On March 15, the Minister of Public Security, François Bonnardel, and his colleague Christopher Skeete, Minister responsible for the Fight against Racism, presented Bill 14 (PL 14) at a press conference. It was amazing to hear them claim that the legislative proposal would “strengthen” and “make more accessible” the police ethics regime, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Bill 14 is rather a missed opportunity to implement long-standing demands to truly strengthen this complaints mechanism which, it should be remembered, should meet the needs of citizens before any other consideration. Among other things, Bill 14 does not provide for extending the limitation period for filing a complaint from one year to three years, nor for making the conciliation process voluntary and optional for any complainant, two changes long demanded by community organizations. and defense of rights.
But there is worse ! Bill 14 represents a historic setback in the rights of citizens since the creation of the regime in the 1980s. The Police Act currently provides that “any person” can file a complaint about police ethics. But this right is currently threatened, because Bill 14 proposes to limit the right to file a complaint to only two categories of people: those present at the scene of a police intervention and those directly victims of the alleged conduct.
In other words, PL 14 provides for the withdrawal of others, called third-party complainants, from the right to file a complaint. Third-party plaintiffs are people or organizations that have had knowledge of a police intervention that has resulted in violations of rights and police abuses sometimes causing the death of a citizen. According to a recent study, third-party complaints represented, between 2015 and 2020, only 3.2% of complaints while being at the origin of a large proportion of cases leading to citations of police officers before the Police Ethics Committee ( 22.6%) and sanctions imposed by the latter (27.9%).
Thus, contrary to what the police associations have been repeating, which have been calling for the withdrawal of the right to file a complaint for third parties for years, this type of complaint does not overwhelm the system and is neither frivolous nor baseless — it is even opposite ! And that’s probably why they bother the police world so much…
While removing their right to file a complaint, Bill 14 plans to relegate third parties to a new “reporting” process under which the Police Ethics Commissioner will not be obliged to provide the reasons for rejecting the “reporting” to the person who is the author. However, the Police Act currently provides for such an obligation towards complainants. This is an unacceptable setback in terms of transparency and accountability.
The loss of complainant status for third parties will also result in the loss of another right, namely that of seeking review before the Police Ethics Committee when the Commissioner decides to close the file after investigation. This will undeniably have the effect of further reducing the ability of citizens to monitor and control police interventions, and the work of the office of the Commissioner herself!
Concretely, the loss of the right to file a complaint for third parties means that a relative of a person who died in the hands of the police will no longer be able to file a complaint, for lack of having been present at the scene of the intervention. This is all the more unacceptable since some police interventions take place in the absence of civilian witnesses. For example, only police officers were present when Richard Barnabé suffered a cardiac arrest in 1993 in the cell of a police station in Montreal after a violent arrest. This was also the case when David Tshiteya Kalubi was admitted to a police station in Montreal in 2017, where he was detained and died twelve hours later.
If left unmodified, PL 14 will weaken a mechanism that is already in poor shape, having become over the years a machine for rejecting complaints (10% of complaints are currently under investigation). Ensuring the accountability of police interventions is a collective responsibility that concerns society as a whole. This implies that the police ethics complaints mechanism be accessible to anyone, whether the police officers like it or not.
It is urgent and necessary for Minister Bonnardel to change course and for parliamentarians to modify Bill 14 during the detailed study which will begin soon, in order to avoid the serious setbacks he announces and to truly strengthen the police ethics regime. !
* This text is co-signed by Alain Babineau (Red Coalition), Annie Savage
(Network to help single and homeless people in Montreal), Bernard St-Jacques (Clinique Droits Devant), Florence Amélie Brosseau and Marie-Éveline Touma (Association of Progressive Lawyers), Fo Niemi (Centre for Research-Action on races) and Maxim Fortin (League of Rights and Freedoms, Quebec section).