44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 22, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague and neighbour from Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for sketching out, as I would have as well, that the RCMP has had instances, which are in the minority of RCMP behaviour, that were alarming. I note that, in the Fairy Creek example my hon. colleague raised, even after the Supreme Court informed the RCMP that the way it was interpreting the injunction to create setbacks to prohibit the media from being near the deliberate abuse by and brutality of the RCMP officers in the way they were arresting people, particularly indigenous people, was illegal, it continued to do so.
I want to raise the example of the CBSA. We are long overdue for this oversight agency. The CBSA has a very high degree of reported instances of racism, homophobia and abuse towards people. Border agents have immense power. Each individual agent has the power to say someone is not coming into our country, and there is no appeal. We really need to look at how fair and democratic these institutions are.
Is my hon. colleague not disturbed by the extent to which individual powers are granted to CBSA officers, and for which no one can complain?
205 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, first, I thank the parliamentary secretary for his kind words of congratulations. Second, I support this. I have been waiting and waiting to see action taken, as it has been promised for many years. I remember that the initial questions I raised about the Canada Border Services Agency were directed to the minister at the time, Ralph Goodale, who is now our high commissioner to the Commonwealth. Some time has passed and this is urgent.
There are areas I am concerned about. There will be hearings before this commission. It is possible that things could progress to a hearing on the conduct of an RCMP officer or officers, or a CBSA officer or officers.
I would like the parliamentary secretary to give me his opinion, and I do not think he can be conclusive. I am disturbed by the investigation into the Portapique massacres. I am disturbed that something called “trauma-informed inquiry” was used, which meant the people who actually made the decisions and failed to protect the public in Nova Scotia did not need to take the stand. Is there a way to protect against that in this bill?
195 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Madam Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre, who knows of what she speaks when talking about the abuse of indigenous women and indigenous people in a disproportionate fashion.
I will briefly say this. My own experience with the RCMP officers, when they led me away while arresting me for violating the injunction to protect the Texas pipeline company Kinder Morgan, was that they were kind. They asked if I would take their arm, as they did not want me to slip in the mud. When I saw the arrest of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs, who were thrown to the ground with a knee in the back, I realized that not only were their actions different, but these were different police people, different RCMP officers. Sure enough, it turns out there is a branch of the RCMP that is typically using more brutal force against indigenous protesters than it would use with a settler culture MP standing on indigenous lands. When the hereditary chiefs were on their own land, UNDRIP was being violated by the way they were treated. I would ask for the hon. member's comments on that.
196 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, for a long time it has been manifestly obvious that there is systemic racism in our police forces: the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency. We know that up until now, there has been no oversight body to deal with Canadian border services. I think that with the debate so far, in the very little amount of time we have had Bill C-20 before us, it is also manifestly clear that this act should be amended to ensure an indigenous role in the oversight process. The commission will deal with both agencies.
I would like my hon. colleague's comments on this. What are the best ways, in her opinion, to engage indigenous participation in the commission when investigating complaints?
124 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I want to raise something that is a bit tangential. The member mentioned the head of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki. It is very much on my mind that the Parliamentary Protective Service officers here had to work three years to get a decent contract. They do not get back pay. They have to report through the RCMP now. That is a change that I opposed.
I want to ask all hon. members in this place to do whatever we can. Winter is coming. The people who risk their lives to protect us do not even have a piece of plywood over their heads before the storms come. They are vulnerable to extreme weather events and have to stand outside this place. Unlike Centre Block, this building is not adequate to provide any shelter from winter storms. Does my hon. colleague have any comment?
145 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Fleetwood—Port Kells, both for his congratulations that I am leader of the Green Party of Canada and for splitting his time with me. My chance will come up very soon.
I wonder whether, as a British Columbian member of Parliament, the member has been disturbed by the videos, which I wonder if he has seen, of the arrests and the treatment of indigenous people within British Columbia, particularly those on Wet’suwet’en territories, where land defenders were quite brutalized, and in Fairy Creek as well, where land defenders were also brutalized.
104 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I rise in this place acknowledging that we stand on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe Nation, and essentially this building sits on Algonquin land. To them, I say meegwetch.
I am very pleased that we have seen another incarnation of Bill C-20. The fundamental essence of this legislation, for those who may just be joining the debate, is to ensure that two really significant federal law enforcement agencies have mechanisms for civilian complaint.
Those two agencies are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canada Border Services Agency.
The Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP interact with Canadians and foreigners on a regular basis. The RCMP has had a public complaints commission for many years. It has been inadequate. Initially, it did not have powers to subpoena, to find out from RCMP officers what really happened in any event. The ability to summon witnesses is terribly important.
The powers of the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP were weaker, but it is unbelievable that we do not have a single entity to handle complaints against the CBSA.
I do not know about my colleagues in this place, but certainly through COVID I had a lot of reasons to be concerned about the structure of the Canada Border Services Agency and the degree of powers granted to individual officers. It will be beyond the scope of this act to deal with some of these issues, so I place them before us now as we go through second reading debate.
This is concerning for all of us. I should not speak for all of my colleagues, but I have a hunch here, because I talked to many of them, regardless of party, during the period of time that we were trying to help Canadians come home to Canada. For instance, those married to permanent residents, not Canadian citizens, had to make their pitch at the border to a Canada Border Services agent, whose decision was final and discretionary to a particular officer. This created no end of misery for Canadian families. I do know that cabinet at the time passed an order in council to try to alleviate the problem, but it is still the case that an individual officer can make a decision on the spot about anyone.
My stepdaughter was once going into the United States to take up a new job that she had in California. She had all her paperwork, but the Canada Border Services agent did not like her. He said he did not believe her and did not think she had a job, and he sent her back. There is no appeal. There is no place to go with that. We need to take a broader look at the Canada Border Services Agency.
Some constituents, who were not my constituents, asked me for help. They happened to be a couple I know from Cape Breton Island, where my family lives and where I am from. The couple was at the New Brunswick border with Maine. When they drove up to the Canadian kiosk to say they were going home, the border agent told the wife she could go home because she is Canadian, but her husband could not go home because he is still a permanent resident. They had to leave one spouse at the border with all the luggage, while the other was allowed into Canada because they were not allowed to go back into the U.S. together. These kinds of things are nonsensical. We need to look at the Canada Border Services Agency and make some policy choices and raise some other issues.
We certainly know that we want, as a matter of policy, which I have heard from many people in the House today, the CBSA to be focused on stopping the smuggling of guns. We want the CBSA focused on stopping the smuggling of contraband drugs too. We do not particularly want the CBSA at the border to terrorize racialized people from other countries. We do not want it thinking that its number one job is to find people whose citizenship is not quite right and whose paperwork as a permanent resident is not quite right, and get them deported as quickly as possible.
We have a lot of complaints about the CBSA and there are concerns about racial profiling in the RCMP. There are complaints that need to be heard. However, I really want to emphasize the extent to which the CBSA, in the past, has brutalized Canadians. I will give one example, because it comes from my own experience. I was just discussing it with the member of Parliament in whose riding it happened before he was the MP for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford.
An indigenous man, born in the state of California, came across the border in the 1980s or 1970s with an indigenous woman from Penelakut Island, from the Penelakut nation of Vancouver Island. They married, they had kids and they had grandkids. There is a thing called the Jay Treaty, but obviously the CBSA had never heard of it. It gives additional rights to indigenous people crossing borders.
In any case, for some reason, CBSA agents decided in 2013 to show up at the door of Richard Germaine from Penelakut Island. They had not sent a note saying that they noticed he did not have all of his paperwork done to be a Canadian permanent resident. They just showed up four days before Christmas and arrested him. I am not exaggerating a bit. They put him in leg irons in the back of a van and drove him off Vancouver Island, taking a long ferry ride, to Vancouver, where they placed him in a cell.
I have seen the cells now, thanks to Senator Kim Pate, who likes to take other parliamentarians on tours of prisons. They are in the basement of the Vancouver airport. The people put there are rarely there for more than 24 hours before they are summarily deported. Since the time that I toured that facility, they have moved to a different facility for the deportation of foreigners.
This was a railroading; this was fast. This was taking someone from his home, a grandfather, right before Christmas in front of his wife, who was a residential school survivor, and sending him for deportation without due process, because, well, that was what the political mood wanted to do.
We desperately need this legislation. I will be supporting it to get it through second reading and get it to committee. The CBSA, for a long time, has had a high number of complaints, and these have been noted by the Auditor General. They are complaints of racism, homophobia, transphobia and rudeness. It is an agency that desperately needs oversight. I want to make sure that I say, as other speakers have said, that there are wonderful agents in the RCMP and wonderful agents in the CBSA, but this is crying out for reform.
I will be presenting amendments to Bill C-20 because I want to make sure that it is as rigorous as possible and as fair as possible to the people who experience these issues at the border with CBSA. We also need to do much more to examine systemic racism within the RCMP. We need to do much more to pay attention to that. What if people do not feel like they can make a complaint?
We need proactive anti-racism programs in the RCMP. We also need to take a very close look at so-called wellness checks, as in the case of Rodney Levi, a member of the Metepenagiag Mi'kmaq Nation who in June 2020 was killed by an RCMP officer.
Local complaint commissions, efforts at inquiries and coroners' reports are not really where we want to start the efforts to ensure this does not happen again. The place to start efforts to ensure this does not happen again is specific anti-racism training and specific training to root out misogyny within the RCMP and CBSA, and ensuring that we protect the agencies that are created to protect us. We must take steps to ensure that our RCMP and CBSA agents are protected themselves.
We need to make sure that the process set up under Bill C-20 is robust and fair and does its best to ensure that our law enforcement agencies meet our values as Canadians.
1409 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate the hon. member for Victoria remembering the Elsipogtog standoff in New Brunswick. It was a non-violent protest and was demonstrated in many ways to be a non-violent protest.
It was also widely supported. The indigenous land defenders of Elsipogtog, part of the larger Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy nations, were widely supported by settler culture New Brunswick residents nearby. There were people on the side of the road supporting the Elsipogtog First Nation. It was letting emergency vehicles through. It was there to protect its land against the hydraulic drilling for what is called fracking.
The RCMP, the night before, had brought the non-violent protesters tobacco, which was a suggestion we were now in a stage of de-escalation and working together, only to have a pre-dawn raid the next morning that involved attack dogs and a fully armed SWAT team moving in. Those kinds of incidents leave a community traumatized. They should leave settler culture Canadians ashamed. The incident was never explored, and there were no answers given to anyone as to why the RCMP chose an aggressive, violent approach to shut down that particular effort to ban fracking.
Fortunately, the government elected right after that event banned fracking in New Brunswick. The current government is wobbly on the point.
220 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, it was a real blow, because she had a job set up and some arbitrary guy decided no, he is not letting her fulfill her life's dream. It was his decision and there was no appeal. Obviously having an appeal would help, but so too would examining the day-to-day operations of CBSA and providing more guidance.
For instance, an officer should not have full discretion to decide whether they like the cut of someone's jib when people are coming into Canada. They should have some criteria. If the criteria has not been met, they have a reason to say no. However, there is no criteria, and it is often as subjective as the member for Kingston and the Islands suggested. It is arbitrary and discretionary, and it is specific to each officer.
My constituents have had completely different experiences at different airports with different CBSA officers, and on the same fact set there have been completely different decisions. I urge the ministers responsible, as we get Bill C-20 through, to say that CBSA officers should not have unfettered discretion to make decisions that affect people's lives as fundamentally as they do. I know this will be outside the scope of the act.
210 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
Mr. Speaker, the government of the day, which happens to be the current government, brought forward the legislation without a real commitment to see it through. When legislation dies on the Order Paper, sometimes it is inevitable, but in this case we have been debating it and calling for change.
As I said earlier in a question to another colleague, I remember raising this in Parliament when the minister responsible was Ralph Goodale, the public safety minister. It was not that long ago, but this has been coming up for at least seven years. There is deep concern that we need an oversight body for an agency with the powers the CBSA has.
The hon. member is a member of the official opposition, and I hope this time all parties can ban together and say we cannot let this situation go on. This time, let us get the bill over the finish line and make sure it is good law.
160 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
