Legislative Assembly of Ontario

The House resumed at 8 p.m.

METROPOLITAN POLICE FORCE COMPLAINTS PROJECT ACT (CONTINUED)

Resuming the debate on second reading of Bill 47, An Act for the establishment and conduct of a Project in the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto to improve methods of processing Complaints by members of the Public against Police Officers on the Metropolitan Police Force.

Mr. Speaker: It is my understanding that when we rose at six o’clock the member for Scarborough-Ellesmere was about to speak.

Mr. Warner: Mr. Speaker, if it is permissible, I would appreciate it if my colleague from Scarborough West could begin the debate this evening.

Mr. R. F. Johnston: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, my colleague from Scarborough-Ellesmere. I am pleased to be able to speak this evening because I believe this is a very important debate we are having. It is one, even though there is another major event on tonight, very dear to my own heart. I am pleased to be here in the Legislature to speak about it. To me this has to be a very important bill, to be able to compete with the referendum on the future of Canada in the nature of its importance.

As a Metro spokesman for the NDP I am very concerned with the state of police-civilian relations in Metropolitan Toronto. To be frank, I have a great fear we are approaching a very long, hot summer in Toronto unless some major initiatives are taken to show all citizens of Toronto, but especially the visible minorities, that their police force -- not so much the officers, for whom I think most of us have great admiration, but the leadership and system of policing in Toronto -- is open and one that can respond to the reality of Toronto as it is today: a very broad, multicultural community. As a result, I feel the establishment of a civilian review board is a vital step with one very important facet in making our Toronto police system more open, more accessible and more reflective of the nature of our population in the city.

I speak in opposition to the bill, as I would have last December, because I see very little in the way of change in the bill as it has been presented to us again this spring. I do not feel it adequately asserts itself nor speaks to the needs of which I have just spoken.

I would like to talk a bit, if I can, about the nature and the extent of our problems in the city of Toronto. We too often hear such and such is an isolated incident, that an attack on an East Indian family in Etobicoke is perhaps reflective of individual personalities involved and that a retaliation on innocent white individuals by the East Indian community is somehow again not reflective of the overall scene in Toronto, but rather reflective of some unbalanced individuals.

I believe the history of our problem in Toronto is a long one and goes back to the way we handle our policing, the move away from a constabulary system into the militaristic format and the corporation structure we have now, the distancing of the individual policeman and his individual responsibilities as a constable from his community. I believe that is fundamentally what our difficulty is.

If we had stuck to the old system established in Britain and not moved into the American model of corporate and militaristic forces, such things as having height and weight restrictions that properly reflect individual communities, having openness in terms of who is hired on the force, having commissions and review boards which were reflective of the city, would be there.

I believe it reflects itself in the way our police force and the leadership of our police force, not the individual members on the beat, have conducted themselves over the last number of years. I would like to list some of the things that have happened just to bring this into perspective.

In March 1979, Canadian Jewish News quoted Mr. Givens with respect to a dispute concerning Middle Eastern pavilions at Caravan. “Givens said Caravan should have ignored the Palestinian representation, they should have told them to go soak their heads.” That’s a quote from the Globe.

We all remember News and Views, the police association’s internal publication, which published stories attacking various minorities. The chairman of the police commission said, “Racist comments are no cause for firing a policeman.” That’s a quote from the Star of that period. The Star and the Globe printed strong editorials attacking this and indicated the problem our commission had dealt with those difficulties.

In March 1979 again, three Etobicoke girls claimed they were kicked, slapped and subjected to racial slurs by Metro police in the Albion Mall. According to an article in Contrast in April 1979, the Toronto city council passed a series of resolutions regarding the police, including a call for an unequivocal apology to the minority groups, an apology which they never made, Mr. Speaker.

From that point on, we had various groups appearing before the commission trying to get their point across and trying to make people on the commission aware of the extent of the problem.

In May 1979, Mr. Bill Elie was killed. He pulled a dummy gun, the members may remember, in a Scarborough shopping plaza and was shot to death by the police. I am not going to impugn the action of the police, but it is part of the scenario in which we find ourselves.

In May 1979 as well, Albert Johnson alleged that he was beaten by the police and was hospitalized.

In June 1979, there was the famous raid on what was termed a bawdy house or a gay place--I can’t find a better description. The police seized mailing lists and questions arose concerning the right to privacy.

A Portuguese immigrant, Aquilio Torcata, was shot by the police in June 1979 after allegedly firing at them in a five-hour siege. I’m not trying to point a finger here, I’m just saying this is something that’s accrued over the last number of months.

In June as well, various groups came before the police commission, talking about a series of entrapment allegations by the gay community.

In July 1979, Professor William Angus and others from Osgoode Law School wrote a letter to the Attorney General (Mr. McMurtry), asking for a royal commission to investigate what they called police killings of civilians as reported in the Globe. The same month, Alderman Howard Moscoe from North York brought forward his problems.

In July 1979, the police commission finally rejected the idea there was anything wrong in the News and Views article and was unwilling to make any concessions.

There are any number of these examples. I will skip over some from August, if I may, except to say that in that month, the Ontario Provincial Police were called in for the first time in history to investigate the shooting of Albert Johnson by Metro police. I believe the whole OPP investigation obfuscated natural justice. We should have seen a coroner’s jury, an open public inquiry into that, not an OPP investigation, the results of which, Mr. Speaker, I believe we will never see. I see the minister is shaking his head --

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: You are certainly demonstrating an abysmal lack of understanding of how our justice system works when you talk like that.

Mr. R. F. Johnston: Mr. Speaker, not to involve myself in idle repartee --

8:10 p.m.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Does the member want to try these officers in this House tonight?

Mr. R. F. Johnston: Certainly not. Mr. Speaker, as I am addressing say comments to you, I am not trying to try anybody tonight. I am certainly not trying to try individual members of the force. I am suggesting a secret investigation is not the best way to deal with it. I would suggest it is systematic and symptomatic of the way the Attorney General has tried to defuse these various issues over the last number of years that he would take that approach.

Our whole establishment, and I would count ourselves as part of that establishment, is seen as suspect in this whole thing. The chairman of Metropolitan Toronto had stated in the same month of August 1979 that there is no excessive use of firearms by the police. A lot of people wait for an incident like this to take cheap shots at the police.

Those kinds of allegations, again, to which I am being subjected this evening, are not what I am trying to say and are not what people who are raising the issue are trying to say, albeit there might have been some people who were very hot-headed at the time. I am trying to be very calm about this and just indicate that the extent of this problem is very large indeed.

In September 1979 there was a march in support of Albert Johnson and to protest the shooting of Albert Johnson. Two thousand demonstrators surrounded 18 Division at that point.

It is interesting to note that the Jamaican High Commission wrote a letter to the external affairs committee about the Albert Johnson case. Reviews of that were not just restricted to a few individuals inside Metro who could be seen to be hotheads or political opportunists, but included people from outside.

The New York Times, which very seldom spends any time at all talking about things Canadian, let alone things Torontonian, had an article printing a story about the conflict between Toronto’s police and immigrant communities during that month, an indication that other people with a broader view were seeing this as a large and dangerous difficulty for us all.

In September 1979, Mr. McMurtry termed a call for police reform premature in an article in the Globe and Mail. But the pressure continued, and that month Cardinal Carter was appointed by the police commission to mediate. It was a very clever ploy, the cardinal being a man of high renown and respect throughout all communities. He brought forward a report to which I will refer in my speech. It raised and noted a number of the problems which many of us have been speaking about. It was a very thoughtful response and did not surprisingly, make the problem go away, as I think a lot of our people thought it might do.

I could go on. I have several pages here of the kinds of things which have happened over the last year and a half. In fact, I have approximately eight more pages of incidents, to do with the whole escalation of the problem with policing in the city of Toronto, that have occurred in the last two years or a year and a half.

The problem is enormous. I look to the south and I see what has happened in Florida. I do not want to make any crass and very simplistic comparisons and say that is what we are going to have this summer. But I do believe there is a danger that this summer will be a very tough summer in Toronto, a very hard summer for a lot of us in terms of trying to defuse. We as legislators here in this House have a large responsibility in trying to come to grips with this in a way which is seen to be, as well as is, open, to look for solutions, and to respond to the communities that have been raising the largest concerns about the problem in Toronto.

I will just go back, if I can, to the whole way things have operated. I find it offensive that our police commission and the representatives on that commission have not opened themselves to representations from elected people and from others who came before them to try to raise concerns about comments by one of the commissioners. I think that is symptomatic of the problem with that particular commission and why that commission needs to be overhauled as another major facet of what we should be looking at this spring. We should not be seeing a bill which was introduced tardily, in my view, last December, which is now being brought in late in this season, if I might be so bold as to say so, and which is of extreme importance but is not placed in the context of the larger needs in terms of reforming policing in the city of Toronto.

This commission, to which we would normally look for leadership on a local basis, has taken no initiative at all in terms of the problems that have been raised except to respond to pressure. It has shown no capacity at all to take the lead in the reformation of policing and how it operates with the public in general. I would look at recent resignations, people moving on and police chiefs being replaced early, as indications of succumbing to pressure and not so much a matter of any kind of planning.

I believe fervently we need a police commission that is able to legislate in a sense and to take leadership, that needs to be larger, needs to have better representation on it and certainly does not need to be appointed by this provincial Legislature but should be under local control and, therefore, more responsive to local elected politicians and groups within the local society. I would hope that a suggestion in that area would be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future from the minister’s office.

In November, a number of colleagues of mine in the Legislature and a few other people involved in civil liberties’ associations and various groups within Metropolitan Toronto met in a series of weeks and came up not with a bill which could then be dissected and attacked for small portions of it, but with a number of principles of police survey and review procedure. We presented that to the House in the form of a resolution under the names of the members for Scarborough-Ellesmere (Mr. Warner) and Dovercourt (Mr. Lupusella).

I would like to refer to a few of those items in those principles because it is on the principles that I wish to attack this bill and not on legal niceties, of which I am not so well versed as others in this House with legal training. To start off with, there were two things in terms of standards of conduct and the rights of police officers to which I would like to refer.

The first recommendation we made was that a police officer shall exercise his authority as a police officer in a manner that respects the rights, liberties, inherent dignity and reputation of every citizen consistent with a diligent performance of his duty. I believe that concept is enshrined in the new bill. We stressed that the rights of police officers have to be protected as well and that it is the right of every police officer that his reputation and career be unaffected by frivolous, vexatious or unjustified complaints and that he not be placed in double jeopardy.

I would refer to Cardinal Carter’s report in that instance in which he spoke about the rights and protection of police officers. He said on page 25 of his report: “We heartily endorse what has already been said a number of times about the rights and the protection of police officers in the pursuit of their work. The Maloney report is quite strong in this regard, as was the statement by the jury in the coroner’s inquest into the Evans death. Police officers are citizens also and should not be any less respected in terms of civil law than the citizens whom they are protecting.”

I believe that any bill coming forward with a civilian complaints procedure must protect those basic rights. I would think, in general, this bill does that. It is not one of the major complaints which I have with it.

We did state that the appointment of the tribunal, the political control of the tribunal and the procedure must be in the hands of the Metropolitan Toronto council and cannot rest in any way with this House or with the ministries of the crown in this area. That principle has not been accepted within the terms of the bill before us tonight.

8:20 p.m.

The rules of natural justice need to apply. We listed them all, but the bill does not do so. I am not knowledgeable enough in terms of legalese to know which of these should or should not be included, but I am sure some of my colleagues will speak to that. There was one item to which we spoke which I think is crucial. The hearings must be impartial in the sense that the tribunal must not have, or must be seen not to have, any preconceived notion of the merits or the demerits of the complaints or the complainants or the police officers.

I regret to say I do not believe this bill meets that basic principle because the initial overseeing or decisions about a complainant are made by a police officer and not by an independent individual. I would say this not only would deter individuals from launching their complaint, as I am sure others have said, but it would also militate against its being an unbiased kind of approach later on if it was to be proceeded with against the will of that particular officer involved.

It is interesting that Cardinal Carter suggested the commissioner should have a status similar to that of a judge, but that he not be a police officer and that he have tenure. I think this is an interesting concept by Cardinal Carter.

One of the other clear things we spoke about was on the standard of proof. I find that this bill does not meet that standard of proof criteria we set down. We indicated that we felt the tribunal should make its findings on the preponderance of probability and may, in so doing, take into account similar conduct on other occasions. Instead, what we have before us is a burden of proof, which is what one would find in terms of court proceedings and of the need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt. That is something which I believe in this kind of procedure is not very practicable.

We have the registrar appointed by the metropolitan council and not by the province. I believe that is vital. The other thing we indicated is that there should be a report by the tribunal on an annual basis. There are several things I would like to suggest we need to look at in terms of the bill. I would hope it goes out to committee so we can have groups speak to this bill as to the detail of it in a number of areas which I think are vital.

I believe the bill should and must be amended to indicate that the entire board be appointed by the metropolitan council and that there be full publication of all decisions with reasons for these decisions when they are made. I think we need to make sure the police role is clarified by establishing procedures to ensure the police pass on complaints and refer complainants to the board. I think the informal mediation that is done must be done by the board or representatives of the board and not by the police.

Another fundamental point I alluded to earlier is there should be a consistent disciplinary process. That is to say the citizens’ review process and the Police Act offences must have the same kind of disciplinary action involved with it. I think we have to establish that we wish to entrench in this bill the rights of police officers to fair consideration.

I’m not exactly pleased with subsection 14 as it applies to the establishment of an independent investigation machinery as a board and I would hope that we can make some amendment in that area. We need to put in a requirement, as a minimum, to publicize recommendations of change in police practice or procedure resulting from investigation, some sort of mandatory report to Metro council as well as to the Solicitor General of the province.

It is important to provide for legal costs to be defrayed. This scheme is experimental and we don’t know exactly where it is going. In the long run I would also suggest that perhaps we have to look at the possibility of having the Ombudsman’s office as a last line of complaint by individuals who are not satisfied with the system through which they go.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that unless we have a system that is not seen to be police-controlled and therefore does not have an initial police-controlling mechanism of a person who makes the decision as to what is an acceptable or unacceptable ruling, and unless we have open hearings in which all complaints are published, unless we have an appointed tribunal which is seen to be above political appointment and does not seem to be just an extension of political favours, we will gain nothing through this procedure.

I believe it is absolutely crucial that the principles to which I alluded initially be incorporated into any bill that comes out of this House. Too many of them are not incorporated in this bill as it exists before us. It may seem to be acceptable to members here with small revision but I believe it will be seen to be a sellout by people in the community. It will be seen to be only a half-hearted effort. With the listing of the things that are in the history of the problem in Toronto that I started off with, I don’t believe a half-hearted approach to this problem will solve anything.

There have been tragedies in this city which should never have come about, which have come about and which I believe will continue to come about. Some of those we could never stop no matter what kind of system we were to put forward. But I rue the day -- and we have arrived at that day -- when people do not feel that there is justice, that their complaints will be heard, that they will find in a policeman a representative of their community, someone in whom they can confide and to whom they can go in terms of community policing, in terms of being part of their community. Until we get to that day we are going to see an escalation of our difficulties in Toronto. They are not going to go away.

I believe we need a civilian review board that has more guts to it than this does, one that is seen to be more obviously open, cannot be seen to be a neat mechanism for protecting the establishment and the majority white English-speaking population of Metropolitan Toronto as we have known it. We need to do much more than this. This bill is one small part of what we need to do.

I regret that I stand to oppose it at this time. I hope that this being a minority government, this being a fairly open government that we have had these last four or five years, we will be able to take this bill and turn it into something which can speak to justice, which can speak to the communities in Toronto to let them know that we are not just accepting a status quo that is totally unacceptable. It should be much as we came to in our debate on Confederation -- an understanding that Ontario can no longer be the fat cat, can no longer accept the status quo and only take from Confederation.

We must also accept that the police structure as we have set it up in Toronto is no longer acceptable. It needs massive revision. It needs an open-hearted look at it. It does not need to be diffused and spread about in various kinds of components, in bringing forward a civilian review board proposal when it is too late to debate it in December, and then having the Solicitor General bring it back late in the session like this so that people like myself who oppose it will no doubt be accused of not wanting reform and expecting too much. The bill is not dealing at all with the police commission and not dealing at all with providing the tools with which to make it a responsive committee- based organism for dealing with communities.

8:30 p.m.

Just to complete, because I am conscious of the fact I am now repeating myself, it is crucial that this House amend this bill and that it turn it into a very different kind of bill from that which has been presented to us. If we do so, we may do something to switch the trend and to stop the flood of negative feelings towards individual officers, which is happening, towards the kind of exchange that occurred between myself and the Attorney General when I was trying to go through the history of how I see Toronto at the moment in the light of this issue. We must seem to be meaningfully trying to change things for the betterment of this city.

Mr. Mancini: Mr. Speaker, as most of us are aware, this legislation leads one to much emotion because we are talking about one’s rights and one’s privileges in a free society. This debate leads to much emotion because we are dealing also with the authoritative body in our society that ensures there is peace and order, and that ensures private citizens’ public institutions will be protected from the criminal element which may be in our society. Having said that, we must ensure also that the people to whom we entrust this tremendous responsibility in no way abuse or seem to abuse these most-trusted responsibilities and authority which have been granted.

The face of Ontario and Metropolitan Toronto has changed a great deal over the past 10 to 15 years. We have had many new immigrants come to this country. Many of them have come from countries where the privileges, rights and freedoms we enjoy here are not enjoyed there. Many of them have a deep-seated fear of any police department, not because of experiences that they have had here, but because of experiences they have bad in their home countries. We must be sure that for new Canadians who have this fear that fear is put to rest.

Secondly, and just as important, we must ensure that the freedoms and rights we have fought during the last 1,000 years for society to obtain are in no way infringed upon. If that takes a police complaints bill so that a public complaints commission is set up, then I don’t think that is asking the government of Ontario to do very much.

We feel very strongly about this particular piece of legislation. We welcome it. We feel there are some changes that are going to be made. That is going to be outlined, I believe, by the party critic further on in the debate. But I would like to say several things in reference to the bill.

First of all, may I say that basically the complaints procedure seems to me to be fair and straightforward. A person having a complaint against a particular action taken by a member of a police department has the right under this bill to make a complaint at that bureau. Then, as it states in the legislation, the copies of the complaints go to the commissioner and to the police officers involved if it is felt that will not hamper the investigation. The matter is dealt with as quickly as possible, one would hope within the 30-day limit as stated in the bill, or on a monthly basis until the investigation is completed.

But the thing I like best about this process is that it summarizes all the facts for the bureau chief to make a final decision as to what should be done in this particular case, if anything at all. It outlines that the chief of police who reviews the summary may: order a further investigation; cause a criminal charge to he laid; refer the matter to the board for a hearing; initiate disciplinary hearings under the Police Act; counsel or caution the police officer, or take no further action. Having said all that, in order for the bill to be fair, the police officer involved has an opportunity to appeal the decision before the board if he feels the matter is unfair.

At the outset it is important to determine what interest is sought to be protected by this piece of legislation. It seems to me that the purpose of a civilian complaint procedure is to ensure that citizens have a body that is responsive to their complaints. The end rationale is a process that can inspire continued respect for the police force here in Metro. As has been stated before, and I want to reiterate this one more time, justice must be seen to be done. It is not good enough in today’s society for justice to be done. The public at large, the people whom the police force has been set up to protect, have to feel that in no way have any of the rights and privileges they have been granted through law been infringed upon or encroached upon.

This past weekend we have seen the unfortunate incidents of violence and rioting that have taken place in our neighbour country to the south of us, down in Miami. I can say to you honestly, Mr. Speaker, that has been the match that lit the fuse, when a major portion of the population in Miami felt that justice was not being done. Justice may have been done, but it was not seen to have been done and, therefore, we see how people battle back as fiercely as they can in order to protect the rights and privileges, as I have mentioned earlier, that have taken mankind over 1,000 years to establish in law.

In closing, I would like to say that we in no way want to intimidate the police force from doing what they believe is their responsibility. We in no way want them to feel we are going to second guess every action they have taken, or want to, for no good reason, and point the finger at a police officer who may have made a misjudgement call. The essence of the bill is to ensure that all society is protected, including the police force. If we can bring to the public forum some incidents where some police officers have not acted properly, and if those situations can be dealt with fairly, openly and honestly, then the whole police force itself is much stronger and much better for it.

8:40 p.m.

I certainly hope the police departments do not feel we are unnecessarily proposing legislation which is a tool whereby we can have a scapegoat. Certainly in my personal view this is not what the legislation is for. It is to protect society as a whole and as our society evolves further, we may need further legislation. As our society changes, we may need to take further action which gives people a feeling of security and comfort and one where they feel all are treated equally.

In my riding we have many new Canadians. I am reminded of a story of a friend of mine who has come to Canada from Mexico. He informed me that when he was there, many of his relatives and friends and even he himself walked by the police station in some trepidation. He said that just about all the village’s activities were centred on the police station. Actually the citizens in that area had to be as aware of the police as they were of the criminal element and in some cases they had fear of the police.

That is a sad note and that is something we do not want to have developed in this country. We in no way want to have the citizenry of this country feel in any circumstance that the police officers and the police department are there for reasons other than to protect the whole of society from the criminal element.

So I’ll close on that note. I am sure the bill will go through the House. Some changes are going to be made and they will be proposed later on by the Liberal critic. Thank you.

Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, I want to speak to this bill in its basic principles and I want to begin by saying that unfortunately I oppose the principles that are here in this bill. We will, as others have said, vote against the bill on second reading.

I do want to spend some time on the subject, not on the mechanics, of how one might set up, if one thought it was desirable, some procedures to examine complaints against police officers. I want to set all of that mechanical stuff to one side and attempt to deal with central issues which, it strikes me, escape this bill in some way. I find that unfortunate.

There was a day in this province when people in their own neighbourhood knew the person who wore the uniform. They met that person in social situations. They would not for a moment hesitate to stop and have a chat with that person. That individual gave them some guidance about a great many things. In small towns like the one I was born and raised in, a police officer was much more than someone who wore a uniform and drove a car that had a siren in it and some lights on the top. A police officer played a role in that community.

I view it as an extremely unfortunate set of circumstances that leads us to put before this Legislature this kind of bill. I understand that this society in which we live today is much different from the one in which I grow up. I understand that all of the tension and pressures that are at work in a busy city such as Metropolitan Toronto are not always easy to cope with. I understand that.

We have made some attempt to train our police officers in different ways and we now have set up particular kinds of bureaus to deal with problems of this nature. We have at least begun, after a good deal of fuss and furore, to waive some requirements for police departments so that other groups, particularly those who might not be quite as tall as the norm for police officers these days, could participate. We have seen that women could participate as police officers in other than just desk jobs. We have made some steps in that regard.

If one looks at this central issue and the reason this bill is before the Legislature this evening, we can’t be faulted for not having taken the time to write up reports on the problem. We have done that consistently. We can’t be faulted for not examining other jurisdictions. We have done that. We cannot fault the media for not paying attention to the problem because that certainly has been done. The tragedy is, we feel a piece of legislation like this will solve the problem now. I don’t think it will.

If we look at the name of the bill before us, we stumble on part of the problem. If it is a bill to deal with complaints against police officers, and it surely is, I don’t feel that is the problem. I have no problem complaining about anybody. The problem really is, does an individual out there feel that police officer represents him or her, and fairly? Does the police officer feel threatened in any way by the levelling of complaints? Is there a fair and reasonable process at work? I don’t think there is, from anybody’s point of view.

Mr. Speaker, when I came to this place, one of my first little assignments was as critic for the Solicitor General’s department. That was in 1975. Through that initial period, when I was just feeling my way around the Legislature, it was apparent to me there were problems of a long-festering nature in police forces across the province. This bill, five years later, addresses itself to one part of the problem, Metropolitan Toronto, surely an important part and surely, in terms of police work, a major part, but it took five years to get it to this point.

It has taken much longer than that to deal with the aspect of whether citizens out there, in a practical way, can voice an opinion about the work of a police officer, and can do so without threatening the police officer severely. In my work as critic of the Solicitor General a few years ago, it became apparent to me one major problem is that a police officer didn’t feel he got a fair day in court, that rules and regulations set down by the police departments and police commissions around the province didn’t give even a police officer the feeling of a fair hearing.

When one stacks the deck and makes the problem even worse by saying the police should investigate the police, the ordinary citizen says, “I don’t stand a chance in this.” Some suggest the judicial system ought to be the recourse but I don’t think that’s a workable mechanism for the average citizen. It obviously involves considerable cost and it involves the laying of charges, which is not always easy.

If one looks not too far from this jurisdiction to the United States, one can see that our judicial system is often viewed as a last resort by the population at large. The last thing we do is go to court. If that court system fails in any way, the results damage more than just the individual; they damage society. And that’s what’s wrong with the principle in this bill -- it doesn’t address itself to the problems of society.

I suppose one could prepare the world’s easiest, fastest mechanism for dealing with complaints against police officers. In my view, very little of that society’s problems would have been solved. This bill isn’t going to do very much for those people who are threatened in our society, who feel our police officers and our courts don’t give them a fair shake. We are caught in that old Ontario conundrum: The way to play the game in this province is to do nothing, or if you are pushed a little bit, Mr. Speaker, get a distinguished citizen to write a report; if that doesn’t work, get another one to write a report; if that doesn’t work, have a committee write a report.

In the end, the problem itself is often forgotten by the time someone gets around to writing legislation. There seems almost a natural reluctance on the part of the government to deal with the problem as it is until they really have to; in other words, they take what might be seen initially as a real problem in our society, let it fester, let it grow, study it, make recommendations on it and ignore all the recommendations that come out of those studies. They do not want to have an open and public discussion of what the problem might be and eventually they will get pushed and shoved into some kind of legislation such as this.

8:50 p.m.

My problem with this bill is that it is not, in my view, the best practical solution. More important, the bill itself does not shed any real light on what the problem is.

In any community in Ontario, especially in Metropolitan Toronto, are we seriously expecting that someone who doesn’t normally feel comfortable with the system would feel like picking up the telephone tomorrow morning to a good lawyer friend of his and rushing off to court? I think the bill doesn’t solve that initial problem.

There is something else which is unstated in the principles of this bill. It is my feeling, which is shared by some others, that there is an air of delusion about this province which is just unreal any more. If I might use a little parallel here, I think that in matters dealing with the reforms to the constitution, this province decided that wasn’t going to be a problem and it wasn’t going to pay any attention to it until a dramatic event took place.

I think the same principle is at work here, namely, that if one decides not to pay any attention to a serious problem, it will somehow go away and won’t be there any more. I don’t think that is true. A number of members have alluded to what might happen this summer in Toronto.

I am not sure that is a useful exercise for us to draw on, but I do think it is important to note that two weeks ago if one had suggested there would be in the United States the kind of race riot there was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, people would say, “No, that’s old hat. That hasn’t happened any more.” There have been a great many rights won by the black people in the United States. They are integrated now. They play a role in every aspect of society. One would have accepted that kind of delusionary concept that one could never have that event transpire which shook the world less than 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, I am one of those who believes that can happen in this province. Part of it has to do with one’s feeling of identity of who he is, what his origins are, what his race is, what his culture is, whom he associates with, and whether he can live what he considers to be a normal life in this kind of a society. Does he feel threatened by police officers or doesn’t he? Does he feel the judicial system is there to work so that he gets a fair shake or is it there to work against him?

I would point out, at least in my opinion, there are more and more people every day who feel those two things are major problems and that the law officers we put on the street are not essentially there in a comfortable way with the population which they serve. I think that is a major problem for everyone, not just for the citizen who might feel threatened, but even more so for the police officer who has to try to work in that kind of a climate.

I think the same holds true for the judicial system. However well it might work for many people, we also have to admit that for many others it does not work well. I think that comes around to how big the problem is and the size of it. In my judgement, a bill devoted to this kind of a principle of establishing a complaints system is hardly even going to be noticed because of the size of the problem. We are going to pay the price now for pretending there isn’t a problem. We are going to pay the price now for the kind of delays that have accrued for whatever reason in attempting to deal with this.

I am not suggesting there will be an easy mechanism at work here, but I am saying that reluctance to deal with the problem is going to compound the problem and make it larger instead of smaller. If one has expectations that this bill in whatever form is going to attack those problems, I don’t think it will because it doesn’t know what to attack.

We have talked at great length on a number of occasions here about police training. There is in some way a belief, which I partially share, that if one could only train police officers in certain kinds of community relations work, that would resolve the problem. I think that attempt must be made, but I am not sure I have sufficient faith in anybody's educational procedures these days to say that we can do that.

We live in a world today which is different in many respects and uncomfortable for more and more people. If one has been following the media coverage in Metropolitan Toronto over the last few days, one would see this kind of violence erupting here in good old staid Toronto where everybody is safe to walk the streets at night. That violence is here and is now occurring. It is not occurring in large measure, but with enough consistency that one could say some of our funny notions about how safe our streets are, how our citizens view our police officers, how our police officers view them and whether the whole judicial system here works as well as we would like it to are not correct any more.

Part of my objection to the principles that are put in this bill is that they do not look at the problems. We are basically looking at this. If we felt that a bill like this could go into those problems, if it could solve things like unemployment and poor housing, whether it is going to be hot in Toronto this summer or whether people have real or unreal fears and apprehensions about the police system and the judicial system, we might be getting somewhere. I do not feel this bill does that at all. In my view, it is not even intended to try to do that.

Those are the major problems we have. The first major thing we would have with any kind of complaints procedure -- and I find it ironic that that is what we are dealing with -- is the complaints procedure itself. It is not to right the wrongs of our society, it is the vehicle to vent complaints.

That may be a clear indication of how far we have come. There is a much longer way to go in the entire process of dealing with it. When we get ourselves to the point where our police officers, the men and women who do the job that most of us do not want to do, feel comfortable and secure in the neighbourhoods they are supposed to service, that will be a step. When those neighbourhoods feel those human beings can relate to them, can understand them, their language and their culture and can deal with them effectively, then we will have gone another measure.

I do not think anyone is purporting to say that people can start up a warm and loving relationship with a police cruiser. They cannot do that. When most of our citizens see a police officer, it is a threatening situation, threatening for the citizen and threatening for the police officer as well.

Among those police officers I count as my friends, the worst kind of a call is what is known in the trade as the domestic situation. When they arrive, they really have no concept of who they are dealing with, what the problem will be like, or what language will be spoken. They have not much knowledge of what the situation really is. That always becomes a threatening situation for the police officer.

That, in part, speaks to the major problem of how our society runs itself, how it governs itself and how it polices itself. I am afraid this bill looks worse and worse in my eyes the more I look at the size of the problem.

I do not think any of us is predicting there are going to be race riots here in Metropolitan Toronto this summer, but I do think the problem is getting near that in proportion. Because of the sensitivity and the feelings on both sides, it has that potential. I wish I could believe this government was aware of the scope of the problem, because I do not think it is, and was prepared to move in substantive ways to correct the real base of the problem, or even that in setting up the procedure outlined in this bill it had a firm grasp of where it is going.

I am uncomfortable with the notion that it will be tried here in Metropolitan Toronto so that we will be one model for dealing with this kind of complaint. It does not apply across Ontario, and other alternatives are not in place. If we are unsure of the mechanisms, we must try several different ones, try to adjust to neighbourhood communities and attempt to identify who needs some assistance and who feels the system is not working for him.

What we have in this bill is an attempt to do something, but no one seems quite sure what. It surely does not address itself to the problem. It surely does not reflect, at least in my view, the kind of reports that have been tabled on this and other related matters by some very distinguished citizens of this province.

I do not feel this bill is going to pacify anybody, if that is its intention. It does not reflect the concern of a number of communities within Metropolitan Toronto, nor does it reflect the needs of a number of people who live in this city.

In other words, I am afraid that when we have a response finally from the government -- the finally is important because it has taken so long for this government to respond in any way to the problem -- unfortunately the response comes in a form which I think is going to be disliked by the citizens at large. It is also going to be disliked by those people who wear the uniforms in this community, those men and women who are police officers. I do not think they are going to be happy with it either. I am not sure that very many people are going to be happy with it.

One could only accept this bill if he accepted that old Tory proverb that the government doesn’t really do something unless it has studied it to death. Even when the government does something, what is important is that it takes some action, but the action itself is not too important.

9 p.m.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Spend a little time finding out what is going on in the community here.

Mr. Breaugh: I was going to wrap up on those remarks but the Solicitor General has just provoked me a little. I want to look around the benches here in Queen’s Park this evening where we are debating this legislation. I see the distinct absence of Tory members in here. I recall that when we began the debate this evening there was one little soul over on those Tory benches, and only because he had to be here. That was the Solicitor General. The rest of them were off somewhere else. That is all very nice.

“Spend a little time in the community,” says the good, old pompous and pious Attorney General cum Solicitor General. Tell the rest of the world what we have to do. Tell the remainder of our community that only the Solicitor General knows what is right and what is wrong about it. There is nothing like a little piety, is there? It is precisely that kind of piety that has got him into this mess. I suggest that kind of piety won’t get him out of it either.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: You simpletons over there would create a situation --

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order.

Mr. Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, I think we have just heard the ultimate. I want to make sure that Hansard gets that.

Interjections.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order.

Mr. Breaugh: Let Hansard show that our distinguished Attorney General cum Solicitor General thinks that the other members of this House are simpletons.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: On this issue you people are.

Mr. Ashe: You are.

Mr. Breaugh: That is his language. I think that speaks to the heart of the problem. That fine-looking gentleman in the big blue suit over there knows all of the answers and the rest of us are simpletons who do not deal with human beings, who do not know the community as he does, who do not have a right to speak in this House as he does. We do not fit. I think that is his problem in a nutshell. That is why this bill and the principles that are in this bill will not work, whatever the Attorney General or the Solicitor General, or whatever simplistic person that might occupy that seat tonight thinks.

Mr. Warner: Mr. Speaker, we will soon find out whether the Solicitor General’s remarks are accurate or not.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: You don’t provoke me.

Mr. Warner: Okay. Just sit back, listen and find out.

Mr. Ashe: Another simplistic solution.

Mr. Warner: We have awakened the member for Durham West. How about that? That in itself is an accomplishment.

Mr. Ashe: Don’t bet on it.

Mr. Warner: It doesn’t happen that often. We certainly are glad they wheeled him in this evening. I would like to start with a little quotation which the Solicitor General may recall.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: I hope it is not a provocative quotation.

Mr. Warner: The member for Lakeshore (Mr. Lawlor), is passing the quotation realm on to me.

“It is difficult to reconcile an effective system of police with that perfect freedom of action and exemption from interference which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country. The forfeiture or curtailment of such advantages would be too great a sacrifice.”

That quotation was given by a parliamentary committee to Sir Robert Peel in 1822 when a parliamentary committee of Great Britain rejected his advice to set up a London police force. I think what it illustrates is that even in England, which many of us have always held to be a place that has had a tremendous respect for law and order over the centuries, there was a rejection at the outset of the concept of having a police force and that was incompatible in some way with our notions of freedom and individual rights.

Obviously, from that date we have decided that by necessity we must have a police force. We live with the contradiction of wanting to maintain law and order on the one hand while on the other wanting to retain some of our individual freedoms and rights of expression. We abhor the criminal element in our society and we want police forces to be able to do something about that. What bothers me is that through the process of developing a police force and particularly bringing it to bear in an urban society like Metro Toronto, a very large and complex urban society, we have in one way or another separated the police from the community.

This was not done consciously, it was not something someone set out to do and it was not something the police wanted to have happen, as the Solicitor General very well knows, as he has a lot of friends who are policemen. That is no secret. It is something he should be proud of and something we are all proud of. I have many friends who are policemen as well and I do not envy their job.

When my good colleague from Oshawa spoke about police officers having to respond to domestic calls, there is no question about what happens.

Mr. Ashe: The Solicitor General didn’t even wait to listen to you. He left.

Mr. Warner: The honourable member set a record tonight. He has been away for six minutes. I can’t believe it, but I applaud him. I am sure his colleagues are happy to have him conscious for that long. He is out there having a coffee and listening to my remarks.

Mr. Ashe: Not likely.

Mr. Warner: At least a hundred of them are gathered out there in the lobby listening, I am sure.

Mr. Lawlor: I am going out to the lobby but I will be right back.

Mr. Warner: I am driving them all out.

When the police officer is required to respond to a domestic call, he or she knows right away before arriving at the scene --

Mr. Kerrio: Carry on.

Mr. Warner: I will.

Mr. Acting Speaker: The member for Scarborough-Ellesmere does have the floor.

Mr. Warner: That is right. I can understand that the member for Niagara Falls would not have any particular interest in this bill but I do. This bill happens to be very close to me for a number of reasons which I will get to. I have a very personal involvement in this legislation. As you know, Mr. Speaker, there is a bill on the Order Paper which stands in my name. I am proud of that contribution, whether the bill will be accepted or not.

I also know from personal experiences that when the police officer has to respond to a domestic call a certain tremor goes through the officer. It is not like an armed robbery or the type of clearly defined criminal activity where we know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Often what happens is that when the officer shows up the complainant turns on the officer. The person who called the police in the first place, perhaps because she was being beaten, often stands to the aid of the man who is beating her when the police officer arrives.

That police officer is placed in the invidious position of being on someone else’s private property trying to maintain peace and order, separate two people and against her will protect the woman who is being beaten. She doesn’t want that protection. The officer finds it very difficult to carry out his responsibilities and at the same time protect the individual which is something he is supposed to do. As the Solicitor General certainly is aware, we have moved through the years from a situation where we simply required somebody with brawn to a situation where we need someone with some brains, to put it very simply. We have gone beyond the stage of simply requiring a police officer --

9:10 p.m.

Mr. Kerrio: That is not going to look good.

Mr. Warner: The member for Niagara Falls doesn’t have to remain here. He has nothing to contribute to the debate as usual. He can go off to the bar for a while. I would be most pleased to see him leave.

Mr. Kerrio: I contributed as much as you did in 30 seconds.

Mr. Warner: I happen to want to contribute to the debate and if he doesn’t want to, he can leave. It is as simple as that.

Mr. Kerrio: Get on with it.

Mr. Warner: Why doesn’t he try to be quiet for a change?

Mr. Kerrio: No way. Haven’t you got anything to say?

Mr. Warner: I will ignore the rude interjections from the member for Niagara Falls considering the source.

Mr. Kerrio: It is easy with you Socialists.

Mr. Warner: We have moved from a time when we required police officers to break up brawls in the local pub to a time when we are dealing with sophisticated criminals and with a complex society, particularly in Metro Toronto.

Now I will touch on another subject of which the Solicitor General has a very good understanding and, I think, a fairly sensitive understanding -- our multi-cultural society in Metro Toronto. Metro Toronto is a very unusual community, not just in Ontario or Canada but in the world. The Solicitor General has travelled quite a bit. If he stops to think about it for a minute, he’ll admit there are very few cities in the world with two million people in which at least 50 identifiable racial groups in large numbers are living in relatively close harmony. That is a unique situation in the world.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Maybe the most cosmopolitan city in the world.

Mr. Warner: Yes, I would agree. I think it probably is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, certainly one of the most. It seems to me that in itself says there has to be a very special approach to policing. It means we should not leave the decision about the kind of policies we are going to develop to meet the needs of a uniquely cosmopolitan city like Metro Toronto in the hands of the police officer. That is not fair to the police officer, to begin with. It really isn’t. Those policies should be developed by other people.

We have relied on the police commissioners. Quite frankly, we have been proved wrong. We have misplaced our faith because those police commissioners haven’t done a very good job. I think even the Solicitor General would admit that. In my view, they don’t understand the community and they haven’t become intricately involved in it. I don’t think those police commissioners really understand Toronto. I don’t think they have taken clear-cut stands on the policies to be developed and then implemented by the police force.

The former Premier of this province, Mr. Robarts, among other people, clearly identified that when in the report of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto he said: “The commission finds itself in agreement with the general philosophy of the police function expounded by both the inquiries mentioned above” -- the Task Force on Policing in Ontario and the Morand Royal Commission into Metropolitan Toronto Police Practices -- “a philosophy well described in the report of the Royal Commission into Metropolitan Toronto Police Practices” Which said:

“Policing is too important to be left to the police, too important even to be left to the police schools. This does not mean it is not a special art and that it does not require special skills or that there is an unnecessary elitism involved in restricting the policing of the community to a qualified class. What it does mean is that all of us -- police and non-police alike -- have a continuing interest in the quality and effectiveness of our police system, particularly because our form of political organization, through which we give expression and force to our law, is based on public participation in political and social processes, on freedom to debate public issues, freedom to examine and evaluate public institutions, including the policing of the community.”

Mr. Robarts, in my view, clearly understood the situation of policing in Metro Toronto.

It goes on to say: “The current organization of the police function is inconsistent with the principle of fiscal accountability, which holds that the spender of public funds should be responsible for raising them. More than 25 per cent of the Metro budget (excluding education) currently goes to policing, and of this more than 80 per cent is raised through the local property tax.”

What he ends up driving at is that the police should be directly responsible to Metro Toronto. Recommendation 15.1 says: “Subject to provincial standards and regulation, and accompanied by a general power to delegate, the metropolitan council be given the responsibility for policing in Metropolitan Toronto.”

I think as we examine this bill we will find that the principles of the bill are inconsistent with the recommendation put forward by Mr. Robarts. The ultimate authority still rests with the appointments of the Lieutenant Governor in Council. I think that is a very important principle that Mr. Robarts established and one that should be followed through, although it isn’t.

He makes another interesting observation that the basic organization of the Metropolitan Toronto Police has not changed fundamentally since 1957 even though it has grown to a strength of some 4,640 men and women, 3,760 of whom are constables. The report was in 1976, so the force has likely grown a bit from then. None the less, to think that it hasn’t changed fundamentally since 1957 may account for some of the problems we are having. I underline again that the problems are not essentially with the men and women on the force but with the lack of direction they have had from the people at the top, the commissioners.

Policing is different from other safety services examined in this report in that the Metropolitan Toronto police force does not report to an elected council. That obviously is a flaw and one that should be rectified.

Robarts addresses another major area of concern, and I think rightly. At the time of the Goldenberg Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto in 1965, the only concern articulated about the police force -- and this was not a major one -- was that the force was too centralized. “It was clear in 1965 and it is still clear 10 years later that unification of the police forces has improved the capacity of the police to deal with traffic problems and area-wide criminal activities.”

Nevertheless, concern has often been expressed by members of Metro council, particularly the late Metro Chairman Albert Campbell, that a unified police force has reduced the contact between the force and the citizenry.

This is in keeping with some remarks I saw in the paper attributed to the Solicitor General. The Solicitor General thought it would be appropriate for there to be more officers on foot and fewer in cars. I just saw that in the newspaper; I take it that was an accurate remark. I would agree completely. It is a fairly simple thing to do in the core of Toronto, perhaps even in the area where the Solicitor General resides. But it is a little difficult in my riding and the suburbs in general, because of the nature of the beast.

9:20 p.m.

We don’t have the same population density. Other than high-rise apartments, the residential area, single-family dwellings, are spread out. There is no row housing, there are no 25-foot frontages. There are 40-foot and 50-foot frontages. It is spread out. If we want to put a police force on foot out in Scarborough we had better hire twice as many people as we have now, because I do not know how on earth they could handle the situation. That must be the toughest part the police force has to deal with.

I can tell the members a personal anecdote. I recall several years ago, in 1968, we returned home about 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. to discover that our house had been broken into. The people who did it were still there. They were in the back part of the house. Our house had a vacant lot behind and beside it.

I phoned the police and within less than two minutes there was a police car at the front of my house. The police officer was by himself -- a good argument for two-man cruisers. He was all by himself, so he went in one door and I was at the other. Those guys got out the back window and into their car, and the policeman tried to chase them, but they got away.

About six or seven weeks later they caught the people and we got all our goodies back. The people went to court and were found guilty. The police in Scarborough were able to respond because of the car network they have, which is great. They did a first-rate job, in my opinion.

When the police officer was there, I made a cup of tea for him and we sat down and chatted. I had a tremendous respect for that policeman, for what he was trying to do and his attitude. He calmed down my wife and relatives, which was great. We have traded that off and lost something in that communication. We can get the police there by telephone because of their great car system, but there is no police officer on the street in Scarborough, and that is where we lose something.

I honestly do not know how we overcome that, yet I know from my own experience in the job I have, and the Solicitor General knows from the job he has, that personal contact is essential. It is essential to good police work, it is essential to good social work and to solving problems. It has left us. We cannot retrieve that any more in the suburbs. Maybe we can in downtown Toronto because of the nature of the city, the way it is laid out, but we have lost it in Scarborough.

Yet I can tell the Solicitor General that in Scarborough, believe it or not, we have the makings of some very serious problems in parts of our community, because the nature of Scarborough is changing. It was primarily an Anglo-Saxon enclave, middle class, upwardly mobile and so on. We have had a great influx of working people and people who are not Anglo-Saxon. We have a mixture of people from many countries, and our school system was not ready for them coming into the community. All the agencies and the community itself was not ready, and we have the potential for some real problems.

I would not pretend for a moment that the police can solve our problems. They could be a big help to us, but I do not know how they are going to do it, I really don’t because it seems to me that, first of all, among other things, there isn’t the priority for community relations officers within the police force itself, and those are the people we need.

I remember working with a chap who is a sergeant of detectives now, I think. His name is Don Taylor, and he’s a super guy. He was a community relations officer. He worked with young people who were in trouble or might be in trouble with the law. That guy worked miracles. At the time, I was with Agincourt Community Services. Don Taylor used to come in and relate to us the problems that some of these kids had. Then we would see if they needed some other help -- a social worker, the children’s aid society or somebody else. He was a super guy.

However, I got from him and from others the impression that this wasn’t exactly the most flattering position to have within the police force. It wasn’t looked upon as being something terrific. It wasn’t a promotion in any sense of the word. I think there’s even a problem within the police force about that kind of position. But beyond that, at the time -- and maybe it was improved -- we had a total of two community relations officers for the entire borough. From personal experience, I can say that we had enough troubled youths and problems within our community to keep 10 community relations officers working full-time.

Those are the people who are on the front line, the people who are going to help to get our kids going in the right way and make sure we have a good, sound community. They should be supported, and we need the money to do it obviously, but we cannot expect a community relations officer to work in a vacuum, and I submit that’s what he and his fellow officers have had to do because of the present commission.

Phil Givens may sound like a great guy on the radio to some people but, quite frankly, I think he is an absolute, unmitigated disaster as a police commissioner. I know the members opposite appreciated him taking on the job, but he’s a disaster.

For example, just as a fairly simple thing, why was it not possible for the commission to take a look at what was going on in London, Ontario? Why was it not possible to take a look at the imaginative family crisis intervention unit that was working there? While London, Ontario, isn’t Toronto, they are running a very successful program, and the chief of police there says: “It has helped our force. It has kept down the number of family dispute calls.”

The police commissioners here in Toronto didn’t even know the London program existed, let alone take a look at it. They have totally closed minds. The world begins and ends in Toronto. If we are not doing it in Toronto, I guess it is not good. That attitude is wrong, dead wrong; the members opposite know it, I know it, and I think we have to do something about it.

I want to touch on something which I think goes to the heart of this bill. I am going to read a quotation if I may be permitted:

“The secrecy of past internal investigations makes it practically impossible to put into perspective allegations of police misconduct and worse. The overwhelming majority of the officers in Metro police departments rarely, if ever, elicit serious complaints from citizens. Yet perceptions of racially and economically motivated police abuse are buttressed by the apparent unwillingness of those police departments to purge their ranks of officers who have shown a pattern of excessive violence.

“The atmosphere of secrecy surrounding the self-policing performance of police departments also increases the regrettable isolation of police officers from their fellow citizens. Only by proving to the public that their own houses are in order can policemen build the public support they need and deserve in fighting the mounting wave of crime. Only in an atmosphere of openness can good constrictive contact between police officers and other citizens bear fruit.

9:30 p.m.

“It is awfully difficult for the public to unite behind police officers when there are inadequate guarantees that citizens may see in the sunshine the results of what was done in the night. Even if justice be done in the case of Mr. McDuffie's death, that alone will not set aright what is wrong with police internal disciplinary procedures and police- community relations.”

That article is not from a Toronto newspaper. It is from the Miami Herald, dated Friday, December 28, 1979. That city is being torn apart piece by piece because of Mr. McDuffie’s death and partly because there was not an independent investigation.

The Solicitor General probably knows the Miami system better than I do or he may not. We will wait and find out. I understand Miami has a system for complaints and some public review of the situation. They have not until now had an independent investigation. That wasn’t just one article. There was a series of articles over the policemen who apparently beat Mr. McDuffie to death. The public perception was that because there was not an independent inquiry into the facts surrounding that death there was a cover-up. That perception heightened the feelings in Miami. From that, an explosion of violence has torn that city apart. When one reads that article one can substitute the name Toronto.

Mr. Speaker: It really has nothing to do with the principle of this bill.

Mr. Warner: It sure does.

Mr. Speaker: It doesn’t. I don’t see anything about the United States, Florida or Miami in this bill.

Mr. Warner: Mr. Speaker, with great respect, the situation in Miami was triggered by the lack of --

Mr. Speaker: It has nothing at all to do with Miami. If you want to deal with Metropolitan Toronto, you have the floor. If you want to deal with another jurisdiction, I can call on another speaker.

Mr. Warner: Mr. Speaker, unlike you, I have read the bill. In the bill it calls for not having an independent review.

Mr. Speaker: Fine.

Mr. Warner: What I was attempting to describe was that when there isn’t an independent review what one can end up with is what is going on in Miami today -- racial violence, triggered partly because there was not an independent review of complaints against the police.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Those officers were charged with murder. There can’t be any more independent way of dealing with it, regardless of what the member may think of the results.

Mr. Warner: This is where we are getting to a difference of opinion, because it is not the laying of the charge -- that is part of it but that is not the whole story -- it is the investigation of the complaint. That is what I submit the Solicitor General has missed. The complaint needs to be investigated, but the public also has to be assured that it can trust the investigation. I don’t think one can do that by having the police investigate themselves. I think that is where the Solicitor General is wrong. I think that is where he has made a mistake in his bill. And that is the essence of the bill, Mr. Speaker.

The whole bill and the difference of opinion between this party and the government hinges on that investigation. The minister is content to have the police investigating themselves and we are not. What we have talked about is having a registrar of complaints who has the power to hire ex-policemen, to second an investigator from the provincial police, to bring in professional staff, perhaps a retired officer from Metro Toronto or wherever -- ex-RCMP officers, professionals, people who are highly trained --

Mr. Ziemba: Not ex-RCMP letter openers.

Mr. Warner: Maybe they get tired of opening letters, I don’t know.

But when professional people have been retained, we can assure the public that it will be separate, that they will not be beholden to the police force, that they don’t have to be careful about what they say in order that they won’t offend their colleagues and so on, that it gives the appearance as well as the fact of being independent. I submit that when this is done, not only do we establish a principle to which our citizens can relate, but we make the job easier for the police officer.

I don’t know much about the Miami police force. I wonder how those fellow officers feel -- the good ones -- about an investigation that isn’t independent. When the citizenry rises up because they are enraged about what happens --

Mr. Sterling: That’s the result of the trial.

Mr. Warner: We don’t know. Because when there isn’t that totally independent investigation, maybe the terms of reference are a little too narrow.

Mr. Sterling: But the investigation led to the charge.

Mr. Warner: And perhaps not enough evidence? Because the investigation wasn’t good enough to turn up the evidence required to make the convictions? Certainly the investigative reporting that was done -- I have read all these articles -- leaves no doubt as to what happened. Maybe there wasn’t sufficient evidence for a good lawyer to get a conviction, I don’t know.

But at least when there is that totally independent review, the public can’t have any form of complaint about what happens. They feel, “Well, it’s an open public review. They have done their best to protect the citizens.” I think the police officers themselves would welcome that, because it doesn’t taint them. Government members know as well as I do that the vast majority of the police officers in Metropolitan Toronto are officers of whom we can be proud. There are problems; of course, there are problems. I bet the Solicitor General can name a few problem lawyers. He’s going to give me a list. I can think of a few problem teachers from when I was teaching. Every profession that is represented in this House can find a few of its kind of whom it is not proud.

Don’t taint the whole force. At least give them the benefit of the doubt and some advantage by allowing an independent review that serves everyone. It serves the citizen, the politician and the policeman. I firmly believe that unless we can do this we may be in for a long, hot summer in Toronto -- because the tensions are not lessening.

The Solicitor General knows of the unfortunate racial attack that occurred in Etobicoke and the responding attack, and some vandalism in the Sikh temple -- the flag being stolen, a sacred symbol to the Sikhs -- and their return visit and their pledge to offer physical assistance to anyone who requires it. The police are going to have their hands full and so are the rest of us. They need help, and I do not think we are helping them by continuing to have the police investigate themselves.

9:40 p.m.

I could not find anything, and we have had a lot of reports: the Task Force on Policing in Ontario; Metropolitan Toronto Review of Citizen-Police Complaint Procedure, by Mr. Arthur Maloney; Mr. Justice Morand’s Royal Commission into Metropolitan Toronto Police Practices; the Robarts Royal Commission on Metropolitan Toronto, and Mr. Walter Pitman’s report, Now Is Not Too Late.

If there is a single thread that comes through those reports it is that the public has to be assured that everything possible is being done on its behalf to maintain a safe community, to try to keep good relations on the street and maintain a good atmosphere.

This bill, I submit, is one of the most important bills for Metro Toronto that has ever come before this assembly. It speaks to frustrations that a lot of citizens have had; it speaks to problems the police have encountered; it speaks to frustrations a lot of politicians have had: How do we get at these police commissioners?

They used to have a little trick at their meetings. Legally, those meetings are supposed to be open. To make sure they were open, they put a little wedge in the door so that the door was open an inch, and they could not be accused of having a closed meeting. Nobody showed up, of course. For one thing, there were no chairs. They only had chairs for the commissioners. They have operated in secrecy too long and we are paying a price for it. A lack of leadership on that police commission is one of the factors that prompts this bill.

There are some other serious problems. The chief of police may decide to take no action. That is a serious flaw. We thought, when we were looking at the situation and drafting a bill, it was essential to have the chief of police involved. We also respected the collective bargaining system. The police chief has responsibility to discipline his force and the force, through its union, can voice approval or disapproval of whatever penalty is meted out. There is a negotiation procedure set up in a collective bargaining situation and that should be respected.

I do not think they are doing that in the bill. It allows us to fire somebody. Not to have the chief of police make that determination; somebody else can do that. We were not that heavy-handed. The panel of the board may dismiss the police officer from the force. That is pretty serious, to fire somebody, and not to have the chief of police do it. I submit that is where it belongs. The chief should be in charge of the force, making sure that it carries out the policies the best way it can. He may want to fire somebody and the union may want to grieve that. That is the way it should be.

Now we have taken it out of their hands and given it to the panel. They can fire the man or woman, or they can direct him or her to resign. If the person does not resign within seven days, he or she is gone. Or they can reduce him in rank or graduation of rank and pay. Again, I submit, that is a decision that rightfully belongs with the police chief.

I mentioned previously, and I will again, that I am very concerned and disappointed that the Solicitor General could not see fit to turn over the direction of the police force to the Metropolitan Toronto council and have some appointments from the province. Within our provincial jurisdiction, policing comes from the Legislature of Ontario. That is proper; that is the way it should be. I can see having a representative from here, someone that the Solicitor General names, but I think the weight of that decision-making should be with Metropolitan Toronto.

I guess the Solicitor General disagrees with John Robarts, and I agree with Robarts. I think he was on the right track.

Mr. Lawlor: They’ve been treating John Robarts pretty badly over there -- about everything.

Mr. Warner: The poor man lives in disgrace these days. He spent $1 million, did a terrific report, and the whole thing has been tossed out -- and not all at once; it has been done piece by piece. It is rather unfair.

Mr. Lawlor: They totally ignored the Pepin-Robarts report. They ignore everything John does.

Mr. Ashe: You agree with everything, eh?

Mr. Lawlor: Pretty well.

Mr. Ashe: Put it on the record then.

Mr. Warner: I guess that is the fairness we would like to see. There are a lot of policies that we disagree with, but there are also some good things that Mr. Robarts had to say.

There is another important element that I think the minister has made a mistake on. He says under section 6, the place to lodge a complaint is at the police station. I think that is wrong.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Read the section. It is one of three places.

Mr. Warner: No, it is of two. With respect, section 6(1) says: “A member of the public may make a complaint -- oh, I am sorry -- at the bureau, at any police station in Metropolitan Toronto or at the office of the public complaints commissioner.” The minister should have left out the police station. The last place somebody who has a complaint about police conduct wants to go is the police station. If a person had a problem about a policeman, what makes the minister think that person wants to encounter somebody else in a police uniform?

What we visualized was having a store front operation, a nonthreatening situation, where somebody who has a complaint can lodge it with a civilian, somebody just like me -- or, even better, like you -- and not have to go into a police station.

As I worked my way through this bill, it was a very complicated bill.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: Just let me say this by way of interjection, Mr. Speaker, the honourable member prefaced his remarks at the outset by indicating a very understandable concern about the separation of police forces from the community by reason of a whole host of factors, and yet most of his remarks seem to be directed towards not only maintaining that separation but also increasing it.

For example, he just said, “Don’t go to the local police station; go somewhere else.” Doesn’t he realize that the thrust of his remarks is to further divide the community from the police?

Mr. Speaker: Is this the minister’s windup?

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: I am sorry, Mr. Speaker; I just wanted to make that clear, not in a provocative way.

Mr. Warner: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the intervention, because I think it highlights not only a point of disagreement between the minister and me, but also a misunderstanding on the minister’s part as to what it is like in the real world out there for people who are trying to cope day by day.

The person who has a problem with the police officer, who has a complaint, I submit does not want to go and make that complaint to someone in a uniform.

9:50 p.m.

Mr. Speaker: The member is becoming repetitive again.

Mr. Warner: I have to in order for him to understand it.

Yes, I want there to be a better relationship totally between the public and the police force. That is part of what we are trying to do. But I submit that one doesn’t help that situation by having the person who feels grieved going into the police station.

Members should put themselves in the place of a police officer. If someone comes in with this outrageous complaint about one of their fellow officers, do they think they will be well-disposed towards that person? Do they think they are going to take the complaint dispassionately and objectively? It is not an easy thing to do. I think we are better off having a lesser-tension kind of situation, because the next step involves the police officer.

We should try to resolve the matter in an informal setting. They are doing that in British Columbia where they have the complainant, the police officer and a third party meet to see if it can be resolved. It may simply be a misunderstanding, and maybe it can be resolved that way. But if the person simply cannot have it resolved in that informal setting, I submit that person has the right to ask for an independent investigation of the complaint and have the matter resolved. That is what the Solicitor General wants to do, but the bill does not do that.

The bill, unfortunately, is very complicated. I have the funny feeling that if this thing goes through the way it is, the citizen who has a complaint should also have at least three years of Osgoode Hall Law School behind him.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: You are being unfair.

Mr. Warner: Maybe I am; but I read through this and there sure are a lot of steps involved if one has a complaint. One had better be persistent, because if the police chief decides to take no action then one is going to have to be a brave soul to stand up to the police chief of Metropolitan Toronto and say he is wrong. He is a man who is held in pretty high esteem in this city. He is a pretty big, powerful person, and to say that he is wrong and I want my complaint heard, one has to get past the police chief.

I think the Solicitor General has loaded the deck on the wrong side and in so doing I think he is being unfair to the police force.

Mr. Speaker, there is one other item I want to add, because I think it is quite interesting. I don’t know how accurate the Toronto Sun polls are -- if they are as accurate as some of its reporting, maybe we can’t put much faith in it. But the Sun did a little survey back in September 1979, and one question was, “Do you think complaints against the Metro police should be investigated by the Metro police department, by the Ontario Provincial Police, by the Ontario Attorney General or by a civilian body?”

Some 20 per cent of the people had faith in the Attorney General to do the investigation, seven per cent by the OPP, 18 by the Metro police department and 24 per cent by a civilian body -- the signal high in the survey. A combination of the above, another 13 per cent; no investigation needed, three per cent; don’t know -- no answer, 16 per cent

It seems to me, out of that there is a bit of a message: either people are unsure about who should do the investigation or they feel either the Attorney General or an independent body should be doing it. That is the people of Metro Toronto. I think it is important in this context that the remainder of the survey indicated that the people generally had faith in the police force.

“How satisfied are you with police protection in the Metro Toronto area? Very satisfied, 63 per cent; somewhat satisfied, 29 per cent. That’s a pretty high percentage when totalled together.

I think the survey indicates the minister would be wise to move to an independent review system, which would be supported by the people of Metropolitan Toronto. For the life of me, I don’t understand what keeps the minister back from what he must know in his own heart is the right answer.

Hon. Mr. McMurtry: It is exactly because of what I do know in my heart to be right.

Mr. Warner: The Metro Toronto police would support the independent system, knowing that the investigation was being done by professionals, people who knew what they were doing. The public certainly would, because it would be getting the straight goods, public reporting, especially if there was Metro council direct involvement instead of the minister’s proposal. Over all I think we would have a much better system in our city.

In conclusion, even at this moment I would hope the minister could reconsider his position on the independent review, because I think he is wrong and headed on the wrong course. Unless we build in an independent review system we are asking for trouble. Trouble is brewing in this city; make no mistake about it. The signs are there, they are unmistakable and shouldn’t be ignored.

In the long run if the minister was to adopt a procedure that we have carefully laid out in our bill he would be helping the police, he would be doing a service to the public and he would maintain that very important -- and it sounds a bit trite now because so many members have said it -- appearance that we not only have justice but that everybody sees we are trying to apply justice. The minister can do that. If that isn’t done, I have no choice but to vote against this bill and I will.

Mr. Speaker: Does any other member wish to speak on second reading?

Mr. Lawlor: Mr. Speaker, how lovely it is to see the Solicitor General handling his own legislation. It adds a fillip to the whole proceedings.

I would like to make initial reference to the Morand report. “The police, like laws, reflect the nature of the society which they serve. Corrupt societies deserve and get corrupt police. Totalitarian societies acquire omnipotent police. Violent societies get violent police. Tolerant societies get tolerant police. Wise societies bridle police powers.”

That is the initial remark he makes, which is a quotation from somewhere else actually. Then I would like to make reference to Chief Justice Bora Laskin’s comments to Simon Fraser University in 1975.

“Policing is too important to be left to the police, too important even to be left to the police schools. This does not mean it is not a special art and that it does not require special skills and special training or that there is an unnecessary elitism involved in restricting the policing of the community to a qualified class. What it does mean is that all of us -- police and non-police alike -- have a continuing interest in the quality and effectiveness of our police system, particularly because our form of political organization through which we give expression and force to our law, is based on public participation in political and social processes, on freedom to debate public issues, freedom to examine and evaluate public institutions, including the policing of the community.”

10 p.m.

On page 184, having gone through numerous cases where certain abuses within the police organizations themselves came to light in these things, he severely castigated in the process. He says: “First, present system is not effective. For a variety of reasons, the investigation of serious allegations of excessive force are incomplete, not impartial and largely unsupervised. I was not impressed with the calibre of some of the officers assigned to the complaint bureau who appeared before me. There does not appear to be a regulation, inspection or direction of their efforts and the investigators appear to be left largely to their own devices.”

True, the Solicitor General will reply, that is the very purpose of my legislation: to obviate the nonsupervision and the difficulties involved, and to a point he does.

Finally, as he sums up the whole thing: “The principal objection offered by the police to this system, the Maloney system, is that it takes disciplinary matters out of the hands of the chief of police.” The Solicitor General quite sedately places them back there in a way that was never proposed in either the Maloney or Morand reports.

“The second objection is that the procedures laid down were cumbersome and potentially costly.” And are the Solicitor General’s procedures ever cumbersome, and how costly will be an interesting thing we will find out in due course.

“Neither of these objections commend themselves to me. In the system envisaged by Mr. Maloney, the chief retains the right of assigning the penalty in every case. It is only the determination of the validity of the complaint which is removed to another tribunal,” a civilian one.

“In my view, it is fundamentally important that the public be confident that a full and impartial investigation has been carried out and that the adjudication has been made by an independent person or tribunal. Justice does not appear to be done when the entire procedure is in the hands of the very body against which the complaint is made and, as I have pointed out, in some cases not only is justice not seen to be done, it is not being done. These considerations must be paramount in any decision made concerning citizen complaint procedure.

“After giving the matter an anxious study and consulting with many others in and out of the field of law enforcement, it is my considered view that the overriding consideration must be the introduction of an independent element into the investigation and hearing of citizen complaints.” It is precisely that independent element that is missing in this particular context.

If the investigation is wholly within a narrow confine, it carries right through to when the bureau rather laterally receives the complaint, having gone through a series of cascades and maybe over part of the falls. I say to the Solicitor General that the legislation is a piece of typical Tory circumlocution. It is convoluted in the extreme. It goes through winding paths.

Actually one needs an Ariadne’s thread just to get in the process, and one needs a rope to pull one back out again. There are six to seven different phases. It seems to me that what has been done is the Solicitor General has taken the reports from helter-skelter and beyond. He has taken some portions from the Maloney report, some from the Morand report, some reports from Philadelphia, and the odd tidbit out of the Minneapolis experiment. He has put them all together into some melange or hotchpotch so that, when it is all added up, the worst features from them all begin to emerge.

I assume that as Solicitor General, the minister has paid close attention to the report of the Task Force on Policing in Ontario and the remarks made in this wise and generally speaking about some elements of the role of the police in society as mentioned by my friend the member for Scarborough-Ellesmere a few moments ago as to their own particular problems within that form of profession and what we must take account of and be considerate for.

It is improper to have the internal investigation done by officers on officers, Mr. Justice Morand has said, and it has been repeated. One generally is very suspicious and scouts scrupulously any possible conflict of interest. We set up very great laws so that our interests and the interests of judges are preserved, so that conflicts don’t arise in municipal officials and members of boards of education. Yet there is an in-built rule here that probably goes a long way to undermining the legislation and with which I think the government is going to be faced as time goes on and the thing doesn’t work out.

The Solicitor General knows the bill that my colleague the member for Scarborough-Ellesmere produced in this House; it is a far simpler procedure. Sure, it is not fleshed out with respect to all the steps in the total picture, but in skeleton outline at least one gets directly to the heart of the matter. What has the Solicitor General done? He has set up a bureau, et cetera. The bureau itself has an investigative staff. It may settle informal matters as we want them. But then that again is within the investigative body, which will be either ex-policemen or investigatory officers trained in these methods. That is the first hurdle.

Then it goes from there to the chief of police for review and disposition, and look at the range of review and disposition there. The bill says quite bluntly he may take no action. There are circumstances in which taking no action is advisable, but it is too much to place the plenary powers within the ambit of the chief of police -- the new chief of police in Toronto particularly. He has adequate administrative and other tasks to perform without having this task assigned to him. Even Maloney is preferable to this. It should be in civilian hands with the chief having a concerted and working relationship with the tribunal, the judicial body, et cetera -- which is insulated and over there.

We want to go a little further in that direction in order to give no possibility of being identified with the very forces that are in question -- or at least some members of it are in question -- in the proceeding which started the whole thing.

Then there is another hurdle. If that is unsatisfactory, it goes up to the commissioner and the commissioner again reviews the case. This is the third review we have and nothing is resolved as yet. The commissioner may then go through this elaborate process again, doing a number of things, among which are simply to take no action. Then the matter may be forced by making an appeal. By the end of that process the complaint may be defused. If that is the Solicitor General’s purpose in these labyrinthine gyrations he is making, he should say so. This certainly will have that effect. That may be beneficial, God knows.

But I am of the opinion that tempers may be of such a kind -- and I don’t talk about Miamis in this city -- that they are by definition forcing us to come to this legislation. They may be profoundly frustrated and maybe even angrier than they were when they initiated the proceedings on justifiable grounds. That being the case, the Solicitor General is throwing up barricades and hurdles all over the place to make justice as difficult as possible and to get through to the heart of the matter and get a resolution in a serious case, not the informal ones that can be settled out of court so to speak. So he sets up these stages and various pyramids that one has to scale in order to finally get before the board.

10:10 p.m.

I have no particular objection to the constitution of the board nor to its range of penalties and things of that kind. It is just the bloody process of getting there. Why all the difficulty is written into the statute -- of deliberation obviously, because he pondered it long; it has been long coming before this House -- quite puzzles me. I would like the government to consider stripping it down somewhat and making the procedure somewhat more simple. It is a very easy thing to do, instead of obfuscating the central issue.

I want the government to consider it -- and we will ask to have it done -- and that the matter be taken into committee so that the niceties may be flushed out and the internal workings of that bill clarified. It is good to have the members and the general public clear as to how all those gears are going to be oiled to turn at the same time and how they mesh. It is complicated legislation. What originally appeared as something fairly manageable is now intricate and difficult. It should go to committee.

Mr. Ziemba: Mr. Speaker, we have waited almost six years for a citizens’ review commission of some sort, and I guess we have waited for nothing. After the Maloney commission, the Morand commission, the Pitman commission and even Cardinal Carter’s findings, we are right back to where we started from, with the police investigating the police. I say that in a way that I hope is constructive. We have two members of Metro’s finest up in the gallery. At least, I assume they are, because who else would sit through this long and boring debate all afternoon and all evening? I saw Mr. Mal Connolly with them earlier so I assume they are members of Metro’s finest. I hope they take the words I have to say in the spirit in which I intend to say them.

Opposing this bill does not mean that I am anti-cop or that the New Democrats are anti-cop. I really resent the Solicitor General calling opposition members a bunch of simpletons because they oppose this bill. That is not why we are opposing this bill. It bothers me when the Solicitor General gets frothy-mouthed and cross-eyed whenever anyone speaks up against the police. Maybe it bothers me, but I can kind of understand it. If those galleries were full of packing house workers or steel workers I would get very upset if he criticized their leader.

As Solicitor General he is sort of leader of the police, and when somebody comes up with what he might interpret as criticism he gets his back up, maybe quite rightly. That is a problem for him, because at the same time he is also Attorney General and he has to be independent. I do not see how he can be independent in the administration of justice when, on the one hand, he is protecting the police and, on the other hand, he is trying to be open and fair to the public.

That is the problem he has and he could easily deal with it by giving one of the other Tory back-benchers that portfolio -- I think the member for Carleton-Grenville (Mr. Sterling), who is doing a pretty good job as his parliamentary assistant. He is smiling and I am sure he would be really grateful if the Solicitor General would give up one of those portfolios. He does not have to hog them all. Give him one and let him do the job.

Mr. Gaunt: Share the wealth.

Mr. Ziemba: He does not want any more words of endorsement from me, Mr. Speaker.

As to this business about how sensitive the police are to what might be interpreted as criticism, I am sorry this bill is obviously going to pass second reading, because one after the other of the Liberals has got up and spoken in favour of it.

While this is a Metro Toronto bill, we do have a kind of a Liberal presence in Metro Toronto that disappoints me. However, we do have a Liberal presence in the form of Margaret Campbell, and she is everywhere.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I believe you are referring to the member for St. George.

Mr. Ziemba: The member for St. George, yes. She is a very able member. Hopefully, we will get to her before the vote and we won’t vote on this bill tonight. At least if I have anything to do with it, we won’t. The Liberal member for St. George is about the only member I can think of who would be sensitive to this bill. When I say she is a real presence, she really is. She is everywhere I go. If I were to leave this House and attend some ethnic function tonight, there would be the Liberal member for St. George. If I went to another location where there was another meeting of concerned citizens, there would be the member for St. George. I believe the Liberal Party has cloned Margaret Campbell and is sending all these clones out into the community.

Mr. Kerrio: There is one place you have been where you won’t find her!

Mr. Ziemba: We have another interjection from the member for Niagara Falls. He is really bad, Mr. Speaker. You are going to have to do something about him. I know it is a problem because he is a member of your party.

The police cannot be above the law and in a sense they are. By having the police investigate the police, what the Solicitor General is saying to us is that we do not trust citizens to investigate the police; only their peers can investigate them. It can only be an in-house kind of investigation. To my mind, that is wrong.

I am going to talk about a couple of personal experiences I have had along this line that convinced me police investigating police is wrong and police being given any kinds of privileges other citizens do not have is wrong. As elected representatives, we have a certain amount of privilege, but we have no privilege whatsoever when it comes to criminal courts. I found that out the hard way. The police do not have any privileges whatsoever when it comes to criminal courts, but in real life they do.

In actual practice, the police do have privileges. I don’t believe there has been one case of a police officer being asked to name his source, his informant, where the police officer was jailed or even threatened with jail. I can be corrected if I am wrong, but I don’t believe there has been one case here in this province or anywhere else in Canada where a police officer was put in that position.

Don’t police officers have informants? They certainly do. I found out the hard way what happens. When they are faced with that, the police, through the Attorney General drop the charges. They feel strongly enough about protecting their sources that they just drop the charges, and that is the end of it. They are not put in the position of having to give that information, as elected representatives are.

The members of the Legislature don’t have a citizens’ review court -- or do we? It seems every few years we go to the highest court in the land, to the people. There is nothing wrong with that. The police shouldn’t be afraid to appear before their fellow citizens if there is a complaint.

I was going to draw on some personal experiences to make the case for an independent review. I am sure the police will initially have all kinds of complaints coming to their complaint bureau, but many of them will be trivial complaints. I had a trivial complaint not too long ago to my local police at number 11 station. I am really pleased with the work of the police there. It is one of the more enlightened stations. In west Toronto, we say that station is doing a good job, not because they are so vigorous in their policing, but because the people in west Toronto --

Mr. Kerr: Are law abiding.

10:20 p.m.

Mr. Ziemba: They are law abiding. That’s right. It is not so much that the people are law abiding, but that we do not have alcohol promoted and sold in west Toronto. It’s this absence of taverns and bars that cuts down on the amount of police work, and that’s true. I think a lot of the drunks in the number 11 lock up over the weekend come from locations other than the riding of High Park- Swansea.

They come from my neighbouring riding of Parkdale, for instance. One just has to go across the border on Roncesvalles Avenue to see all kinds of drunks staggering around the streets after six o’clock. There is absolutely none of that on my side of the street. My colleague the member for Dovercourt (Mr. Lupusella) is considering a private member’s bill that I am prepared to support. He is calling for a drying up of the city of Toronto to cut down on the --

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Perhaps we’ll deal with that when it comes up.

Mr. Ziemba: Okay. I’m sure you would be interested in supporting it as well, Mr. Speaker. I was going to tell you about some of the problems that I had. Last summer we had a knock on the door about 11:30 at night. Two police officers wanted to know where John was. John is my 12-year-old son. We told them John was out of town. They had a disbelieving look in their eyes. However, after some time I was able to convince them that John wasn’t home.

I asked them why they wanted John. They said: “Your John is in big trouble. We have to talk to him.” I said, “What sort of trouble?" They wanted to come in; I said: “Sure, come on in. Tell me what trouble John’s in.”

“Well, we have very good evidence, strong evidence, that John has been involved in a break-and-enter with some of his friends.”

To make a long story short, a candy store had been broken into and a pile of candy had been stolen, and John was supposed to have been one of the thieves. The young people who were caught, two or three young fellows, went to the same school as my son and implicated four other friends in this break-and-enter. The police, in spite of the fact that John wasn’t home, insisted on talking to him. It was only after I gave them my assurance that I would pick him up the following day and take him to the police station that they left.

They left our house around 12 o’clock and went to the next boy’s house. The father wasn’t interested in letting them in but, when they told him they would come back with a search warrant, he did allow these two police officers in. Notice the charge is stealing candy in a candy store, and these two officers are investigating it at midnight. They woke the kid up, got him out of bed and he was really frightened. He told them he wasn’t involved and, after a great deal of questioning, they were able to ascertain that indeed he wasn’t involved and that my son wasn’t involved. They called us back around 12:30 or 1 and told us everything was all right, our boy wasn’t involved in this break-and-enter, and the information they had received was wrong.

Quite frankly, I was so relieved to find it was a false alarm that I accepted the apologies of the two officers and let it go at that. But I shouldn’t have, because I found out a week later they were fairly forceful when they dealt with the other party. The other man was a Ford worker; he wasn’t a member of the provincial Legislature, and they weren’t as polite when they dealt with him. In fact, they told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t get out of their way they would be back with a warrant and would smash their way in if they had to. That kind of behaviour is unacceptable.

When I talked to the young fellow and asked him if his father was prepared to lay a complaint, he said: “Certainly not. My father would never complain to the police. Why would he? He is afraid of what they might do to him if he did.” So we let it go.

That is the kind of complaint we get. We cannot expect people to go to the police station with that kind of complaint, and have the police be the ones who deal with it or who mediate. It should go to an independent person, a civilian.

The other incident I experienced dealt with racial discrimination. We have a Hindu temple in my riding that has been defaced on a number of occasions. There are not too many members of that Hindu church who live in my riding. There is one family, however, that was harassed by the young people in the immediate area. The harassment went on for about six months. It finally ended with charges and counter-charges being laid, much the same we have now, where the individual decided to take the law into his own hands and take on his harassers.

The police were sort of helpful, but not all that helpful. They would tell us they were too busy, had only one cruiser in the area and couldn’t be watching the house night and day. This went on for months and months until, finally, I had occasion to visit the house after a rock had been thrown through the front window. At that time, the police had been called and were talking to my constituent. But instead of being sympathetic to him and appearing to be sensitive to his problem, they seemed to be hostile and antagonistic towards him.

I couldn’t believe it, sitting there. They didn’t know I was a member of the Legislature as this happened in 1976 and I wasn’t too well known to the police at this time. They questioned him in a way I thought was most unfair. They wanted to know if he was employed, where he was working and how long he had been working. When I asked them what business that was of theirs, they turned to me and said, “Why are you involved? Do you live here?” I told them no, and they were quite abrupt.

To make a long story short, they walked out of the house in a huff. Of course, I became furious at that point and took my constituent and his wife down to the police station to complain. If I was an ordinary citizen, I would think twice before I did that. When I got to the police station, there was the officer who had been so rude and all of his buddies standing around joking. When I walked in, the joking continued. It wasn’t until someone recognized me in my old clothes that they became sensitive to the problem.

They apologized profusely to my constituent, and from that point on corrective steps were taken. All of a sudden, there was a youth officer assigned to the case, and within three weeks the problem was resolved. They found the kids who were harassing him and talked to the parents. To this day there hasn’t been a repeat performance of this kind of harassment.

But up until then it was a problem. They weren’t sensitive to the East Indians involved. Not only that, they were kind of rude. So that situation has been dealt with. Since then, I’ve had a number of occasions where I’ve had to call the police at number 11 station and they have been very good in performing their duties. I’ve brought this up in estimate debates.

We have a new inspector now. In fact, I found Inspector Schultz, who was criticized by the various ethnic groups as being intolerant to the black community, to be a most sensitive, understanding, compassionate inspector. We felt very badly when he was transferred to the Dovercourt Street station. However, he has been replaced by Inspector Pitts who has been very attentive to the problems of visible minorities or anyone else who has come to him. In fact, I would say the Toronto police force is more enlightened and more progressive than all the other police forces in this province. I will put that on the record. I have been in Barrie and in other areas of this province where one wouldn’t find me supporting the police in those areas.

In Metropolitan Toronto, because of police interest in changing their image when it comes to labour, I think that the first reforms took place in that area. Perhaps the Solicitor General can recall back in the early 1970s we had a number of violent labour disputes. There was the Artistic Woodwork Company Limited dispute where the police were seen to be working for the management. That was my first actual brush with the Metropolitan Toronto police. I was asked to attend that picket line by an ex-MPP, a fellows who had held my seat for a few years back in the late 1940s. Bill Temple asked me to attend the Artistic Woodwork picket line back in 1972.

We would get out there every Tuesday and Thursday morning around six o’clock and try to pass out literature to the strike-breakers that were being driven through the picket line. It didn’t do much good because the police really took their work seriously at that time. We had the emergency task force on the job.

Mr. Ruston: Time.

Mr. Ziemba: Has my time expired, Mr. Speaker?

Mr. Deputy Speaker: It is 10:30 of the clock.

On motion by Mr. Ziemba, the debate was adjourned.

The House adjourned at 10:30 p.m.