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House Hansard - 132

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 22, 2022 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 132 - Nov/22/22
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
  • Nov/22/22 1:20:40 p.m.
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  • Re: Bill C-20 
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.
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