Bill No. 13 - Police Act - Third Reading

CLAUDIA CHENDER « » : Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues ‑ the member for Halifax Needham and the member for Preston ‑ for their insightful comments on this and I will add to them as our caucus's Justice critic, but I am not sure there is anything entirely new.

I do want to highlight, especially in light of the conversation the last few days in the House, where we see a real resistance on the part of government to examine anything to do with policing, I think that is why we are hearing more debate on this bill than we might otherwise hear: because we know that there are issues and we are not seeing any willingness to examine those issues, and SiRT is a place where we know that there are these issues, where we have so many examples that have already been brought up.

As my colleagues have spoken about, there is a very real perception that SiRT is not as independent as it could be. The four investigators on SiRT are all either current or retired police officers. Sometimes that makes sense, but in some part we would want community representation to be taking into account these very serious issues that get taken before SiRT. I have to point out that as of July of last year, all four of those investigators were male and all four of them were white and that certainly doesn't match the makeup of all the folks who are necessarily coming before SiRT or the folks who are engaged by the issues that come before SiRT.

There have been calls to hire civilian investigators and to find other ways to incorporate those civilian and diverse voices, but today we haven't heard a response to that so I am hopeful that maybe the minister will address that in his comments to close debate.

Members of this House know - and it bears repeating but it has been said many times now - about the legacy of systemic racism in our province. Black people, Indigenous people, people of colour face significant barriers in access to housing, education, health care, employment, and access to justice. We know that those folks are more likely to be stopped by police and when people are stopped by police and things go sideways, that's when SiRT is involved. We know that Black, Indigenous, people of colour by definition will have a specific perspective and a valuable insight to offer into investigations undertaken by SiRT.

So again, I rise to encourage the minister and the department to consider, particularly as we expand, the incorporation of those voices. We heard SiRT commit to establishing a community liaison committee - we would love to hear an update about that. We would love to hear that that is happening and if so, how it's happening. We know that that kind of committee could be an important step towards including systemically marginalized voices and perspectives in the justice system.

Extending SiRT's jurisdiction to other regions, which essentially is what this bill does - I understand there will be mirror legislation that would come into place in New Brunswick to allow that as well. That kind of intensifies the stopwatch, if you will, on the need for those improvements.

We're not speaking against the bill, but we're saying we know all of these improvements need to be made to SiRT. We have advocated for them in the past. Particularly if we are exporting, as it were, this process, it's imperative that the process is a good one.

Nova Scotia exports - we talked a lot about that in this House - we want to export the best. If we're offering help to another province, we want that to be the best help possible. We want that to be the best system possible. These suggestions are made in that light.

These are some of the improvements. We know this is very much connected in a bigger way to the need that we have been pushing for to re-examine policing generally in Nova Scotia and those contracts. This is a first step, and one that we believe needs to happen before we export SiRT, as it were.

Our caucus will continue to look for those improvements. I look forward to the comments of the minister. With that, I'll take my seat.