Yes, yes.

“‘He could have had a knife. He could have had a suicide belt.’

“However,” Professor Leuprecht “says if the constable had waited for backup, the situation might have escalated and had a different outcome.”

This is an opportunity for an individual who no longer poses a chance of harm to himself or to others, and that’s when the officer jumped in.

“Federico said what the public saw in the video was something officers are trained to do, which is switch from a deadly weapon to a less dangerous option—the baton—as the officer determines there is a lower threat.”

Additional training is a factor, and Constable Lam made the city of Toronto proud, despite it being a very challenging day.

It was so difficult to process all that happened, but the tragedy of the van attack on Yonge Street could have been significantly worse if it was not for the quick thinking of this young officer who is highly skilled and highly trained. Only in his thirties, this officer, but this officer positioned himself well by utilizing and deploying his training so he knew that he could de-escalate without using his firearm.

Aren’t these the type of officers we want in our community, officers who are encouraged to become community members that we move through high-quality policing training right here in Ontario? If you want to set a standard to have a modern, effective police service, this is how you do it.

That’s why I know that in my conversations with previous police chiefs, whether it’s Bill Blair or, previously, Mark Saunders, they were really proud, and they would boast about how proud they were about the next generation of officers. I heard that repeatedly during my 12 years at city council, about the next generation of officers, who were going to be better educated and better trained than the previous generation.

I wish to be seeing these programs and resources, so we can get more officers like Constable Lam. But in this bill, Bill 102, the government’s bill, entitled Strengthening Safety and Modernizing Justice Act, this bill doesn’t seem to value those skills, that level of training and education that officers have received.

I want to share with you an email that I received from a constituent named Stacey. I did not know Stacey, to be quite honest, but Stacey took some time to write an email to me. Stacey said this about Bill 102:

“My name is Stacey, and I live in Toronto. I am writing today because I am concerned about the proposed amendment to the CSPA, to eliminate the post-secondary education requirement to become a police officer in Ontario.

“I live and work directly in the community, as a clerk at a restaurant. It means I have a different perspective than the ones” you’ve probably heard, whether it’s “from elite right- or left-leaning voters. The majority of my co-workers simply do not vote, nor do they read about, or pay attention to the passing of new legislation.

“They do not believe it concerns them. They” believe that they are “powerless to change the system that has made rents high, wages low, and groceries more expensive than anyone can ever afford.

“However ... everyone I know is at least somewhat aware about the Conservatives’ plan to amend the CSPA to allow a secondary school diploma to be sufficient for admission to police college. Few, if any, of my peers feel good about this change.

“My personal feelings on the matter aside, one thing seems clear: The only reason to vote in favour of amending the CSPA on such short notice, with little to no research into the public opinion on this issue, is that those voting yes are extremely confident in the belief that they will never find themselves on the wrong end of an undertrained police officer’s gun.

“This might even be true for most of the sitting MPPs who will hear this. But it won’t be true for all of them, and” it’s certainly not true “for their constituents.

“How sure are you that your child will never be in the wrong place at the wrong time? That you yourself will never be walking down a dimly lit street at night, with a whisper of a resemblance to a violent suspect in the eyes of a young trainee? How sure are you that a child with a disability will not be mistaken for a public threat due to an outburst?

“Are you 100% sure?” Or “75%? Would you bet your life on it? Maybe.

“But what you are doing by passing this legislation is betting the lives of people you set out to represent. You are gambling on the belief that those who pass through the Ontario Police College will be able to distinguish when and when not to use their firearm after only 12 weeks of training.

“In Canada, at least, many of us believe that for the most part, police officers are brave, hard-working, intelligent individuals, whose concern is about keeping the peace. But I worry that” by “loosening the requirements to apply to the police college,” you are unravelling that belief, “not just in the police as a governing force, but in the provincial Conservative Party itself, and especially in the Premier’s leadership.

“I urge those voting to, at the very least, delay the passing of this legislation until more research has been done into how communities ... feel about it. I guarantee the answers will surprise you. To do anything less (to pass this bill with so little public consultation) is to gamble, yet again, on the hope that the people who have reservations will still be too disempowered to change the system.”

Wow. I am so impressed with this constituent, whom I haven’t even met, to take the time to write me such a thoughtful email, and I’m so honoured that I was able to share Stacey’s letter and her words into this House today. I want to thank her for taking that time to write to me.

I hear Stacey’s concern for her community through her words. I, too, worry that this bill has been rushed through, without adequate public consultation to determine and to ensure that the fears—and the efforts to amend the bill is to put people’s minds and to put their hearts at ease. Because what we know is that we want more trust in the police. We want the police to be able to work collaboratively with the community to keep them safe. It can’t be a polarizing effect.

I want to offer something into this House. In an editorial from the Toronto Star, they shared that in the summer of 2020, Finnish newspapers reported that in Finland they were seeing a disturbing trend. According to a survey conducted by Finland’s Police University College, trust in the police was slipping. Only 91% of Finns trusted their police. This is a significant amount that fell from 95% in 2018.

“In contrast, Statistics Canada reports that in 2019, only 41 per cent of Canadians had ‘a great deal’ of confidence in the” police, “though another 49 per cent of Canadians had ‘some’ confidence” in the police. That number significantly falls when it’s a visible minority group or people living with physical or mental disabilities. Victims of crime all expressed a lower confidence in the police.

What is the big difference here? Well, Canada doesn’t fare as well as Finland, probably because in Finland the police officers complete a three-year research-intensive university degree in policing before going on patrol, “while most Canadian cops spend only a few months at police college.” This is why Ontario’s recently suggested bill is “a short-sighted effort to forestall dropping recruitment numbers,” when they are no longer required to pursue a post-secondary education as a prerequisite to policing.

What’s also missing is that, based on Nova Scotia’s Mass Casualty Commission—which actually endorsed the Finnish model, largely because it is the proven model to be the most effective—this bill does everything contrary to what just came out of the largest national investigation on policing.

I want to offer you, Speaker, comments by Deepa Mattoo, who is the executive director of the Barbra Schlifer Clinic. She shared with me this feedback: Reducing the educational requirement could result in a greater diversity of individuals entering a police force. It could. While that may be true and we would all be thrilled with that outcome—if that is the government’s goal, and it would be a commendable one, I do hope that this government would be proactive in encouraging diversity in newly hired officers in more overt and specific ways, in addition to this mechanism. Building trust within marginalized communities and with individuals who are marginalized youth as well is something that could be achieved through the neighbourhood officer program’s expansion—once again, the NCO program being referenced by a legal clinic that specifically supports women fleeing violent situations.

By investing in Toronto Community Crisis Service—that’s how you would do it. That’s how you build relationships with a community. That’s how you build better, effective, community-based policing.

I’d like to share the feedback with you, based on the comments of the director of Policing-Free Schools, Andrea Vásquez Jiménez, who submitted a deputation to the committee:

“I am writing to you under my capacity as director and principal consultant of Policing-Free Schools and the focus of this letter is on Bill 102, An Act to amend various Acts relating to the justice system, fire protection and prevention and animal welfare, particularly schedule 1, Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019, schedule 4.

“Currently, the clause requiring post-secondary schooling to become a police officer in Ontario has yet to come into force—yet your government”—the PC government—“is seeking to cancel this pending change and solidify the removal of the post-secondary schooling requirement for police officers.”

Then, the letter continues that they are here to remind you that this decision is not evidence-based. It will not contribute to healthier or safer communities, and it goes against the recommendation once again—this expert cites—for more education and more training set out by the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia.

“Community safety does not equal more police, and policing community safety equals healthy communities.

“At Policing-Free Schools, we know that creating conditions for healthy communities supports the co-creation of healthy schools and vice versa, particularly because schools exist within and are part of our communities and as an extension are microcosms of communities and society in which they exist. Community safety is about co-creating with bold, courageous actions, transformative, healthy, equitable, life-affirming and healing community spaces. Thriving and healthy community spaces—which in and of themselves are safe, have ample support and resources and not more police presence, policing, punitive and carceral measures and there is more than enough data, reports, research and evidence indicating this.

“The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with the lack of evidence-based action by governments, both created new inequities and exasperated already existing ones. This within the context of the federal government continuing to place profit over people. Our provincial Ontario government for decades underfunded and underresourced our education system, the push for privatization of our education and the health care system, ongoing policy decisions to uphold poverty, meanwhile prioritizing funds into prisons and policing, to name a few.

“The current government has chosen to continue not addressing the root causes and not addressing social and structural determinants of health and equity. What your government”—the PC government—“is doing is further increasing a pipeline of police officers contributing to a heightened policing-carceral state. It is no coincidence that this government is seeking to cancel this pending change to require post-secondary schooling, meanwhile $267.6 million into policing, billions more into the expansion of prisons and, most recently, more into announcing free tuition to the Ontario Police College for new police trainees while simultaneously choosing to not fund or underfund those community-based support systems that actually support creating the conditions for the well-being of communities.”

It’s a long letter; I’m going to bring it to a stop there.

I want to be able to thank Andrea for the feedback because I think it’s absolutely important that we hear from all sectors of society, and yet at the consultation of the committee I think we heard from mostly police, to be quite honest. So if the government talks about hearing positive consultation, sure, we heard positive 20-minute deputations from various different chiefs and perhaps association heads about how this was going to help them, but I know that in the past, before the PC government took office, it’s the same officers who were talking about how proud they were about the next generation of officers. It’s the same officers who talked about the need for more training and not less.

The Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission is something I want to spend just a few minutes on. It’s a heartbreaking report, an inquest about the community tragedy that we all have learned about stemming from central Nova Scotia. I’ve got family out there. It was very, deeply personal. My family is located in Truro, Nova Scotia, right where the incidents all took place, so this is deeply personal in so many ways.

I read those recommendations. I read the report. There’s too many for us to list here today. There are just simply too many, but that report had an executive summary. That executive summary mentioned training at least 100 times, and it’s clear from that very well-documented raw report which looked at the modernization of policing and the effect of failures and what we need to do to improve policing—that report laid it all out for us. That report came out roughly the same time—that this government was putting forward Bill 102, and it runs contrary to what the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission talked about.

I know that that federal report, produced in partnership with the province of Nova Scotia, is going to be travelling, and the federal government is going to be approaching the provincial government right here in Ontario—and the territories; they’re crossing the country—and tabling that report. It’s going to say, “How are you going to do your part in the province of Ontario to make sure that the recommendations out of the Mass Casualty Commission’s report are going to be implemented provincially?” And you know what you’re going to tell them? “We’re not doing it.” Instead, we’re going to adopt Bill 102, which actually reduces education—completely contrary to what the Mass Casualty Commission is recommending.

So many different incidents and violent situations can be diverted with more education and training. I want to recognize that there was—and I want to be able to say this properly—an external, independent review of the RCMP, including a review of the contract system under which the RCMP provided police services to rural communities. And this is what happens: Sometimes you contract out policing, so you have it set up in one community, and you send them elsewhere—and I know there’s been times here, right here in Ontario, where we have sent our officers out because there was another incident that required boots on the ground from our community. That happened during the convoy in Ottawa. We were moving officers here and there, and then they had to move some officers here when we thought the convoy was going to land here. I know the city of Toronto got involved; we put up waste trucks, garbage trucks, to barricade the road so that we could keep Queen’s Park safe. We did that work. We did that work with the Toronto police. We also did that work with other police associations that were lending us a hand, just like we’ve lent others a hand. Whether it’s firefighting or sending paramedics outside of our city, when we need each other, that’s how it works.

But we can’t have some officers better trained and better educated than other communities. That’s just not right. We want to have the very best, most-educated and best-trained officers right here in Ontario. So therefore it doesn’t matter if you’re from the north or from the south, if you’re from rural and urban communities, officers are consistently trained so that they can all do the hard work of de-escalation and building relationships with the community so that they can be better effective in delivering and ensuring public safety.

There was a closing of the RCMP training depot in Regina and the establishment of a Canadian police college: “The RCMP should phase out the depot model ... by 2032” and create “a three-year degree-based model of police education for all police services in Canada.” That is recommendation 3 that is coming out of the mass casualty report. They note “all police services in Canada,” and this is what it also speaks to.

The RCMP’s training depot in Regina trains and recruits for 26 weeks. The report says that the training is far from adequate—far from adequate: therefore, inadequate. This government should take note because this 26-week training is more than twice as long as the Ontario Police College training, which is about 12 weeks. What are we doing here? What are we doing? You want to build better officers? Then build a better system, a better pipeline; invest. This fact is not just doable, but it’s actually two more years of training that is required in order for us to meet the call to ensure that our officers are better trained.

We need officers to learn the soft skills, not just how to discharge a weapon. They need to have some of those “soft skills” that actually enable them to be a successful, high-calibre officer. This includes anti-racism training, understanding domestic violence, de-escalation, assisting people with mental health challenges, non-violent communication and helping people dealing with PTSD, trauma and stress and so much more.

Now, I understand that this might slow down the number of recruits—I get that—and I know that there are some communities that are well underserved. They have no officers. But I want them to have well-trained officers—not just any officer but well-trained officers so that the situations that I just described—it’s not just putting anyone out there, because I did mention that the police chiefs were talking about the next generation of officers being better than the last generation of officers. I can’t stress that more, because it left an impression on me when they said that.

I want to offer you a couple of more thoughts, Speaker. The mass casualty report also identified that gender-based violence is a national “epidemic” and that a public health approach needs to be taken to address violence against women, “stable, core funding” for groups that serve women survivors along with the creation of a national commissioner on gender-based violence.

This was also reinforced by the Renfrew inquest, the 86 recommendations. Their number one recommendation is to declare intimate-partner violence an epidemic. It costs you nothing—absolutely nothing—and from there, if you declare that, you can build a strategy, and then you can move to recommendation number 4, which is to implement the framework to ensure that the 86 recommendations are rolled out and operationalized. This government hasn’t done that. You talk about safety. How are you keeping women safe? How are you keeping women and girls and children safe?

Violence-against-women organizations have been asking, protesting, pleading. They’re exhausted. The pandemic has beaten everyone down so badly. They want a partner in this government. They want you to work with them. They’re begging you to work with them, but instead, who is going to get more money? Not them, and yet they’re the ones who are receiving those crisis calls. They’re the ones who are struggling to provide support for women who are fleeing violence.

In the Toronto police 2017 report, The Way Forward—and this was touted as the modernization report. I have to say, I know this report extremely well, because I was on council at that time. I had several briefings with the Toronto police, including the chief at that time. We were told that this was how we’re going to build a modern police force, one that was going to be community-minded, one that was going to remove $100 million from the police services and then repurpose that back into the city of Toronto—because that’s what the modernization task force was about: to strip away inefficiencies and to make it a streamlined, modernized service that met the needs of the community.

In that report, training was mentioned 44 times in 55 pages, and it emphasized community-based policing, which I’ve already spoken about. In that report, the modernization of Toronto Police Service report, calls for more comprehensive training and an increased emphasis during employment screening for evidence of bias, racism and discriminatory beliefs. They believe that this type of training was absolutely critical because there was no place for racism, white supremacy, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and any other kinds of bias in policing.

The report emphasized de-escalation training as critical to ensuring that force is only used when absolutely necessary.

The report reads, “As citizens, we need to know that police officers will follow their training to put themselves in extremely dangerous and potentially violent situations without question or hesitation. We also need to know that police service members will follow procedures to the letter without overt or implicit bias, to ensure fair and effective prosecutions and protect the rights of individuals under the law. To be successful, the culture needs to promote and ensure a disciplined adherence to legislated requirements, training, and procedures.”

This report goes on to say: “Our intent won’t be achieved if procedures and training do not empower officers to be facilitators, partners and problem-solvers.”

The report also recommends “a partnership with an Ontario university and/or college of applied arts and technology to work with the TPS on its training model for a modernized police service. The goal will be further professionalization and active accountability by leveraging the partner organization’s ability to bring more academic rigour, additional training mechanisms, and research to create new and relevant learning opportunities.”

Mark Saunders was the police chief at that time. This was the report that he shopped around and brought to every single councillor and said, “This is how we’re going to modernize the Toronto Police Service.”

The Toronto Police Service recently had a meeting in April. The word “training” appeared 331 times in one meeting. Clearly, it is the responsibility and clearly it is the priority for both the public as well as the members of the police service. I want to make sure that this government understands that Bill 102 undermines all of that.

So yes, there are some good things in the bill, and I want to be able to separate that, but that’s not how this place works. You get to vote for the whole darn thing. I did move a motion at committee that specifically tried to undo one thing that I thought needed to be done, and that was to make sure that Ontario no longer is the province that doesn’t give the police chiefs authority to suspend officers without pay. I wanted to make sure we could finally reverse that, but this government and the committee voted against it. So that’s why this bill is so challenging and problematic for us. We want to do more with it, and we want the police to do better, and right now, the bill—