Coroner Géhane Kamel believes that Minister François Bonnardel’s Maureen Breau bill is “a step in the right direction.”
Bill 66 creates a position of “liaison officer” to follow up on people like Isaac Brouillard-Lessard, the man who stabbed the police officer in March 2023. It was also introduced in the wake of the triple murder committed by a young schizophrenic man in 2022, in Montreal and Laval.
Liaison officers would be responsible for following up on people who have been found not criminally responsible by the Mental Disorders Review Board (MDRB). They would be probation officers who have received special training.
Mme Kamel, who presented his report on Monday in the M caseme Breau also spoke in parliamentary committee on Tuesday during the study of the bill.
From the outset, her team said that it was “a step in the right direction.” She even congratulated Minister Bonnardel on Tuesday for not having waited for his report before legislating, even speaking of a “historic” moment.
The big challenge, she stressed, will be to apply the law on the ground so that “communication is fluid” in the monitoring of each individual.
Disagreement over role of correctional services
Some experts and groups, however, are troubled by the liaison officers’ affiliation with correctional services. The presence of a correctional officer risks creating “distrust,” explained Anne Crocker, director of research and university teaching at the Philippe-Pinel National Institute of Forensic Psychiatry. “This perpetuates the idea that recovery is the opposite of public safety.”
If we want to mandate someone to coordinate the monitoring of these people, the intervener should come from the health and social services sector, she maintained. Another group, the Association of Intervention Groups in Defense of Mental Health Rights of Quebec, also criticized this measure.
Coroner Kamel did not, however, comment on this specific point. “It is not at all my role” to establish which department or agency these stakeholders should report to, she said. The coroner also did not make any suggestions for amendments to the bill.
Police needs
Minister Bonnardel’s approach is essentially aimed at giving police officers access to more information on people in crisis with whom they may be called upon to intervene.
In the morning, representatives of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) came to say how much they needed it. This could allow police officers to be “better prepared” and “adapt the intervention according to the mental state of the person,” explained the chief inspector of the Direction des services de proximité aux communautés, Jonathan Menard, and his colleague Daniel Boulianne, responsible for mental health services.
The government has already funded the possible hiring of 18 liaison officers across Quebec. The minister estimates that they could take charge of a total of 500 cases in the first year out of the 1,900 people under the jurisdiction of the Mental Disorders Review Commission (CETM).
The issue of confidentiality
Minister Bonnardel said he wanted to limit the stigmatization of people by using the term “liaison agent”, which is not associated with prison environments.
In order to limit breaches of confidentiality, the minister and the police said that the information shared would not come from the medical file.
The police could, however, know if the person has a particular distrust of the police or what their condition is prior to the intervention, SQ representatives reported.
Or, Mme Crocker argued that one cannot separate “medical and psychosocial factors in risk management,” hence the importance of risk assessment “being done by a multidisciplinary team.”
Moreover, most of the groups that were heard on Tuesday in Parliament on Bill 66 had also taken part in the coroner’s inquest.
However, in the opinion of some, such as the Liberal opposition, the government should have waited before tabling this bill, because of the coroner’s inquest, but also because of other work concerning forensic psychiatry in Quebec, particularly that concerning Bill P-38.
“We had to act as quickly as possible,” the minister said. The coroner said she shared this view.