CANADA
40th PARLIAMENT,
2nd SESSION
Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security
EVIDENCE
CONTENTS
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
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The Chair (Mr. Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton—Melville, CPC)) |
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Mr. Alex Neve (Secretary General, Amnesty International) |
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The Chair |
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Hon. Warren Allmand (Spokesperson, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group) |
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The Chair |
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Mr. James Kafieh (Legal Counsel, Canadian Arab Federation) |
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The Chair |
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Mrs. Shirley Heafey (Board Member, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association) |
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The Chair |
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Mrs. Kerry Pither (Human rights advocate and author, As an Individual) |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Mark Holland (Ajax—Pickering, Lib.) |
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Mrs. Shirley Heafey |
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Mr. Mark Holland |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Mr. Mark Holland |
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The Chair |
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Mrs. Shirley Heafey |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Serge Ménard (Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, BQ) |
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Mr. James Kafieh |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Jack Harris (St. John's East, NDP) |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Jack Harris |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Mr. Jack Harris |
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The Chair |
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Mr. James Kafieh |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton—St. Albert, CPC) |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Mr. Brent Rathgeber |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Brent Rathgeber |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Brent Rathgeber |
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Mrs. Kerry Pither |
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Mr. Brent Rathgeber |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Robert Oliphant (Don Valley West, Lib.) |
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Mr. James Kafieh |
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Mr. Robert Oliphant |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Robert Oliphant |
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Mrs. Kerry Pither |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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The Chair |
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Mr. James Kafieh |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Dave MacKenzie (Oxford, CPC) |
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Mrs. Shirley Heafey |
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Mrs. Kerry Pither |
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Mr. Dave MacKenzie |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Dave MacKenzie |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Dave MacKenzie |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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The Chair |
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Mrs. Maria Mourani (Ahuntsic, BQ) |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Mrs. Maria Mourani |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Mrs. Kerry Pither |
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The Chair |
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Mr. Rick Norlock (Northumberland—Quinte West, CPC) |
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Mr. Alex Neve |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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The Chair |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Rick Norlock |
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Hon. Warren Allmand |
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Mr. Rick Norlock |
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Mrs. Shirley Heafey |
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The Chair |
CANADA
Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security
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EVIDENCE
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
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(0905)
[English]
I would like to bring this meeting to order.
This is the Standing Committee on
Public Safety and National Security. This is our eleventh meeting of
this session, and we are continuing with our study on the Iacobucci and
O'Connor reports.
We would like to welcome to our
committee this morning the International Civil Liberties Monitoring
Group, Mr. Warren Allmand, spokesperson; British Columbia Civil
Liberties Association, Shirley Heafey, board member; Canadian Arab
Federation, James Kafieh, legal counsel; Amnesty International, Alex
Neve, secretary general; and as an individual, Kerry Pither, human
rights advocate and author.
I would like to welcome you all to
the committee this morning. We look forward to what you have to share
with us.
I understand you have decided that Alex will start, and then we're going to go down the row.
Please introduce yourself again; I
may have mispronounced your name. Tell us a bit about yourself. We'll
give you approximately ten minutes for a presentation. I'm not usually
too strict on the time, if you're sharing something important with us.
Go ahead, sir.
Mr. Alex Neve (Secretary General, Amnesty International):
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Alex Neve. I'm the secretary general of Amnesty International.
Amnesty International has played a
central role in the work around all four of the cases that you are
examining, from very early days, when Maher Arar had just been arrested
in the United States. So our experience is quite extensive. In November
2003, after Maher Arar had described his ordeal in a national press
conference, I received an emotional call from a man who told me about
his son, Ahmad El Maati, who he said had been imprisoned in Syria and
Egypt for about two years at that point, and still was in detention. He
said that Canadian officials had insisted he not go public about his
son's case. Now, he had seen that Monia Mazigh had gone public and that
her husband, Maher Arar, was home. He feared--and was almost in tears
with me on the phone--that he had been wrong to remain silent, and again
and again in that call he pleaded with me to know what he could or
should do to ensure that his son's rights could and would be protected.
There were similar moments to this in
each of the four cases you are reviewing, at every turn and every
juncture. Every time, the theme has been the same: where to turn to
ensure that the individual's rights could and would be protected. That
none of these individuals or their loved ones have known where to turn
to secure basic human rights protection was and continues to be a
scandal. It is very much our hope that through these hearings and the
much-needed attention they will bring this committee will help restore
human rights to where they belong in Canada's national security
practices. Human rights are the key to national security; they are not
the obstacle. That's a point that has been forcefully brought home in
two recent international reports.
The first report, issued last month
by Martin Scheinin, the UN Human Rights Council's special rapporteur on
the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms
while countering terrorism, includes a reference to Maher Arar's case
and stresses how important it is to ensure that there is strong
oversight and true accountability with respect to human rights
violations associated with counter-terrorism practices.
The second report is a lengthy,
remarkable report from an eminent panel convened by the International
Commission of Jurists, which after close to four years of research,
investigations, and hearings around the world, including in Canada,
concluded that the ways human rights have been undermined since the
September 11 attacks represent “perhaps one of the most serious
challenges ever posed” to the integrity of the international human
rights system. The eminent panel points out that upholding human rights
is not a matter of being soft on terrorism. Quite the contrary: states
have a positive human rights obligation to protect people under their
jurisdiction from terrorist acts, an obligation that extends to those
who may be at risk of terrorism and to those who may be suspected of
terrorism.
The cases of Maher Arar, Abdullah
Almalki, Ahmad Abou El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin have been the subject
of two extensive judicial inquiries. The result is a disturbing picture
of disregard for fundamental precepts of the rule of law, due process,
and commitment to human rights. In all cases the use by Canadian
officials of inflammatory, exaggerated labels, such as being extremists
linked to al-Qaeda, labels not at all borne out by evidence, was shown
to have played a crucial role in the chain of events that led to their
unlawful imprisonment and torture. Ontario Court of Appeal Justice
Dennis O'Connor and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank
Iacobucci, eminent Canadian jurists, both catalogued a myriad of
shortcomings that caused or contributed to the severe human rights
violations experienced by these four men.
Many Canadians likely assume that
with the inquiries done and the reports in, these cases and the
underlying issues have all been resolved. That is all the more so given
that most Canadians are, of course, very much aware of the official
apology and compensation that Maher Arar received in early 2007. But
there is still far to go, both in ensuring that there truly is justice
and accountability with respect to these four cases, and in ensuring
that the legal, institutional, and policy reforms needed to guard
against similar instances of human rights abuse in the future are
enacted.
(0910)
I'm going to briefly sketch the
important work that still must be done to address the pressing concerns
at the root of these human rights tragedies.
First is oversight and review. An
absolutely crucial safeguard in protecting against human rights
violations by police or security agencies in any country, in any
context, is to ensure that there is effective, independent, and
impartial review and oversight of their activities. In the Arar inquiry,
Justice O'Connor spent considerable time and resources canvassing this
issue exhaustively. He found that the approach to review and oversight
of agencies involved in national security investigations in Canada was
complex, unwieldy, incomplete, and inadequate. He proposed a thoughtful,
comprehensive, integrated new model. However, more than two years later
there has been no public indication at all of progress towards adopting
and implementing that model.
We--and all of us here today--have
called on the government to do so without further delay, and to
implement the precise model Justice O'Connor proposed, nothing less.
With a strong mechanism in place for reviewing the national security
activities of the RCMP, CSIS, and other agencies, there would finally be
an answer to the question that haunted Mr. Elmaati's father and all of
these men and their families, and a place to turn to and ensure their
rights would be protected.
Second is the critical importance of
implementing the reports from these two inquiries. Justice O'Connor
formulated a detailed set of recommendations, as that was part of his
mandate. Justice Iacobucci did not, as that was excluded from his
mandate. However, his findings as to what went wrong, and why, lead
quite naturally to implicit recommendations, some similar to those of
the Arar inquiry, others perhaps in addition to what Justice O'Connor
proposed.
More than two and a half years after
the first report was released from the Arar inquiry, there has not yet
been any meaningful public reporting as to the implementation of the
recommendations. Mr. Arar himself remains in the dark.
Five months since Justice Iacobucci
released his report, we have only an assertion that his findings are
reminiscent of what arose in the Arar inquiry, that the Arar report has
been fully implemented, and that there is nothing more to do.
That's not enough. It is time for
full implementation of the Arar recommendations, a public analysis as to
what additional recommendations are needed to address the Iacobucci
findings, and a commitment to regular public reporting on the progress
of implementation. In a letter to Amnesty International earlier this
month,
Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan
described ten steps the government has taken with regard to the Arar
inquiry recommendations. This was the first time we had heard anything
of this sort. Unfortunately, the points tend to raise more questions
than they answer. For instance, it is asserted that before sharing
information with a country that has a questionable human rights record,
the RCMP now uses Department of Foreign Affairs human rights reports,
but there is no indication as to what approach is taken and what would
lead to a decision to share and what would lead to a decision not to
share the information.
Third, there must be accountability
for the serious human rights violations that have occurred in these four
cases. Individuals in Canada, the United States, Syria, Egypt, and
Jordan all made decisions or took actions that contributed to the human
rights violations these men experienced. To date, to our knowledge, not
one person in any of those countries has been held accountable. We urge
you to press for details about what has happened to Canadian officials
most centrally implicated in these cases. What steps have been taken to
determine whether any criminal charges should be laid? What steps have
been taken to impose appropriate disciplinary penalties?
When there is no accountability for
human rights violations, the only message conveyed is one of impunity,
and impunity encourages more of the same. Beyond the accountability of
Canadian officials, we also urge you to press for details as to what the
Canadian government has done to ensure accountability of officials in
other countries. Unfortunately, the government has maintained that in
Canadian courts lawsuits against foreign government officials are barred
because of Canada's State Immunity Act. Therefore, Maher Arar's efforts
to sue Jordanian and Syrian officials in Ontario court failed.
It is not clear how forcefully
Canadian officials have pushed for there to be independent
investigations and real accountability in any of the other countries
involved.
(0915)
The recent letter from Minister Van
Loan indicates that the Syrian and Egyptian ambassadors to Canada have
been provided with copies of the Iacobucci report and have been asked to
investigate and report back. That falls short of a forceful demand that
individuals responsible for the torture of four Canadian citizens be
held accountable. At a minimum, we need assurance that formal diplomatic
protests have been registered with both governments.
Fourth, there must be redress for all
of these men. There has, of course, been redress for Maher Arar. Five
months after the release of the Iacobucci report, though, there has been
nothing for the other men. Minister Van Loan's letter declines to
comment on this, because their cases are currently before the courts,
and notes that Commissioner Iacobucci was not asked to address issues of
compensation. With respect, that is not the issue. Commissioner
Iacobucci documented numerous deficiencies that contributed to the
imprisonment and torture of these three men. It is time for redress for
the role Canadian officials played in those human rights violations. We
urge you to press government witnesses who come before you to lay out
what steps they are taking towards a prompt, preferably negotiated or
mediated settlement of the claims of these three men, leading to a
meaningful official apology and appropriate compensation.
Finally, what we have learned from
these four cases must inspire a new approach to how Canada responds to
similar situations. Sadly, we need look no further than the current case
of another Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrazik, to see that little has
changed. Imprisoned on two separate occasions in Sudan, almost
certainly, information now reveals, at the behest of Canadian officials,
he was subjected to torture in detention, and now, for close to one
year, he has been languishing in temporary refuge in Canada's embassy in
Khartoum. Rather than take quick and decisive action to right the
wrongs in this case, the Canadian government has put obstacle after
obstacle in the way of his return to Canada and the restoration of his
rights.
That brings us back to Ahmad
Elmaati's father, who didn't know where to turn to protect his son's
rights. Six years later, thinking about what's happening in Sudan,
sadly, it seems, the refrain remains largely the same.
Thank you.
Mr. Allmand, you may proceed.
Hon. Warren Allmand (Spokesperson, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group):
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, today I am representing the
International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a broadly based Canadian
coalition that came together after September 11, 2001, to monitor the
impact of the new anti-terrorism legislation on human rights and to
advocate against abuses. We were also intervenors before the Arar and
the Iaccobucci commissions.
I come to this issue having spent 31
years as a member of Parliament, four years as a solicitor general, and
five years as president of the International Centre for Human Rights and
Democratic Development.
Today I will focus on the recommendations set out in the first and second Arar reports.
In his first report, Judge O'Connor
reported on his investigation into the case of Canadian citizen Maher
Arar to determine how and why he was detained in New York on September
26, 2002, and then surreptitiously sent to Syria, where he was
imprisoned and tortured for approximately one year.
Judge O'Connor, after examining all
of the evidence, both in camera and public, found that the RCMP had
falsely labelled Mr. Arar and his wife as, and I quote, “Islamic
extremists suspected of having links to al-Qaeda”. Judge O'Connor said
there was absolutely no evidence to support this label. This was in
addition to other inaccurate, misleading, and damaging information, all
of which the RCMP irresponsibly shared with American authorities.
At page 19 of his report, O'Connor
said: “Labels have a way of sticking to individuals, reputations are
easily damaged and when labels are inaccurate, serious unfairness to
individuals can result.”
Then at page 24 he said, “Project A-O
Canada”, which was the RCMP special investigation unit, “supplied the
American agencies with a good deal of inaccurate information about Mr.
Arar, some of which was inflammatory and unfairly prejudicial to him.”
In his general analysis with respect
to the Arar evidence, Judge O'Connor came to the following conclusions.
First, the RCMP had not properly checked the information relating to
Arar for relevance, accuracy, and reliability. Second, the sharing of
this inaccurate information with the United States was contrary to
existing policies and without the proper caveats. Third, there was
inadequate direction and oversight of the investigating team by senior
levels in the force. Fourth, the RCMP investigation unit lacked the
training and experience required for this security and intelligence
work. Fifth, the RCMP had been thrust back into security and
intelligence operations, contrary to the recommendations of the 1981
McDonald commission report.
As a result, in his part one report,
O'Connor made 23 recommendations to correct the above-mentioned
deficiencies so that cases like Arar would not happen again. These are
very specific recommendations dealing with, among other things, mandate,
sharing arrangements, training, centralized oversight, policy guidance,
screening for accuracy and relevance, joint operations, and racial
profiling. As a result, what is required from the government is a
specific answer to each one of these 23 specific recommendations.
The general comment by Stockwell Day,
who was then the minister, on October 21, 2008, that all the
recommendations were implemented tells us nothing about the
implementation measures and is unacceptable.
Nor is the letter of March 9, 2009,
from Minister Peter Van Loan to Alex Neve in which he states that the
government has implemented 22 of the 23 O'Connor recommendations. It is
unacceptable that his examples of implementation in the letter do not
relate directly to O'Connor's numbered recommendations and they are
general rather than specific.
The minister speaks of formal
processes, changes to policies and common frameworks, but there is no
detail. In the circumstances, how can parliamentarians and the public
judge whether or not these responses are germane to the recommendations
and whether they are adequate or not?
(0920)
If Parliament is really serious
about correcting the abuses suffered by Mr. Arar, it is imperative that
the minister be asked to appear before this committee to give a specific
accounting in writing to each and every one of the recommendations in
the first Arar report. Only then can you and the public judge whether
what was done was consistent with O'Connor's recommendations, or whether
more has to be done.
This leads me to O'Connor's second
report, of December 12, 2006, in which he proposed a new review agency
for the RCMP and a new review process for five other federal agencies
carrying on security and intelligence activities. As a result of his
inquiry, Judge O'Connor discovered that there were 24 federal agencies
in Canada involved directly or indirectly in the security and
intelligence business, the principal ones being CSIS, RCMP,
Communications Security Establishment, the CBSA, Transport Canada,
Foreign Affairs Canada, Department of National Defence, Department of
Citizenship and Immigration, the PCO, the Department of Justice, and the
Coast Guard.
He also found that there were 247
agreements by which intelligence information was shared internationally
and within Canada. In addition, he found that there were an increasing
number of joint intelligence operations, known as “integrated national
security enforcement teams”, or INSETs, made up of CSIS, the RCMP, the
OPP, and Ottawa Police Service. Those are just examples, but there were
others as well.
With all this sharing and all these
joint operations, it's easy to understand how errors and mistakes by the
RCMP and other agencies might escape review and go undetected. The
problem is that the existing review bodies--the CPC, SIRC, and the CSE
commissioner--have different limited powers and mandates, and in each
case are only directed at a single agency. For example, CPC can only
deal with the RCMP, and SIRC can only deal with CSIS. Therefore how do
you get at joint operations and sharing arrangements?
Some of these review bodies have the
power of subpoena; some don't. Some have the right to audit; some don't.
Some, such as the Canadian Border Services Agency, have no review body
whatsoever. This leaves us with an impossible situation, where issues
can easily fall between the cracks.
In chapter 10 of the second report,
O'Connor asks if the status quo is adequate. He absolutely and
categorically says no. Judge O'Connor says that the RCMP internal
controls are not adequate. Ministerial controls are not adequate.
Judicial controls are not adequate. The CPC's existing powers are not
adequate, and the powers of other accountability bodies are not
adequate. He therefore proposes a new body to replace the RCMP's CPC to
review the RCMP and the Canadian Border Services Agency, with increased
powers to audit and investigate complaints. He also proposes that SIRC
be given additional powers to review the security and intelligence
operations of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, DFAIT,
Transport Canada, and FINTRAC, in addition to CSIS. He leaves the CSE
commissioner as is to review the activities of the CSE. However, to
coordinate these three bodies, review all national security practices,
and make sure that nothing falls between the cracks, he proposes an
integrated national security review coordinating committee that would
also receive all complaints and then refer them to the appropriate
review agency.
After more than two years since the
report's presentation, parliamentarians and the public have the right to
know the government's intention with respect to this important proposal
and have it, as a bare minimum, implemented as soon as possible.
Again, the answer given by Minister
Van Loan in his letter of March 9 tells us nothing. He says, and I
quote: “In regards to Commissioner O'Connor's Part II Report, the
government is moving forward to enhance security and intelligence review
measures.” After two years, it is moving forward to do what? We all
have the right to know.
(0925)
In conclusion, let me emphasize the
following. Judge O'Connor spent almost three years on the Arar case.
Judge Iacobucci spent almost two years on his mandate, at a cost of
millions of dollars to the taxpayers of Canada. These commissions dealt
with critical issues of human rights and fundamental freedoms of great
concern to all Canadians. They should not be put on the back shelf or be
brushed under the rug; they should be enacted as soon as possible so
that no one else will suffer the fate of Messrs. Arar, Almalki, Elmaati,
and Nureddin.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, sir.
Go ahead.
Mr. James Kafieh (Legal Counsel, Canadian Arab Federation):
My
name is James Kafieh. I'm legal counsel for three intervenors in the
Iacobucci inquiry. I'm representing the three of them here today. They
include the Canadian Arab Federation, the Canadian Muslim Civil
Liberties Association, and the Canadian Council on American-Islamic
Relations. These organizations have been active for a very long time on
the issues that are before you.
The Canadian Arab Federation, as
early as 1991 during the first Gulf War, found itself targeted by CSIS
activity in our community. This brochure that I hold before you is from a
production that we made during that war. It's entitled When CSIS Calls,
and it's basically a civil liberties guide, so that Arab Canadians, and
Canadians in general, will know what their rights are and how best to
contribute to national security without endangering the fabric of their
communities or threatening their own personal security. This is
something that the Canadian Arab Federation produced.
The Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties
Association has been involved with issues of racial profiling since its
founding a decade ago.
The Canadian Council on
American-Islamic Relations was active on Maher Arar's file since October
12, 2002, when the first media stories on it hit The New York Times and The Globe and Mail.
On that day, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations was
very much at the forefront of that effort and were very explicit in
pointing out from that very initial point that if Maher Arar were to be
sent to Syria he would be at risk of torture, and they were actively
trying to confirm Mr. Arar's whereabouts.
As a combined population of Arab and
Muslim Canadians, we number about one million. These institutions above
that I represent in turn represent the interests and concerns of these
communities. Taken separately, or even put together, however you want to
look at them, the Arab and Muslim communities are two of the largest
and fastest-growing communities in Canada. They have a population spread
throughout the urban centres of Canada, but in particular in ridings in
Ontario and Quebec.
The issues that are before us today
have had a profound impact on the Arab Canadian community. We have a
special interest in the success of the O'Connor and the Iacobucci
inquiries, whose work is not done until their recommendations are
implemented. We understand the Middle East better than any other
community in this country, because we speak the language of the Arab
world and we monitor the broadcasts and read the publications and we
travel there. We do so at a greater rate for obvious reasons: we have
connections to that part of the world. We are, as such, at the greatest
risk when we travel there.
We're at the greatest risk of
recklessly being labelled extremists, a term that Justice Iacobucci
found to have no real definition. It meant whatever the author wanted it
to mean, without standards on something so important, where labelling
alone could get you.... Well, in fact it had a profound impact on having
people incarcerated in dungeons and tortured—Canadians.
We are at increased danger from a
lack of security and the way the security agencies do their work. The
Arab Canadian community lost confidence in Canadian security agencies in
large measure from the experience of Maher Arar. And when we saw the
treatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, and Muayyed Nureddin,
we understood this was a pattern, that it wasn't just a one-off event
but a pattern. And we see the abuse of other Arab Canadians today in
other parts of the world—they've already been mentioned—in terms of
their perplexing inability to return, with the help of the Canadian
government, back to Canada.
It calls into question, for us, the
quality and substance of the Canadian citizenship held by an Arab or
Muslim Canadian. Can we count on our government to be there? Can we
count on our security agencies to protect us like any other Canadian
would want to be protected?
We need, as a community, to see
evidence of the implementation of all 23 recommendations of the O'Connor
report. It's critical that we see it. This shouldn't be something done
in secret. It's important for Canada to come clean and to start anew, in
terms of building relationships with the communities that are perhaps
more critical right now for us to have a good relationship with, so that
there is confidence, for example, between the Arab and Muslim
communities and Canadian security agencies.
(0930)
Security is everybody's business. We
need to be working together, and it makes it very difficult when we
don't see the accountability.
We don't see any aspect of remorse.
It's important, in particular, in terms of the recommendations for the
Arab and Muslim community—I would certainly refer to 17, 19, 20, and 22.
They are on record from the O'Connor recommendations.
But the oversight process is perhaps
one of the most important things that has been left undone, because
without that, where do Arab Canadians go for redress? Where do they go
for answers? How do they protect their citizenship? Do we have to have a
royal commission every time this happens? Is this the normal procedure,
the standard operating procedure for dealing with these issues? I would
argue that for obvious reasons this is not practical. It's not the way a
responsible administration would conduct itself. We have to have
something that's systematic. It's been studied. It's clear what needs to
be done. Justice O'Connor laid it out very clearly, and we don't
understand why it hasn't happened already. It calls into question the
seriousness of the Canadian government, the level of commitment to
fulfill what's needed, what's obviously been found to be needed.
When we talk about also doing what's
right, it's important that there be remorse, remorse in terms of the
role Canadians did play in the detention and torture of these men. There
is an obvious requirement that was explicitly recommended by Justice
O'Connor in the case of Mahar Arar, but which Justice Iacobucci was not
allowed to recommend. He was only allowed to make findings without
recommending, in terms of what the government should do. But the pattern
is laid out. An explicit apology to these three men is still
outstanding, and beyond that there is an issue of compensation. Without
compensation, as well, for the ordeal they went through, the apology
will ring hollow.
It's important for Canada, in
addition, to protest to Syria and Egypt the fact that there has been no
accountability for what their administrations did to these Canadians. It
is not something we can do in a credible way, to reach out to these
governments and chastise them while we still haven't come to terms with
what our own inquiries have revealed need to be done. We have to come to
terms, and the obvious thing is to settle up and provide open evidence
that the 23 recommendations of Justice O'Connor have been applied and,
where there is an obvious application, that those same
recommendations—for example an apology and compensation—be applied to
the three men who were the subject to the Iacobucci inquiry.
(0935)
Thank you very much, sir.
Ms. Heafey, please.
[Translation]
Mrs. Shirley Heafey (Board Member, British Columbia Civil Liberties Association):
Good morning, Mr. Chair and committee members.
I am representing the British
Columbia Civil Liberties Association this morning. I am currently the
Public Complaint Director for the Calgary Police Commission in Alberta.
Today, I will be giving you my
professional expertise, my first-hand experience. I spent five years
conducting inquiries on national security. So I know the security
service and the way it operates very well. I also know the difficulties
the members face in their daily work.
For eight years, until 2006, I was
chair of the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP. I know
the RCMP culture well. It is a culture that forces its members to
preserve the prestige of the RCMP at all costs, certainly at the cost of
their accountability to the public that the RCMP has to serve.
[English]
The previous government had the
courage to call an inquiry into the rendition of Maher Arar. Just so you
know, prior to the inquiry being called, I initiated a complaint as
chair of the Commission for Public Complaints in Mr. Arar's case. Months
later I received a two- to three-page letter in response to the calling
of the investigation, saying yes, there had been a few little
administrative glitches, but everything had been done well. Knowing what
you know about the Arar inquiry, I think that has to bring up a lot of
questions about the RCMP's ability to look at themselves and to examine
themselves when something goes wrong.
The present government also showed a
lot of courage in calling on Mr. Brown to conduct some studies and look
at the culture and structure of the RCMP, and he declared the RCMP badly
broken. Those were his words.
I have talked about the courage of
successive governments in taking some action in shedding light on the
problems of the RCMP as well as other agencies involved in national
security activities. Now the real test comes when there is enough
courage shown by this government, by opposition parties, to bring down
the iconic RCMP from its high horse and make it truly answerable for the
use of its extraordinary powers, the inadequacy of its training, its
outdated policies, and its shameless culture of arrogance and
superiority.
As you can tell, after many years of
struggling to have the RCMP be accountable--I was chair for eight years
and a part-time member for two years, so I was involved with the RCMP
for ten years all told--I'm not very good at soft-pedalling my views,
because they're based on first-hand experience and a very frustrating
experience. Just like everybody else, I grew up looking up to the RCMP,
and the biggest shock was being there and looking at what they were
doing and having my bubble burst every week, every day I was there. It
was a huge disappointment.
But what bothered me equally was that
the rank-and-file members were really badly served by the unfair and
callous way in which they were treated. It was something I worked on as
well, but it wasn't something that was welcomed by the leadership at the
time. The members--and I think you will probably have seen some of that
in the inquiry that's going on in Vancouver--make a mistake, they're
put out to sea, and they're on their own. It isn't fair to the rank and
file. I think if there was more answerability, more accountability all
around, the members would be better for it, and they would be treated
better, certainly, the rank and file, who I admire very much.
I've been on the board of directors
of the BCCLA since my departure from the complaints commission, and my
involvement with the RCMP has continued, because we have made complaints
about all the deaths in custody that have taken place in the past three
years. We've also made a complaint about the RCMP income trust
investigation during the election prior to the last one. We've been
intervenors in the Braidwood inquiry in Vancouver regarding the tasering
of Mr. Dziekanski and his subsequent death. Our involvement in these
cases has elicited generally dismissive and arrogant responses. We have
not received anything of substance, and actually one of the unfortunate
responses came from the commissioner himself.
(0940)
Despite the promises of change in
the RCMP, I can tell you that as far as we have seen, nothing has
changed. There's been no evidence of any change whatsoever, just based
on the kinds of responses and the kind of cooperation we get when we
make a complaint. Our goal is to work with them and to do what we can.
Our organization, our association, tries to work with the police, and
it's not working. It's not working with the RCMP. Up until today, it's
still not working.
I am not referring to the dedicated
rank and file. These members are dedicated. It's not a matter of the
people in the organization. There is a culture that draws new members,
who come in and are very dedicated. They have to preserve the culture
and prestige of the RCMP at all costs. They do regard themselves as.... I
am with the Calgary Police Commission at this point. The RCMP works
with the Calgary police. I've been involved in some of the joint
investigations as an observer, and it's very clear that there is an
approach of superiority that really offends most police services, and I
see it again today.
Lack of accountability does not serve
the RCMP well. This is quite a personal experience that I had. During
the Arar inquiry, the deputy director of CSIS, Mr. Jack Hooper,
confirmed his initial resistance. When SIRC was first set up, he was my
worst nightmare. I was the first investigator at SIRC who had to go into
their files and look at their files. No other civilian eyes had looked
upon these files before. He was in charge of liaison, and he resisted
for almost a year and gave me nothing but problems. During the Arar
inquiry, he confirmed that yes, he did resist, but he realized after
about a year, and to this day, that they're a better organization as a
result of the civilian oversight. I think that says a lot. He went even
further; he said the RCMP would be a better organization with adequate
civilian oversight.
Justice O'Connor provided a formula
for accountability for not only the RCMP but also for all the other
agencies involved in national security operations. The chair of the
Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, Mr. Paul Kennedy, was
here just recently. In his testimony before you, he talked about his
inability to oversee the RCMP activities and a lot of the conduct that's
complained about. It was déjà vu for me, because everything he said I
had lived through while I was at the commission. As a matter of fact, in
my annual reports during that time I often called upon Parliament for
help, and I talked to ministers to ask for help, because I couldn't get
the information to respond to complaints. There were all kinds of other
issues that members of Parliament were involved with, and this wasn't
urgent, I suppose, so nothing happened.
I went to Federal Court on two
occasions to ask the court to help me, because I had no place else to
turn and I couldn't get the information. There were two decisions in the
Federal Court, and I can provide the references. You'll see in there
that both the trial division and the appeal court said that it's not
possible for you to do your job, that this legislation is outdated, that
there are too many difficulties, and that it is the RCMP that decides
whether you'll get the information and what information you'll get. My
own comment is that it's like putting the fox in charge of the chicken
coop: they would get to decide what I would see or what I would not see.
(0945)
Both courts said it's up to
Parliament to bring about these changes, that they could not do it: “we
interpret the law and agree with everything you're saying, but we are
not the legislators, so you have to call on Parliament to do this.”
Ms. Pither, please.
Mrs. Kerry Pither (Human rights advocate and author, As an Individual):
My
name is Kerry Pither. I've been working on these cases now for more
than six years, and my work isn't over yet. When I first started working
on these cases, I had been asked by Monia Mazigh to help her in her
campaign for the release of her husband, Mahar Arar. That was in May
2003.
I didn't realize, when I first came
in to join that work.... There were questions about the involvement of
Canadian agencies, but at the time it was mostly believed in Canada that
this was the fault of the United States. Several years later, we now
know of course that it was the actions of Canadian officials that led to
the U.S. decision to send him to Syria for torture, and that it wasn't
just Maher Arar, that there were three other Maher Arars: Ahmad El
Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin. That complete picture
would take several years and courageous decisions by all four men to go
public—tell their stories publicly and demand answers publicly—and two
judicial inquiries to uncover.
The picture is this. Four Canadians,
all targeted by the same RCMP investigation and by CSIS, all end up
being interrogated and tortured at the hands of the same Syrian
interrogation team, and in the case of Mr. Almalki by an Egyptian
interrogation team, and all of them being imprisoned at the Palestine
branch of the Syrian military intelligence.
All have described in gut-wrenching
detail how, among other unspeakable atrocities, they were whipped with
cables, and in the case of Mr. El Maati subjected to electric shock. Mr.
Almalki has described being restrained so that he could be whipped with
cables in a car tire. He's described what it was like to survive daily
life for 17 months in a dark, underground cell the shape of a grave:
three feet wide, six feet tall, seven feet deep. Mr. El Maati has
described what it was like to spend almost all of the two years and two
months that he was detained in solitary confinement and in wretched
conditions, and how at times, with his hands locked behind his back, he
was forced to eat like an animal off the floor. Mr. Nureddin has
described how his Syrian interrogators would periodically stop whipping
his feet to douse them with cold water, to ensure that the nerves were
working and that the pain was intense.
All of these men, while being
subjected to this torture, were being asked questions provided by
Canadian officials or based on information provided by Canadian
officials. And here we are today, almost six years after I first became
involved and seven years and four months after the torture began for Mr.
El Maati, pushing for changes that will stop this from happening again.
I urge the committee to urge the
Government of Canada to do two things. First, I agree with my fellow
presenters here today that the Government of Canada must be called upon
to provide a public, detailed accounting of how each and every one of
the recommendations in the Arar enquiry's factual report has been
implemented. In doing so, the committee must examine how those
recommendations need to be augmented in light of the findings of the
Iacobucci enquiry, which was not mandated to make recommendations on its
own, and to ensure that those augmented and additional steps are taken.
For example, the Iacobucci enquiry
has determined that it wasn't just the RCMP that provided questions to
Syrian interrogators; it was CSIS too. Justice O'Connor's recommendation
that his recommendations be examined by CSIS for applicability to their
actions must be taken doubly seriously, given the findings of the
Iacobucci report.
Recommendation 21 in Justice
O'Connor's report called on the Canadian government to pull back the
border lookouts issued for Ms. Mazigh and for their children. Today, Mr.
Almalki's family is experiencing the same kinds of problems that Ms.
Mazigh and her and Maher's children experienced. They too appear to have
been placed on border lookouts. On March 4, Mr. Abdullah Almalki's
14-year-old son was subjected to a body search while leaving Canada to
visit his mother's native home, Malaysia, and his wife was subjected to a
body search as well.
They were told they were on a no-fly
list. They carried with them—and this is a pretty heavy thing to have to
carry around in addition to your passport—the Iacobucci report. They
convinced the authorities to let them onto the plane after reading a
section of the report that said that the allegations against Mr. Almalki
had been inaccurate, unfounded, and inflammatory. The authorities
agreed and let them board their plane.
(0950)
Justice O'Connor's 22nd
recommendation does two very important things. It calls on the Canadian
government to register formal objections with the United States. In
Syria, of course, the same thing now must be done. In light of the
Iacobucci findings, formal objections must be registered with the
governments of Syria and Egypt for the torture they inflicted on three
Canadians.
The second thing Justice O'Connor
calls for in recommendation 22 is for the RCMP to inform American
agencies of any caveats that should have been applied to information
shared and were not, and, very importantly, to correct any inaccurate
information provided to the Americans about Mr. Arar.
In the Elmaati, Almalki, and
Nureddin cases, Justice Iacobucci finds numerous examples of how
inaccurate and inflammatory information was shared about them, not just
by the RCMP but by CSIS too, and not just with the United States, Syria,
and Egypt, but with numerous other countries, many of which are not
even specified in Justice Iacobucci's report. The consequence, of
course, is that it makes it very risky, if not impossible, for these men
to travel safely.
In sum, Justice O'Connor says of
information shared about Mr. Arar that “inaccuracies should be corrected
and caveats attached”. The same must happen for information and
allegations shared about Messieurs Elmaati, Almalki, and Nureddin.
Another recommendation that needs to
be considered in light of Justice Iacobucci's report is Justice
O'Connor's 23rd recommendation, which called on the government to assess
Mr. Arar’s claim for compensation in the light of his report and
respond accordingly. I agree. The same should be done for Messieurs
Elmaati, Almalki, and Nureddin. He encouraged a creative approach to
mediating a settlement that could involve an apology.
I urge the members of this committee
to recommend that the Government of Canada do the same as it did for
Maher Arar, which was the right thing to do, and apologize officially to
Mr. Elmaati, Mr. Almalki, and Mr. Nureddin for its role in their
detention and torture. An apology, of course, is an important signal to
the men themselves, to all Canadians, and to the world that someone,
somewhere, feels remorse and that officially, at least, the Government
of Canada regrets the role it played in the torture of its own citizens.
The third, and in some ways the most
important, step the committee must urge the government to take is to
insist that the Government of Canada recognize that Justice O'Connor's
factual recommendations were designed to work in concert with the review
mechanism he recommended in his policy review report. As he says at the
start of the recommendations in his factual report:
|
The recommendations are operational in nature and are
intended to complement those made in the Policy Review report, which are
directed at providing a robust independent, arm’s-length mechanism for
the review of the RCMP’s national security activities. Such a mechanism
is essential for ensuring that those activities remain consistent with
Canadian values and principles. |
His recommendations rely, he says
repeatedly, on an expectation on the part of the RCMP and others
involved in national security investigations that “the legality of their
actions will be reviewed”. The RCMP may well have taken steps to ensure
the appropriate distinction between their law enforcement work and that
of CSIS, as Justice O'Connor recommends in his first recommendation,
but as Justice O'Connor says in that recommendation, it is the role of
the review body to make sure that remains the case.
Justice O'Connor calls for more
ministerial directives to provide guidance for national security
investigations. He says they should be made very public. There's no
evidence that many of those have been issued, which may be the
explanation for the fact that no one has missed the role the independent
review mechanism was to play here in ensuring adherence to those
ministerial directives.
The RCMP says that it has adhered to
Justice O'Connor's recommendations that call for centralized control of
information sharing. The point of that centralized control was to
provide “an appropriate level of accountability, thereby facilitating
review”. The review isn't taking place.
Then, perhaps, the best example is
recommendation 10, of course, which says, “The RCMP’s
information-sharing practices and arrangements should be subject to
review by an independent, arm's-length review body”. Maybe that's the
recommendation, the mysterious number 23 that we're not sure of, that
hasn't been recommended yet, because of course there is no independent,
arm's-length, effective body in place.
In summary, you can't just go
halfway. I'm certain that were Justice O'Connor to have known that his
recommendation on review was not going to be implemented, he would have
written a very different set of recommendations for his factual report.
(0955)
The others here have talked about
why this mechanism is so important. I come back again to Mr.
Abdelrazik's case and echo Mr. Neve's concerns: where is this man to
turn when he comes home and has questions to ask about what happened to
him?
Mr. Chair, committee members, it has
now been seven years, four months, and ten days since the sequence of
events began and Ahmad Abou Elmaati was detained, whipped with cables,
and asked questions based on Canadian information. It's long past due
time for Canada to put all the measures in place that will stop this
from happening again.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all very much for your testimony.
As is the usual practice, we will
turn to the official opposition for seven minutes of questions and
comments.
Mr. Holland, please.
Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for appearing today.
I'd like to start by thanking the
people here and those who are not who have been the victims of the
failures that we're talking about today for their courage to come
forward, and say how profoundly sorry I am that Mr. Elmaati, Mr.
Almalki, Mr. Nureddin, and Mr. Arar went through the terrible ordeal
they went through. Ms. Pither, thank you for bringing that to light,
just in terms of the personal story, because I think when we're talking
about oversight on some of these elements we can get lost in the
theoretical concepts and forget what the real-life consequences are for
Canadian citizens who went through horrors we can never imagine.
I want to start, if I could, on the
issue of oversight. We had Mr. Kennedy before our committee talking
about the two handcuffs that he has to tie his hand behind his back. I'm
going to come to Ms. Heafey first, if I can, because as chair of two
different bodies with this responsibility, particularly the public
complaints commission, Mr. Kennedy is bound on the one hand by
legislative restraints that you were referring to and on the other hand
by a lack of resources and funding. In fact, not only are we seeing the
government not implement Justice O'Connor's recommendations to enhance
oversight, which were reinforced by Mr. Iacobucci, but we're now
actually seeing funding cuts. We saw a massive reduction in the
additional money that had been given to Mr. Kennedy's office.
I wonder if you can talk about the
implications of cutting that funding. I think you very clearly spelled
out the legislative restraints, but I'm wondering if you can talk about
the fiscal restraints and what this loss of money means, and how the
fiscal side of things presents a challenge.
(1000)
Mrs. Shirley Heafey:
With
every organization, there are never enough funds, so I'm not going to
dwell on that in a lot of depth. My experience was that if the RCMP had
cooperated, if they hadn't made my job so very difficult.... I mentioned
earlier that I went to court twice. Now, can you imagine the amount of
time and energy and the expense this took? If I'd been allowed to do my
job without all that struggle, I would not have been complaining so much
about the money. A lot of the expenses were just struggling on a daily
basis to do my work.
There's never enough funding. There's
never enough. So my experience was that it would have been a lot
easier, and I would not have been complaining about funding, if I'd been
able to do my job and not spend days and days and resources just
struggling and begging and trying to negotiate and trying to get what I
needed to do the job.
I
want to come back to the comment that Mr. Neve made. I believe it was
you who was talking about the challenges that we have when there's no
collective oversight, no ability to go cross-agency. We had somebody
here from SIRC—and in fairness to them, they were lower down on the food
chain, so they probably didn't have permission to speak more freely—who
said they didn't really have an issue with that.
But it seems impossible to me that
you have the public complaints commission, which has just had its
funding slashed by 40%, which doesn't have the legislative mandate to be
able to actually compel information and do proactive work, and in many
cases you have to have public inquiries at an astounding additional
cost. So I'm wondering if you could just talk about that problem, Mr.
Neve, of not being able to go beyond just your own agency. Forget all
those additional constraints I'm talking about—just the ability to
follow the bouncing ball as it works its way through different agencies
and what different failures and mistakes might have been.
Mr. Alex Neve:
Absolutely. In addition to the revelations that already were quite well
known, I think, before Justice O'Connor did his work--the fact that the
Commission for Public Complaints, for instance, had inadequate powers--I
think the most stark and important lesson about review and oversight
that emerges from looking at these four cases and reviewing Justice
O'Connor's report is that we need an integrated, comprehensive approach.
This work happens, as well it should,
in a coordinated way amongst police and security agencies. They do work
together. Canadians would want and would expect them to be working
together. How, therefore, can we not have a review process that responds
similarly? A review process that continues to take a silo approach,
looking separately at each of the multitude of different agencies--Mr.
Allmand listed the many different departments and agencies involved in
national security work in Canada now--will be contradictory. It will
involve turf battles. It will miss all sorts of issues that fall between
the cracks. And we simply can't risk that.
Amnesty International, along with, I
think, many of the organizations that were involved in the Arar inquiry,
had actually urged Justice O'Connor to go further in his report and
recommend that the government set up a new formal institution that would
be actually an integrated review agency for all of those different
bodies. He hasn't gone that far, and has maintained separate review
bodies. But he has, very importantly, called on there being a committee
that in an overarching way coordinates and integrates how those bodies
are reviewed. We view that as essential.
(1005)
Mr.
Kafieh had talked about the impact of not having this oversight and not
having somebody to go to. He talked about the impact on particularly
Arab and Muslim Canadians who don't feel there's anywhere they can turn.
They find it difficult to trust these institutions. They don't have
that independent oversight.
But there is the other side of that
coin, and I want to come back to some comments you made, Ms. Heafey,
that I think are extremely important and aren't talked about
enough--namely, the benefits to the agency itself. When we're talking
about public trust in an institution, if you don't have the independent
oversight that has the full legislative power to do what it needs to do
to probe into these cases proactively, it hurts these agencies, doesn't
it? You mentioned it with regard to SIRC, but there's also the RCMP.
Do you feel that if the RCMP had
this, it would be much stronger as an agency, and public opinion of it
would be much stronger? Perhaps you would just comment on that.
You have time for a brief response.
Mrs. Shirley Heafey:
I truly believe the RCMP would be a much better police service if it were accountable.
I have the experience right now of
being counsel and public complaint director at the Calgary Police
Commission. I never have to spend any time struggling to do my job. They
are there. They are accountable. Just recently, as an example, we
conducted a survey, and the Calgary Police Service had 89% approval from
its citizens. I think that says a lot. I think any police service in
this country would be very pleased to have that kind of result.
That's the kind of impact that would
come from accountability. If you know you're going to be checked...and
this is what happened with CSIS. When they figured out that we were
going to be there, that we were going to be looking at their files, that
we were going to be auditing, everything changed. I saw it over the
course of five years. By the time I left, it was a different
organization.
In my view, there's no question it would make the RCMP a stronger and a better police service.
Monsieur Ménard.
[Translation]
I
must say that it is quite discouraging to listen to what you are
saying, even though I was prepared for it. Clearly, we insisted on
holding these hearings because we knew perfectly well that the rate of
implementing these recommendations was 10% to 15%, maybe a bit more.
Among the clearest recommendations was to recognize the wrongs done to
Maher Arar; again, that was explicit. I agree with you entirely that,
just because it was explicit in Maher Arar's case, it does not need to
be in the other three cases.
I get the message loud and clear that
the most important thing to tackle, the key thing that will have most
effect, is to set up a single surveillance organization, as the
Iacobucci Report recommended. It is my impression—and, frankly, my
reputation is not as the most partisan politician, far from it—that
while the present government is in place, little will be done to set up
mechanisms for real change. It is my impression that the government
feels that the police and the secret services have a difficult and
essential task to fulfill—and I agree completely—which, when it comes to
getting information from a terrorist, inevitably requires the use of
tough measures that cannot be revealed to the public. So we have to make
arrangements with countries that do not share the same ideals as we do,
but whose police forces are more effective.
I really do not know where to start. I
could have hundreds of questions for you. But they are not so much for
you as for the government. Government representatives will give us the
same answers: they have implemented 90% of the recommendations. But
looking at the precise details in these recommendations, it is easy to
conclude that almost nothing has been done.
I will ask you one question, though. I
really understood the messages everyone sent us very clearly and I hope
the government understood them too. But it is my impression that there
is no political will to put them into effect.
Mr. Kafieh, you represent, and speak
the language of, communities who, I am convinced, should be cooperating
with Canadian authorities if we want to protect ourselves from terrorist
attacks. You know people who speak the language, who know the habits,
who know the milieu, and who, I am sure, would be only too pleased to
help the police if the police were at all well-disposed toward them.
Do you think that I am kidding myself
by thinking that, in your communities, people might well want to help
the police but are reluctant to do so because it is a huge risk to take?
Adil Charkaoui, in Montreal, for example, told us something that is not
a common occurrence, I hope. His problems started when the police asked
him to cooperate and give them information. His reply was that he did
not want to take the risk and that he did not have information anyway.
The police reaction was to tell him to watch out in case anything
happened, and we saw what did happen to him.
I am not sure if your community
really wants to cooperate with the police, given those huge
difficulties. How do you think you would be received, if you did?
(1010)
[English]
Mr. James Kafieh:
In
principle, we are absolutely dedicated to the security of this country.
We are the first people who are likely to be targeted by a terrorist
attack. We're going to get it in terms of one end or the other. When the
Oklahoma Murrah Building was blown up, within minutes commentators on
television were blaming Middle Eastern groups. So right away they came
after Arab and Muslim Canadians, or Muslims in North America. They
wouldn't do this for other ethnicities. It turned out McVeigh was the
name of the person who was responsible for it. They didn't begin
profiling Irish and Scottish Canadians with names similar to the
bomber's. It was something unique. It's a form of anti-Semitism against
Arab and Muslim Semites that's still socially acceptable in Canada. So
there is a real problem.
In terms of credibility, there is a
problem with CSIS. For example, they often counsel people that they
don't need a lawyer. They come to the door and basically surprise people
at their doorstep with stories that are simply not credible. I can go
into detail for you, but it's as if they're doing a customer service
survey regarding things that the Department of Foreign Affairs and
International Trade have done, and there's no reason for them to just
knock randomly on the door of the person they come to. In one specific
case, they came and they told a Lebanese Canadian that they wanted to
know what his opinion was on Canada's effort to evacuate Lebanese
Canadians during the war in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah. This
person wasn't part of it. His family wasn't part of it. He had nothing
to do with it, and the whole idea that CSIS would be going to do that
kind of research simply was not credible.
There are also accounts such as
you've described where Arab Canadians and Muslim Canadians are subjected
to officers who are exploiting the stereotypes of secret police to
force people to cooperate. If they don't, there's a clear understanding
that there will be retribution, such as immigration clearances for
family members will be held up. They are held up for years and there are
people who have enormous problems. This is not something that engenders
a sense of confidence when security is being handled on this level.
There is a profound concern in the
community, but most people will still meet CSIS alone, although I think
it's ill-advised. It's a problem because CSIS will talk to people and
they will be interested in people because they're either a source of
information or a security risk. In either case, you don't know which way
you're going to end up in the context of your having great doubts as to
whether this officer at your doorstep is there for your benefit and
your protection or whether they are there to gather information and open
a file on you that will endanger your life when you travel overseas. So
this is a very difficult thing.
In our brochure the main thing we
tell people right from the beginning is that if they know anything that
could be a threat to the security of Canada, they should inform the
authorities immediately.
(1015)
We're going to have to end that there. Thank you.
Mr. Harris, please.
I want to thank all of the presenters
here today. As someone new to this committee and new to a lot of the
intricate details of not only what happened to these four individuals
but also to the Canadian government response, or lack thereof, despite
the strong recommendations--it's quite a shock--I think all Canadians
who are exposed to these details have to be questioning how it is that
our government hasn't done what's necessary to restore confidence.
It seems to me there are at least two
or three overriding questions that need to be answered, and perhaps you
can help us. We've seen the model proposed by Justice O'Connor as a
solution recognizing that the SIRC model seems to be acceptable for
oversight of the RCMP, although SIRC, as Mr. Allmand says and Justice
O'Connor says, ought to be given authority over other agencies. Is that
SIRC model for oversight of a particular agency acceptable, or are there
problems with that as well? I say that knowing that perhaps an
oversight body is not going to solve all the problems, because Mr.
Kafieh is talking about CSIS doing things with the flimsiest of evidence
and going after people despite the fact that we do have a SIRC
oversight body in place with regard to CSIS. So I'm wondering if
oversight is going to solve all our problems. Or do we have other
problems that need to go beyond that?
Would anyone care to respond to that?
Hon. Warren Allmand:
Well, no, you need the implementation of the 23 recommendations, plus the comprehensive review body.
The International Civil Liberties
Monitoring Group, like Amnesty International, proposes something
stronger than what O'Connor proposed. We felt they needed a
comprehensive oversight review body that could look at any of the
agencies that might be involved in joint operations.
As it is right now, these various
review bodies are directed at one agency. You have the many new joint
operations, the INSETs, the integrated approach, which includes not only
federal.... Judge O'Connor found there were 24 federal agencies that
are directly or indirectly involved in security and intelligence, but
now with these integrated teams they are working with city police forces
and provincial police forces as well. So when mistakes are made and you
have three review agencies with different powers and they must focus on
the one agency, how do they really get the truth out of what was an
integrated operation? That's the problem.
At the very minimum, you need what
Judge O'Connor proposed with this comprehensive committee that would
oversee the general security field and receive the complaints. He points
out that the complaints must go to that committee. When something
happens to him or her, the citizen doesn't know whether it was done by
the RCMP, CSIS, the OPP, or the Canada Border Services Agency. They
would give the complaint to this comprehensive oversight body, and that
new body, which would be set up with the powers of subpoena and so on,
would say it should go to the RCMP and so on.
The other important thing is that
this review body must not only have the right to deal with complaints,
but it must also have the right to initiate audits when there appears to
be a systemic problem within that agency. SIRC has that power, but the
CPC does not. When Judge Antonio Lamer, who was the commissioner of the
Communications Security Establishment, left his job, he also said he
didn't have the powers to do his job. More recently, I think his
replacement has said the same in his annual report.
You need a comprehensive, overarching
review agency that has the powers to receive complaints and audit to
cover the whole field. The reason that Judge O'Connor was so successful
in getting to the bottom of the Arar case is that he could look
everywhere. He had the full powers of subpoena, and he could deal with
things in camera. He got the answers. But none of the existing review
bodies have those powers.
O'Connor proposes that we have that
structure, with the three agencies plus a committee over it. But that is
the minimum. You could even go further if you want a more efficient
type of body.
(1020)
It has been suggested by some that
the Government of Canada needs to look at agencies around the world for
examples before deciding what kind of oversight body to put in place.
I'm a bit surprised by that, because I understand that Justice O'Connor
did a very comprehensive review.
Mr. Neve, would you be able to comment on that?
Mr. Alex Neve:
My reaction
would be that this is a very laudable goal but it has been done.
Justice O'Connor made that a central part of his efforts to decide the
best review mechanism for Canada. He drew on expertise in a number of
other countries. His staff spent time in other countries investigating
that. So it has been done, and it plays a central role in the kind of
recommendation he put forward.
Maybe
this is not something a review body would deal with, but something
that's part of a culture or operation within these organizations.
Mr. Kafieh, you talked about CSIS
showing up at your doorstep, and I've read Ms. Pither's book, which
talks about the extent, for example, of surveillance and following
people around. They seem to have unlimited resources to follow people
around with the flimsiest of evidence. Is that something that can be
avoided? Does oversight help that at all, or is there another problem
that we might have?
You have one minute for a response.
Mr. James Kafieh:
If you
have resources wasted because you're following people without a
foundation for doing so, then you're not doing your job properly; you're
not protecting Canadians. If you're not tailing people without some
substantial reason to be tailing them, you are wasting the intelligence
security resources of the country. How does that make any of us safer?
Mr. Rathgeber.
My thanks to all the witnesses, for both their passion their expertise.
Mr. Neve, you opened your
presentation by indicating that states have a positive duty to preserve
human rights. I certainly agree with this premise, as do all members, I
am sure, on both sides of this committee. But one of the overriding
mechanisms that I've heard from all of your presentations has to do with
civilian oversight. We've heard different issues regarding a perceived
lack of oversight. We also heard from Mr. Kennedy, from the RCMP
Complaints Commission. He mentioned the legislative restraints and
budgetary and funding restraints necessary for that oversight body to do
its job properly. And Mr. Holland, to judge by his questions, certainly
agrees with Mr. Kennedy.
The disconnect that I have, however,
is that civilian oversight, by its very definition and by the way it's
set up, reviews matters after the fact, not dissimilar to how the two
judicial inquiries did their job, and not unlike what we're doing here
today. We're analyzing what happened and what went wrong, months and
years after the events. If these oversight committees were integrated,
and if they were given all the budgets they required, how would that
prevent a specific occurrence, which happens immediately? The decisions
concerning these four individuals didn't take weeks and months and
years; they were made within minutes, or certainly within hours. So how
could an oversight committee—if empowered, as you were lobbying for it
to be empowered—prevent the unfortunate events that happened to these
four individuals?
I'm hoping that Mr. Neve, and perhaps Mr. Allmand, might be able to help me out here.
(1025)
Mr. Alex Neve:
I'll
suggest two key considerations, but others may have more to add. The
first has to do with deterrent value. If it starts to become known that
those bodies exist, and that even if it is after the fact, those bodies
are going to take a hard look at what's happened in a particular case
and take action, that's going to deter wrongdoing. It's going to deter
abuses, and it's also going to lead to the development of best
practices. What goes wrong in cases isn't always about individuals
wanting to abuse human rights. I think we would all hope and expect
that, in a Canadian context, that's far from the usual case. It's often
because there's a lack of guidance, unclear training, improper policies
in place. Through ongoing review, these areas can be identified and
remedied. So there's a deterrent piece to it.
The other consideration is that we
have to recognize, unfortunately, that many of these cases don't play
out in the course of a weekend, or even a few short days. All of the
cases you're looking at played out over many long months. So if there
had been a clear place to go, for family members, for instance, one,
two, four, five months into some of these tragedies, there might have
been an opportunity to get a review agency involved in looking into what
was happening, even while things were still unfolding. It might not
have avoided the initial arrest and detention, but it might have offered
an opportunity to identify bad practices that were prolonging the
detention, which might have brought those tragedies to an earlier end.
Mr. Allmand.
Hon. Warren Allmand:
The
agency that's been proposed for review by Judge O'Connor would do two
things: it would receive complaints and investigate them, and it would
have the power to initiate audits. I agree with Alex that the agency's
being there with full powers would have a deterrent effect. As Shirley
Heafey pointed out, in Calgary, because the police know that they are so
ineffective, they cooperate and they have a high approval rating. If it
became known to the agency that the RCMP was still sharing information
without caveats, they could launch an audit themselves, without
complaints. This way they could find out what was really happening with
sharing information, and also with the processes for checking up on
accuracy and relevancy with respect to labelling.
That's why it is not only the review
agency that is important, but also the implementation of the 23
recommendations. Although we have the letter from Minister Van Loan
saying that they have implemented 22 out of 23, there's really no
information there to say.... I think members of Parliament and the
public need to know exactly what is going on with respect to the
recommendations, whether they should be verified or screened for
relevancy and accuracy. How are you going to make sure that we're not
going to get people labelled as Islamic extremists when they're not
Islamic extremists?
So it's not just the review; it's also the 23 recommendations. This is very important.
On that point, with respect to the exchange of information--and the 24
Canadian agencies that share information--I heard from a number of
witnesses--primarily you, Mr. Allmand--that in these four incidents, it
contributed to the atrocities.
But I'm curious. Doesn't this sharing
of information on occasion prevent inaccurate information? For example,
if one policing agency had information on an individual--and I'm asking
this question hypothetically and not in regard to these four
individuals--and the rest of the agencies were not able to confirm or
back that up, wouldn't the sharing of information among agencies perhaps
solve a problem, as opposed to contributing to one?
(1030)
Hon. Warren Allmand:
O'Connor
did not find that, and he looked at everything. He found, for example,
once A-O Canada had labelled Mr. Arar and his wife as extremist
Islamists associated with al-Qaeda, and that information was shipped to
the United States, the Americans receiving the shared information relied
on it.
There were others. I point out that
this wasn't the only misinformation that was sent respecting Mr. Arar.
So it's very difficult, for example, for these police forces. Anyway,
that won't work.
I didn't do the work; Judge O'Connor
did. It took him three years, and he says we need a comprehensive
oversight. We all worked in the field as intervenors, and we firmly
support that.
Mrs. Kerry Pither:
I would
just add very briefly that one of the recommendations Justice O'Connor
made was that the inaccurate information shared about Mr. Arar be
corrected, and that caveats that weren't attached to the information
that was shared be attached now. The same has to be done for the other
cases, and I think that would be an example of how with the right
controls and that ongoing review and audit, information-sharing could
indeed do as you're proposing and correct inaccuracies. It certainly
didn't happen. As Mr. Allmand has pointed out, Justice O'Connor found no
evidence of that taking place. And to date we have no concrete examples
of how those steps have been taken, if they have, with respect to Mr.
Elmaati, Mr. Almalki, and Mr. Nureddin, despite findings from....
I think what happened to Mr.
Almalki's family earlier this month shows that the inaccurate
information and those allegations, which had no basis--and who knows
what the allegations against his family are--continue to keep his family
on those lists.
So you're right, that is an important
role for the agencies to play, with sufficient oversight and mechanisms
in place. I would just add that as I said in my presentation, and as
Mr. Neve raised, as did Justice O'Connor, the deterrent factor is
important. The officers and officials must expect that the legality of
their actions will be reviewed. Having that expectation in place was
part of his vision for the 23 recommendations.
Thank you to all the witnesses.
Mr. Oliphant, please.
Thank you all, not only for today but for all you've been doing.
This question could be for all of
you. How often do you pray, where do you pray, with whom do you pray,
and where do you go after you pray? You're all welcome to answer it.
Mr. James Kafieh:
I'd like to answer that.
The point is that I recently had
experience with SIRC. I went through it, and the reason, in part, was
because a person, during a security screening interview, was asked
personal opinion questions. The person was an Arab Canadian, an airport
worker, and they were asked, “What do you think of the Palestinian
Authority? Why do you think they can't achieve peace, or do you think
they'll ever be able to achieve peace? Do you think it's okay for the
government to describe some organizations as terrorist organizations?”
The person wasn't applying to be a
foreign policy analyst. They were a customer service representative with
a major airline. That was their job. What was interesting--and it ties
into this business of compartmentalization--was that we argued that this
was a violation of section 2 of the charter. They have a right to have
these beliefs, as long as they're legally held. There is no correlation
between having these beliefs and criminality.
The government argued at SIRC that
SIRC lacked jurisdiction to deal with the charter, that they were
limited to looking at the specific enabling legislation for CSIS, and
that the requirement to look at political beliefs comes from the
government security policy and that's from Treasury Board, and SIRC had
no jurisdiction to look at anything the Treasury Board produced.
So this compartmentalization is
exploited. This is why there has to be an overarching agency that will
review all these things.
(1035)
Hon. Warren Allmand:
The
question you ask is related to an understanding of the religious
practices of different religious groups in Canada, particularly Muslims.
Judge O'Connor said that the A-O Canada group that was investigating
was not properly trained and did not have the experience to do the
investigation for this type of work. That's why the McDonald commission,
in 1981, recommended that the RCMP get out of security and intelligence
and set up a new group. You would recruit and train people who have the
education and background, know about international affairs, know about
the different cultures of different groups in Canada, and know religious
practices and understand them.
The people in the RCMP are very good
at police investigation, criminal law enforcement, provincial policing,
and so on, but when they get into security and intelligence, they
haven't the training or the background to assess what is or is not
really important. They ask people questions such as whether they go to
the mosque and why they pray. That becomes something suspicious. It goes
back to the recommendation, one of the 23, with respect to the training
and recruitment of people for security and intelligence.
There's
no way I wanted this to be trite at all. It is an issue I live with
every day as a member of Parliament for Don Valley West. I'm dealing
every day with people who encounter CSIS agents, who frankly, I believe,
have too much time on their hands to be doing what they're doing.
That's an operational problem.
I want to follow up on what Mr.
Harris and Mr. Rathgeber said, as well. And don't get me wrong. I'm
completely supportive of Mr. O'Connor and Mr. Iacobucci and of weaving
Mr. Iacobucci's recommendations into O'Connor's. Oversight is critical,
but best practices and operating principles have to also flow from an
understanding of human and civil rights. We can't wait for the mistake.
These are not unfortunate incidents.
They're not unfortunate; they're wrong. They're violations. I'm just
wondering whether you can comment--anybody can comment--on what best
practices and principles, leaving oversight aside, need to be put in
place to guarantee human rights on a day-to-day basis, whether it's
CBSA, CSIS, the RMCP or any of the other 21 agencies.
Mr. Van Loan may have given you a
letter, and I'm really anxious that our committee get a copy of it. We
need that letter.
On best practices, what can you add to that?
Chair: We have one minute.
Mrs. Kerry Pither:
I know
that you said putting oversight aside, but I just want to point out that
in recommendation 3(c), on training, Justice O'Connor recommends that
oversight bodies periodically review training curricula and assess the
adequacy of training in light of the complaints and reviews it's
receiving.
Mr. Harris asked earlier about what
difference it would have made then. Mr. Elmaati, at the time he received
a visit, was asked how many times he prayed, had been threatened with
the word meaning torture in Arabic, and was being followed by 14 cars at
a time all over Toronto. An allegation about him was in the media. He
tried to contact CSIS and couldn't. If that body had existed at the
time—he's one of your constituents, and he lives in your riding—he could
have gone and registered a complaint about that. That complaint could
have triggered a review of the day-to-day operational activities of the
agencies in question. I would just say that I don't think you can
separate them out. However, it is important to think of the practices
themselves.
Mr. Alex Neve:
I, too, was
going say training. You cannot overemphasize how important training on
exactly those issues of human rights and civil liberties is. We see time
after time, with various government agencies and departments in Canada
and around the world, that when it comes to the human rights part of the
training, whatever the context may be, it's kind of a one-hour module
at the end of everything else.
The best human rights training is
training that infuses every single moment and aspect of the training.
When they're doing operational training or scenario-based operational
training, human rights are an essential part of everything. Again,
coming back to the important observation Ms. Pither made about the
connection between all these other recommendations and the oversight
body and the kinds of audit provisions these oversight bodies would
have, these are the kinds of things they could look at through
oversight: How is training going? Is it adequate? Does it need to be
improved?
I'm sorry, but we're really running out of time.
Mr. Kafieh, do you have a 15-second response?
Mr. James Kafieh:
You have
to change the culture within these organizations. What the Iacobucci
report indicated is that they didn't really care how the information was
gotten and where it was gotten. All they cared about was that the
information was useful to them somehow.
When it comes to the culture, one of
the reasons Ahmad Abou-Elmaati was singled out for suspicion was that he
had a civil liberties guide on what to do if CSIS calls, which we
distributed as widely as we could.
(1040)
Mr. MacKenzie, please.
Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee.
My friend Mr. Ménard is generally
very non-partisan, and I appreciate his comments. But with respect to
his comment about the will of the particular government today, I'd like
to ask a couple of questions that might illustrate that these have been
long-term—they haven't only occurred in the last three years—and issues
have been raised.
Ms. Heafey, you indicated that you
were involved for eight years as complaints commissioner and that during
that time you brought a number of these issues before members of
Parliament and before ministers. I think your suggestion was that
nothing changed; that, as a matter of fact, perhaps roadblocks were put
up. You indicated that you went to the court on at least two occasions.
Maybe this is an unfair question to
ask, because you've been gone since 2005, but I think it's fair to say
that this government has not put up any roadblocks. And maybe the other
argument would be that changes have occurred—and I'm convinced they
have, when I read what the RCMP have sent to this committee as their
response to the O'Connor report, which I'm not sure my colleagues may
have read entirely yet—but you spent eight years with a previous
government, which you indicated did put up roadblocks.
Mrs. Shirley Heafey:
They
didn't put up roadblocks as such. There was just no support for what I
was doing, the difficulties that I faced. I talked about it in my annual
reports for years and tried to talk to members of Parliament as well.
The government did not support the commission, and it wasn't just the
government. I also spoke to other members of Parliament to try to get
some support, because it was very difficult, and I just never got any.
A lot of what was happening.... You
know now what happened with former Commissioner Zaccardelli and
everything that led up to it. Because I was dealing with complaints on a
daily basis and was dealing with the commissioner on a daily basis for
all kinds of reasons, it was clear that something was going to explode. I
didn't know when, but I knew it would. A lot of what I did was to try
to prevent that from happening by talking about it in my annual
report—not explicitly, but talking to the government explicitly and
talking to some members of Parliament about it. I was hoping that
somehow or other somebody would have the courage somewhere along the way
to tell the RCMP “enough already”, before things exploded.
Mrs. Kerry Pither:
I would
just add that the problems continue today and that we're seeing
problems emerging around Mr. Abdul Razzak's case. I don't think it's a
question of which government has done the good things or the bad things,
because the previous government called a full public inquiry into Mr.
Arar's case and your government called an inquiry, which wasn't so
public, into the other cases. Your government issued the very important
apology to Mr. Arar.
It's not a question of which party
and which government has done what. I think what has to happen now is
that whatever government is in place, that government must have the
courage to do what has been called for here, what has been called for in
two judicial inquiries and, as Mr. Neve has pointed out, by the United
Nations and in the International Commission of Jurists' report. This is
something that's essential and has to be implemented no matter who's in
power at the time.
That's
fair. I just wanted to have on the record that I believe this
government will make the necessary changes, contrary to my good friend
across the table.
Mr. Allmand, you were Solicitor
General in the seventies for a period of time. I think you mentioned
that this morning. At that time, what were the agencies you oversaw as
Solicitor General?
(1045)
Hon. Warren Allmand:
They
includued the RCMP, the National Parole Board, the Canadian Penitentiary
Service, the Security Service of the RCMP, because—
It was pre-CSIS, is that right?
Hon. Warren Allmand:
It was before CSIS.
Of course, I was four years as
Solicitor General, and I saw mistakes then by the security service,
mislabelling mistakes and so on. I could tell a lot of stories to the
committee of personal instances when we ran into problems of
mislabelling and so on. We tried to correct them, but that was a
different period of time. We did take steps to try to do things.
It was only later, after my period as
Solicitor General, that the RCMP got involved with the barn-burning and
the theft of documents from the APLQ. Then there was the inquiry in the
eighties by Judge McDonald from Alberta. He recommended that the RCMP
stick to criminal law enforcement and get out of security, and that the
new agency be set up. That was done by Mr. Mulroney's government in
1984.
During that period of time when you
were Solicitor General with the RCMP, were there any calls then for
civilian oversight? I mean, I do recall, and certainly I know, that
municipal policing in Canada had civilian oversight. Were there any
calls in those days for civilian oversight for the RCMP?
Hon. Warren Allmand:
No.
The big call in those days, when I was Solicitor General, was for the
potential unionization of the RCMP. We spent several years on it. There
was a strong push, especially by the RCMP in Ontario. The big issues in
the RCMP were for unionization. We finally set up, when I was Solicitor
General, the “div rep” system. It wasn't quite a union, but it provided
representation to the rank and file in the RCMP.
As well, there were a lot of problems
in the rank and file on the disciplining of men by sending them to the
Northwest Territories or some base when they didn't do exactly what....
So we set up a new system, which is still in place, to review the
discipline decisions against the men in the RCMP. But there was no major
problem at the time that called for that kind of oversight.
By the way, the parliamentary
committee--I was a member of the committee--was much more involved in
checking up on the RCMP through the estimates. And I as Solicitor
General was often called to the committee. At that time, I think it was
the justice committee. There wasn't a public safety committee. But we
were called quite often on various problems.
Ms. Mourani, please.
[Translation]
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.
You have given us a lot of information and a lot of questions have come
up. I have two quick questions for you.
Last March 5, the executive
director of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, Susan Pollack,
came to this committee. I asked her if CSIS had used, or still uses,
information obtained by torture. She answered, a little timidly, I felt,
that, on occasion, CSIS does use information obtained by torture.
I would like to know if you have any
information to confirm that, despite the reports that have been produced
and the recommendations that are still not implemented, CSIS or the
RCMP still, occasionally or regularly, use information obtained by
torture in their investigations? If so, are those agencies simply
subcontracting torture?
[English]
Mr. Alex Neve:
I can't
give you specific illustrations--for example, here is this piece of
information obtained under torture, used by CSIS in this way--but I can
certainly indicate that you're right; we have not heard a clear
repudiation of the use of torture by CSIS. We have instead heard
indications that they wouldn't use it on its own, that they would
certainly want to make sure that it was confirmed or corroborated by
other information.
It's very worrying. I think we're all
united in a commitment to ensuring that we do everything we can to
eradicate torture around the world. One of the very crucial ways of
doing so is to make sure that the torturer has no market for his or her
produce, that any information a torturer does obtain from someone can go
nowhere. No one wants it. No one will touch it.
As long as security and intelligence
agencies continue to be willing to receive it, even if it's with
caveats--they wouldn't really make use of it unless they were able to
confirm or corroborate it through other sources--it validates torture.
It suggests to the torturer that they should continue to do their work.
We absolutely need an unequivocal repudiation of the use of information
obtained under torture by any law enforcement and security agencies in
Canada, in any context.
(1050)
[Translation]
In
your opinion, is this subcontracting torture? In Canada, it is illegal
to torture detainees in order to obtain information. Is this a
backhanded way to obtain information? Do you think that we are
subcontracting torture, in fact? In a way, are these agencies not
putting Canada's national security in jeopardy by using information
obtained by torture, which, as we know, is unreliable? People being
tortured will say everything the torturers want to hear; they will say
anything.
[English]
Mr. Alex Neve:
Well,
absolutely. There are many reasons we should stand firm against the use
of torture in interrogation sessions. Above all else, we should stand
firm because torture is so abhorrent. It is absolutely illegal, and we
should just never allow it in any circumstances. But there is a very
practical consideration, that when law and security agencies make use of
torture, the information they're obtaining is unreliable. The use and
furtherance of torture is creating more and more victims and
marginalization and resentment, which in itself contributes to
insecurity. Torture is bad for justice, but it is also very bad for
security.
Mrs. Kerry Pither:
I'm not
sure that everyone is aware that when you put the pieces together from
what Justice O'Connor and Justice Iacobucci found in their reports,
Justice Iacobucci confirmed our suspicion that Mr. Elmaati's confession
was shipped back to Canada and became the basis of the application for
justification for search warrants, which were executed against Mr.
Elmaati's family home and Mr. Almalki's family home. The fruits of those
searches were then used to make up new questions, which were then sent
back to the torturers to ask, for those interrogators to ask of Mr.
Elmaati and Mr. Almalki. When the RCMP applied for that search warrant,
they did not inform the judge that this may have been the product of
torture. Then the answers from those interrogations come back again and
get leaked to the media, and all sorts of things happen with them. So I
think torture does beget torture, but it also begets sloppy practices.
We'll go over to Mr. Norlock, please, for five minutes.
I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here today.
We need to be constantly on guard to
make sure people's human rights and civil liberties are guarded and
protected.
I must admit that at the beginning,
when you first made your presentations, I began to think Canada was in
really bad shape. We should be ashamed. Compared to the rest of the
world, we're in terrible shape. But as you began to flesh out your
presentation, I felt a little bit better.
I do look at the rest of the world,
and we watch the newscasts and we see what's happening in Africa, Asia,
and the Middle East. And while we Canadians shouldn't rest on our
laurels and while we should listen to good folks like you and take into
account your backgrounds and your concerns, I think we also need to
say—and tell me if I'm wrong—that we live in a pretty good country as to
adherence to law and human rights and protections. We have the Charter
of Rights and Freedoms; many countries don't even have such a thing. We
have a Constitution that the mother of our institution of Parliament
doesn't have. I just wonder if you could comment on that, Canadians
compared to other western democracies. Are you suggesting...? And these
need shorter answers. Are we in good shape? We need to know where we are
in sort of the human-rights-o-meter, if you will.
(1055)
Mr. Alex Neve:
That's a good phrase, the human-rights-o-meter.
We're not suggesting we're the worst
of the worst. I don't think we can assume we're the best of the best. I
think there are two things to keep in mind in response to that question.
Number one, whenever abuses happen,
whether they're isolated or whether they are symptomatic of something
larger and more systemic, they must be addressed. Victims deserve
justice, and if those point to reforms that can avoid victims in the
future, then we must do so.
I think another reason it's very
crucial that we as Canadians are particularly scrupulous in taking
action against injustice of this sort is that we want Canada's voice to
continue to be able to ring loud and true, internationally. One of the
best ways of ensuring that is by being able to demonstrate the degree to
which we are taking action at home, such that when we speak out with
respect to human rights abuses in other countries—including abuses
happening in a national security context—we can do so with our head held
absolutely high.
Hon. Warren Allmand:
I
would like to add that when I was president of the International Centre
for Human Rights, at one point I was trying to convince the Peruvian
government, under Fujimori at that time, to make some improvements in
human rights, and his officials came back to me saying, “You're not
doing this in Canada, so don't preach to us.”
While I think we are better than many
countries, we have to correct many of the shortcomings. For example,
people internationally know about the Arar case, they know about the
cases raised under Judge Iaccobucci, they know about the security
certificate problem. We have a difficult time in doing democratic
development around the world unless we are shown to be serious about
still improving on the problems we have, because they're raised against
us when we try to raise them with other countries.
I would like to explore a little
further your time as Solicitor General. If I recall, there was a Marin
commission, and it dealt with discipline and grievances and complaints.
If I can recall, didn't the Marin commission envisage a people's
watchman, which in today's terms would be considered civilian oversight?
I wonder how you and your government approached that.
Hon. Warren Allmand:
If I
remember correctly, we had set up the Marin commission to basically deal
with the complaints of men in the force and some of the practices being
used for discipline against the men. It's 30 years now. I'm more up to
date on these recent cases.
We had good results with the Marin
commission, and we also brought into being, with the consent of the men
across Canada and the women in the force, the “div rep” system, which
allowed for some negotiation on issues the rank and file were concerned
with. But we didn't get into the public complaints issue at that time.
Am
I correct that in answering one of the previous persons--it may have
been my colleague Mr. MacKenzie--you said it was in 1986 that SIRC was
brought in to provide the oversight?
Hon. Warren Allmand:
It
was 1984. The McDonald commission report was in 1981, and then it took a
while for the government to respond. There was a change of government
in 1984, actually. I think they started working under the Trudeau
government from 1980 to 1984 and then Mr. Mulroney came in in 1984 and
the legislation was finally passed. But it had been in process for a
number of years. I was on the justice committee at the time.
Mrs. Heafey, I was particularly
interested in your comparison to Calgary, to the RCMP and the civilian
oversight body, and your feeling that Calgarians were better served with
an oversight body.
In particular, you were rather
scathing to RCMP management. When there's a person who is in the rank
and file and who aspires to be a manager in the RCMP, how do you
reconcile the fact that they were doing a fine job in the rank and file
but then when they become management they become this other sort of
creature of policing? Could you talk about that a bit?
(1100)
Mrs. Shirley Heafey:
That
is not very difficult, from what I've seen. People go into policing
basically for the same reasons. They want to do the right thing. They
want to help people and they go in with this view.
The burden the RCMP has is that they
are regarded as an icon and they must preserve that. They're told that
from the very beginning: you must never sully the reputation of the
RCMP. They get into this culture, and some of them, a lot of them, end
up thinking we have to preserve it at all costs, and if we have to cover
up some of these things.... I saw lots of cover-ups in my years there
because they didn't want to sully the name of the RCMP. It's the culture
and it draws people in. The uniform, the horse, that whole iconic look
of the RCMP--it's difficult to fight. If you're in there and you want to
continue your career.... Some of them get up to the top, and by then
they've bought in, but they don't start out that way. I've met so many
in the rank and file, and they all have the right reasons for going
there.
We're way over time and there's another committee waiting.
I want to thank our witnesses.
Before we go, I've had a request from
one of the committee members for Mr. Neve. Can you provide us with the
letter you were referring to with the minister?
Mr. Alex Neve: Yes.
The Chair: Thank you all very much.
This meeting stands adjourned.