­ple, which I’m sure every community, rural to urban, has.

We deal with that issue where hospitals are not the place, and then they are not suitable for the existing housing. Oftentimes we hear from people: “When there are so many initiatives that are being made for housing, how come we are still having these problems?” Mayor Basran touched upon that. They’re crucial, crucial steps that we need to take, and we have started to take those steps.

I think that with that — housing needs for those complex needs — we also need to include broader services with the model of care if we really want to have those successful, consistent rehabilitation goals. It is promising to see that those actions are happening. As a committee, I think that, when we’re making recommendations, that’s something to keep in mind. It’s not just housing. It’s not just one blanket statement, or one size doesn’t fit all. To keep that in mind.

[12:00 p.m.]

Every community — I wouldn’t be wrong — does have hard-to-house people and populations. Also, the impacts can be seen on health care as well.

Thank you, Mayor Basran, for the work — both the mayors and councillors — you are doing and your presentations. This discussion has really been very helpful, and I’m sure we will take all these recommendations into account.

D. Routley (Chair): I believe a couple of members have had to leave, and others have meetings starting immediately. So I’ll quickly thank our guests.

You’ve made a great contribution. Our work is broad and complex. We really benefit from your insight. Thank you very, very much.

Members, this brings this meeting to a close. I will ask one of you for a motion to adjourn.

That’s from Dan, seconded by Trevor.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 12:01 p.m.