Christian Leuprecht
Christian Leuprecht spoke 22 times across 2 days of testimony.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Merci de l’introduction. Vous m’entendez bien?
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Merci. Je vais introduire en anglais, mais je vais prendre vos questions dans les deux langues officielles. So a team that I led supported the Cullen Commission with a submission that figured prominently in the final report released in June 2022. And invoking EA is symptomatic of deficiencies and shortcomings reported by the Cullen Commission. I also published a recent book on Intelligence as Democratic Statecraft across the Five Eyes countries that includes substantial information, and financial intelligence; and have a forthcoming book on financial crime in Canada. So let's look at the typology here. This was not money laundering or tax evasion. The phenomena that we have here is probably closest to terrorist financing. There was an immediate use value to funds provided, the purpose for which those funds were provided was ambiguous, it wasn't clear whether they were being withdrawn for legal or illegal purposes. And small donations can have a relatively large impact, and in this case, can also serve as a proxy for the extent of public support. So let’s think about this: A G7 country, with the world’s 10th largest economy, had to invoke the EA, in part to get a handle on some crowdfunding that was in part sustaining some illegal activity. What does this tell us about the adequacy, effectiveness, and efficiency of Canada’s financial regime? Within Canada, money laundering is currently governed by 15 different laws and regulatory instruments. At the federal level, Canada currently has 12 agencies tasked with AML enforcement and prosecution, while there are approximately 14 within each province. In February, this sizable financial crime policing apparatus was unable to achieve the necessary strategic effect without the EA. That casts a long shadow over the purported efficacy of laws, regulations, and agencies. And although Canada’s system appears quite robust, it is actually very weak. So weak, in fact, that Transparency International has ranked Canada at the bottom of G27 countries -- of G20 countries. What are the implications? First, the inadequacy of legislation, regulations, and agencies. Key allies can achieve the same strategic effect without invoking emergency measures because their legislation, regulations, and agencies are actually up to date and properly postured and funded. Second implication: The inadequately [sic] of the posture of Canadian agencies. Expert federal agencies and their financial reporting entities couldn’t get it done under existing rule of law powers. Third implication: At least a perception, if not a reality, of the unequal, inequitable, idiosyncratic application of the rule of law; that is, crowdfunding played a role in blockades of critical infrastructure and other environmental protest, for instance, that crossed into -- the line into civil disobedience; illegality, perhaps criminality, including disregard for Court injunctions. But no extraordinary measures were taken to stem financial flows to these groups. So the impression? When the government is sympathetic to protesters and their cause, it goes easy on them. When the government is not, it will go to extraordinary lengths to shut them down. That impression, if not the reality, undermines the very premise of constitutional democracy; that the rule of law applies equally to all citizens, to thwart precisely what we’re witnessing here, the tyranny of the majority. Fourth implication: In February, the Prime Minister wanted foreign money funding illegal protests in Canada to stop. Minister Mendicino remarks -- remarked about the number of contributions and their sheer size. But CSIS testified before this very Inquiry that it found no foreign actors funding the protest and told the government that back in February. So did the government engage in deliberate misinformation of foreign funding anyway? Implication 5: Compare the Prime Minister’s preoccupation with foreign funding of a relatively small but tenacious protest in Ottawa, with this government’s inaction on Chinese foreign influence in Canadian elections and democratic institutions; Chinese police stations in Canada; and sanctions on Russia. Words in Canada speak louder than action. In the UK, 19 billion pounds and assets have been frozen; in Belgium, 52 billion euros, in Canada, $122 million Canadian. It would appear that dirty Russian money in Canada is not a priority. But 20 million raised over three weeks, entirely from Canadian sources for protest by Canadians, warrants invoking the EA? There are two ways to read this. The threats to Canadian democracy are as real from within as they are from without, or that it’s okay for US, Chinese, and Russian money to interfere with Canada’s democratic processes and interests, just not for Canadians with Canadian money, especially there -- if they’re opposed to the federal government or its policies. Six implications: Donors came from across Canadian society, including Prairie farmers. They’ve now seen how the government is prepared to go after people and their assets, should they fund a social movement that is opposed to the current government or its policies. The unintended consequence? They’ve restructured their assets to put them out of reach for government, and moved support for controversial social movements online onto crypto currency, which makes these financial flows less visible and harder to track. So the yay has had perverse incentives of making work much more difficult for intelligence agencies. The conclusion: Was it really worth to invoke the EA? So how did we get here, and what does it tell us? First, financial intelligence in this country is embarrassingly weak. FINTRAC is an outlier among FIUs. It’s an administrative FIU; it does not have investigative capacity, the right to request directly from the reporting entities any additional financial information, and the right to freeze suspicious transactions. FINTRAC is a passive type of FIU because it mostly produces reactive disclosures that are linked to voluntary information records submitted by law enforcement. Canada has an exceptional defensive reporting regime that, at $6.8 billion a year, is very expensive for banks. Justice Cullen concludes law enforcement bodies in this province cannot count on FINTRAC to produce timely, actionable intelligence. Second; weak criminal intelligence and the inadequate posture of enforcement agencies. There’s a paucity of investigative and prosecutory ability. In 2018, for example, the RCMP publicly confessed that it had no expertise to conduct sophisticated financial or corporate investigations. Canadian data show that 86 percent of money laundering charges filed between 2012 and 2017 never made it to trial because they were withdrawn or stayed. There are sensational recent examples in both Toronto and Vancouver to this effect. And in 2020, the RCMP disbanded its Financial Crimes Unit in Ontario altogether because priorities shifted. Third; weak legislation. Just one example, at least since 2002, FATF has recommended that governments pass laws to ensure that lawyers collect, maintain, and disclose information concerning client billings to government regulators. This step is thought to be necessary to guard against the use of lawyers as willing or unwilling dupes who are being paid with crooked dollars. In peer reviews, FATF has highlighted the ongoing non-compliance by two countries that refuse to abide by the disclosure recommendation: Canada and the United States. Fourth; weak penalties. For instance, KPMG, one of the world’s big four accounting firms had set up an aggressive tax plan that they marketed to a high-net worth individuals who lived mainly in British Columbia. In March 2016, the CBC published reports that indicated the CRA had entered into overly generous settlement agreements with taxpayers. One unhappy taxpayer went to the media with their complaints, but part of the controversy surrounded the fact that no sanctions were ever levied against the tax advisors, the accountants and the lawyers who set up and then marketed the plan in the first place. What does this tell us? That Canadian national security, including financial intelligence, is not fit for purpose for the 21st century. What’s the government’s response? It announces seemingly ambitious but essentially unquantifiable and vague policy to root out corruption; increase regulatory oversight; tackle the opioid crisis; make housing more affordable for ordinary Canadians. Compare that to the government’s determined commitment and response to counterterrorism. By contrast, the EA and Cullen are a measure of the government’s inattention to financial crime. How, then, to explain the disconnect between the Canadian state’s overt commitments and its failure to deliver on such commitments? Because there is no political or corporate will. The message is, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Especially the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers’ findings, as well as the 2020 Tax Justice Network figures, suggest that Canada is not unduly worried about the cleanliness of financial flows, whether from immigration or from investment. There’s a mix of activities that are illicit, for example, capital flight and business investment; illicit, for example, white collar crime and tax evasion; and on the fringes of legality, for instance, aggressive tax avoidance and trade- related malpractices. Having spent decades building a reputation a haven and global shelter for illicit gains, the government does not have the intent to slaughter its golden goose. Invoking the EA sends a clear message, this is a one-off measure to contain a controversial social movement that is causing the federal government at the time political headaches. Purveyors of dirty foreign money and their enablers need not worry because Canada isn’t about to change its regime or its mantra. Canada is still open for dirty money. The Commission confirmed what we all already knew, that the Cullen Canadian financial regime works very well for criminals and the ultra rich to the detriment of the middle class and everyone else. The message in invoking the EA, “If you’re a criminal or ultra rich, you need not worry.” In short, the justification for invoking the EA that, instead if building a financial regime that’s actually fit for purpose for the 21st century, temporarily invoking the EA was far more expedient. Merci.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Christian ---
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So it's probably helpful to differentiate between risk and threat; right? So everything's a risk in one way or another. But a threat is capability and intent, and so I think we always need to ask then, if we have actors who are providing funding, what is their capability in terms of actually influencing democratic institutions, whatever it might be, and what is their intent. And if that intent is nefarious, if the intent is to support illegality, criminality, if there's an antidemocratic intent, I think that would be an important sort of element of distinction. And so that seems to be driving, for instance, these foreign agent registries that there's a particular concern that certain state entities have fundamental hostile intent and have the capability to follow through on that intent, and so you have to manage the risk very differently than, for instance, some donor, whoever who's just giving money because he's -- she or he or they sympathize with a particular cause.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
I'll try to be brief. Look, intelligence is our first line of defence, and so this is why intelligence agencies are subject to different threshold, evidentiary threshold regime, for instance, than criminal intelligence. Now let's look at how well we're actually doing when it comes to, for instance, figuring out intent in terms of financial intelligence. So 2019 and 2020, FINTRAC had 31-and-a- half million individuals reports submitted to it. Now the entire United States had 21-and-a-half million. The United Kingdom had 500,000. So that's 12-and-a-half times more reports in Canada as compared to the others. That's 96 percent -- 96 times more reports compared to the UK. So that's an exceptional defensive regime that provides very high volume, very low- quality outputs. In fact, in 2019/2020, FINTRAC made only 2,057 unique disclosures to law enforcement, and most of those disclosures were not particularly useful because they didn't, for instance, draw a broader network in terms of threats and so forth. So we need to actually have a much more robust posture for intelligence agencies to actually be able on the one hand collect the information that they need to discern intent, and then to be able to action that type of intelligence. And when it comes to FINTRAC, for instance, if you read the chapter on FINTRAC, in the Cullen Commission report, it is very clear that FINTRAC does not perform. Why does it not perform? Because it is a complete outlier in terms of financial intelligence agencies among western democratic allies. So this just sort of as an example that we can have all the conversations about legal particularities that we like. If we have agencies that cannot perform for the purpose of the security, prosperity and democracy of Canada, then all this is probably nugatory.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
I just do have to -- if I may reply ---
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
--- to that very, very briefly, that what Ms. Davis outlines here is precisely the problem when it comes to effectiveness of government agencies; that there is insufficient transparency for outsiders to measure whether these agencies are actually effective, and what governments do with their own agencies, they will always say about each other that they’re all effective. I’ve yet to find an RCMP report, for instance, that has ever said about any RCMP aspect that the RCMP is not effective at something that it does. So what this means is the state controls the narrative on how effective its own institutions actually are, and that’s why inquiries such as this one are so important because they’re some of the very few opportunities to actually shed light and provide some transparency on what actually happens. And I think it is -- while there may be some factual issues with the Cullen Commission’s report, I think it very dangerous to call into question the overall conclusions that the Cullen Commission draws because it is the only measure of objective independent sort of assessment of the entire regime in Canada, and to what extent it actually or does not serve the public purpose, and I think the Cullen Commission’s conclusions on that are irrefutable.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Christian Lepreucht.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So I think this really gets at the heart of sort of the challenge, that moving beyond the invocation of the Act as simply a means to an end and it somehow had the effect, the strategic effect that the public or the Government was looking for. And I think -- so these measures of notice then get us to, I think, four other sort of thresholds, which is was it proportional, was it necessary, was it reasonable, and was it sort of a -- and the efficacy, so efficacious, efficient? And so what does the sequencing look like in order to be able to then have on your matrix being able to check these off? And so I think the financial piece really came as a way to substitute for the relatively ineffectiveness of the initial law enforcement response also on the financial side because these financial investigations are some of the most complex investigations that you can possibly lead on a criminal enforcement, criminal intelligence side and were simply not postured with the people that can actually do these investigations. So we're having I think the conversation that we're having today as a way that the Government substituted for the fact that we simply on the enforcement side didn't have the appropriate capacities and competencies if we had been able to leverage these the way other countries, Australia, the United States, France, Germany leveraged these in protests effectively then we don't have to resort to these extraordinary measures. And so I think they're trying to understand, you know, where -- how do we get ourselves to some benchmark measures as to under what circumstances it might be appropriate to then use the second order effects, such as the financial measures that we're talking about and when these effects are proportional or necessary, reasonable and efficacious, that's I think the heart of the matter.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Yeah, I just want to introduced the Australian example here, right? So if you look at the fines that were levelled against Westpac and CommBank, for instance, I mean, these are huge fines, and what that suggests is that the banks aren't actually terribly concerned about the risk that any one individual that’s making hundreds or thousands of potentially quite dubious transactions poses. So the banking culture in Canada may be different, but the Australian example suggests that while I think this is an important point that you raise that affects -- clearly affects -- has potential serious impact on individuals, the Australian example suggests that we should be concerned about quite the opposite on the part of banks.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
It's a really pertinent conversation because if you want to prepare to solve the problems of tomorrow rather than the problems of today, then of course we need to prepare for a world where the banks of today are no longer going to be the central financial institutions that we have today. So we're not going to necessarily have a future next time this happens where we can just go to six banks and ask them to identify sort of the key -- the keys of nefarious -- designate nefarious individuals. But what we can do is, and we live in a world where I think we now have about 20,000 cryptocurrencies, that these have very different standards, and once you get into to Altcoin, for instance, and you have significantly less -- intentionally much less transparency and ability to trace and so forth. So what we can do is set standards with regards to what sort of transparency, for instance, is required for the sort of digital currencies that crowdfunding platforms do -- are subject to sort of under regulation. And to some extent that's already happening in the marketplace because the marketplace is sorting out already cryptocurrencies based on some certain benchmarks and transparency and so forth.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So, you know, democracy is fragile. And so we need to make sure that we defend democracy. And we’ve seen the increasing use of emergency powers by democratic governments across the world. And so I think on the one hand, we need to make sure we set disincentives for governments to resort to emergency measures simply because they didn’t have the political incentive or motive to update, to ensure that legislation, regulations, or current agencies are probably postured. And then when we do invoke them, we need to build in sort of enough thresholds to make sure that when governments do have to compensate for shortcomings in regular law and posture in the 21st century, that appropriate, I think, thresholds are forced onto government, even under those circumstances. And I think particularly the comments about that this -- the Act can only apply very specifically and with more safeguards I think is critically important, because I think we saw here elements that most Canadians, whether they -- regardless of where they fell with regards to the protestors, were probably not thrilled to see government feeling that it had to resort to extraordinary measures to re-establish the rule of law in this country and what can we do to avoid that, because if we can avoid that, then we don’t need to have conversations about worries about trust in the financial system under emergency measures and so forth.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Yeah, so if we frame the problem here -- donc, merci de l'invitation aujourd'hui -- so we had a modest but tenacious protest in Ottawa and the system comes under moderate strain and is unable to come together to achieve strategic effect. I mean, we get more people in Kingston for homecoming than we did in Ottawa for the convoy, so let's think about that. So Police Services Acts call for adequate and effective policing. What does that mean? It means policing in response to the needs, values and expectations of the local community. On the other hand, police swear an oath to protect life, property and prevent crime. So the question for police is, what's the best way to keep the public safe? And you can already see emerging here the fundamental problem, which is the delta between public expectations on the one hand, as well as the quantity and the quality of policing. And I would say that delta in Canada continues to grow. And so we can use the Ottawa convoy as a critical case study and a laboratory of experimentation of generally what ails the national security system, because what we have here is a fundamental failure of the entire intelligence, law enforcement and national security system. So police resources are always oversubscribed, even in normal times, and so they'll follow risk. And so that means that police planning, decision making, and action depends on the intelligence cycle, planning and direction, collection, processing, analysis and production, dissemination. We had multiple agencies generating those, CSIS, the RCMP, Criminal Intelligence Service of Ontario, OPP, OPS, open source through media, and it seems we never were able to come together to actually produce a coherent picture. Just think about who would let all these trucks downtown after the Royal Trade Centre bombing in 1990 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1998. So there's four, I think, key elements here. The issues with regards to the Chief in Ottawa I think are more symptomatic of broadly issues in Canadian policing when it comes to police leadership, police management, police institutional culture and policing posture. Issues with regards to the Board are emblematic of challenges of police governance more broadly, but also what happens when we don't have adequate police governance. We have interagency issues of -- and in particular, police didn't ever appear to have an appreciation of the totality of circumstances that affected this situation, and we have intergovernmental issues where the Premier, the Prime Minister and the Mayor should have stood together with their chief law enforcement officers, and instead, we got squabbling among them, all this in the capital of a G7 country, so the system was unprepared. And so I think what we get here, this was more symptomatic of a number of broader issues. One is we have good incident response among law enforcement in Canada. We have difficulty with sustainment, in particular, on issues of intelligence, planning and logistics that a medium-sized police service such as the Ottawa Police Services cannot simply be expected to have for a national protest. That's where we need national, and to some extent provincial agencies to come in. Where was the RCMP surge capacity? We're always told we have this national police force of 17,000 people, so we can surge at times of a crisis. Between A-Division, C-Division, O-Division and headquarters, we have well over 2500 people that could have simply gotten in their cars, that are not on frontline patrol. Where were they? We had a loss of trust and confidence by the public. That caused politicians to meddle. We had issues of outdated policy, which are governance issues. There's a broader debate about what constitutes national security. We have this very realist and traditional approach that I think does not do well in coping with economic security and political stability, issues of hate crime, ideologically motivated violent extremism and so forth. Six, we have a reactive national security posture in preserving national security when we need a proactive and intelligence driven one where federal agencies have to have a firm and clear understanding of their mandate and on issues, so that they can clearly advise local agencies. And I'd say there's a general vulnerability that was created in Ottawa where this vulnerability public safety, national security then created multi-dimensional issues of destabilizing Canada and its democratic institutions more broadly. The conclusion is that the Emergencies Act shouldn't and wouldn't have been needed had the system performed well to achieve strategic effect. The fact that we had -- that the Emergencies Act was invoked is an indictment of the system and its inability to perform for Canadians, for the government and for local citizens in Ottawa.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Christian Leuprecht au microphone. I’ll just keep this brief, but I think we’ve had this theoretical and legal conversation. Let’s take a sociological approach to this, and look at the G7, G20 in Toronto. On the Friday afternoon, it got rowdy, and the locals complained, and police took a heavy-handed approach, and we know what the consequences of that were. And so I think that response and the subsequent Morden Report and so forth have had a chilling effect on the way we police mass gatherings ever since. And given that the Chief in Ottawa at the time was present at G7, G20, I think this very much would have informed his response. We also need to consider that in Ottawa, under the circumstances, with only the Ottawa Police Service on the ground, had there been, for instance, a more aggressive posture, there’s a high risk that the police would have had a rebellion in his own ranks on his hands. And so this is why I think this dialogue and conversation is so important. And I think ultimately these questions of direction need to take into account also particular circumstances and also the size of a police service. And so inherently the question of direction, I think, looks differently in Toronto in a large service with large capacity than it does, for instance, in Ottawa of a more medium-sized service. And so trying to marry the theoretical and the legal remarks, I think, with the sociological reality and the reality of resources is, I think, important to keep in mind for this conversation.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Well, I'd say one litmus test is that we have a long way to go on this. If you look at police budgets, for instance, it can be exceedingly difficult even for boards, let alone the public to understand where exactly the money is going and where exactly people are being deployed. So that, I think, is an interesting exercise. The issues that were mentioned here, ultimately, this comes down to policy, right? So do we have -- and in Ottawa, an outdated major events policy? There's -- we need to establish these beforehand. So we need -- boards need to establish a policing designated major events policy. They need to establish a policy with regards to a chief to board communications. They need to establish a policy on information sharing, information sharing protocol during emergencies. And that ultimate looks different for different police services and different boards, but I think we've heard that Toronto here is leading by example, and there's a lot to be learned.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So there's four police services in this country that I'm aware of that do not have the board -- sort of board structure that we are talking about, the RCMP, the OPP, the Sûreté du Québec, and the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. And we see the challenges that that raises, for instance, for the RCMP when we look at the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia. So that’s, I guess, the first observation. The second is that boards can find themselves challenged. Most appointees to boards don’t necessarily have the expertise, have the experience, and have the time that they need, because in most cases, they are volunteers and they don’t necessarily come from any sort of public safety background. And so I think there's a considerable gap, and that a symmetry often works for chiefs in the sense that chiefs can sometimes rule with an iron fist, especially when they face boards that don’t quite understand their particular agreement. The third is that it is the benefit of boards is that you have, as Mr. Teschner outlined, the ability to develop a strategic plan that sets outcomes which we refer to as priorities, but that also defines outputs that are measurable. Those are what is known as objectives, and the way we translate those outputs is then through policies. And while that happens at the strategic level, it also needs to happen with regards to certain elements of operational elements as defined sort of by policy as we had sort of in the previous conversation. Ultimately, information sharing on a high level is also always about trust, and I think we have serious challenges when it comes to trust within police services, between the chief and often associations, not to speak of any particular service here, but people will be familiar with forces in this country where this has come to the fore. So it's difficult, I think, for a force to be effective, and so boards ultimately need to make sure that those relations are working well. If you have a police service without a board, it is going to be, I think, more difficult to have insights in that regard. And you also ultimately need to have trust with other stakeholders and agencies. We'll get back to that in a couple of questions. I would like to close, when we're talking about the relationships among different police services that this ultimately are fundamental questions about police governance, and I would say that if you look at the recent webinar on police governance held by the Canadian Association of Police Governance with some terrific interventions, I would say that police governance in this country is extremely challenged, and that one of the opportunities for the Commission here is to provide a way forward on police governance more broadly, because if we can remedy the shortcomings on police governance that were on full display during the Ottawa convoy and the meltdown of the Board during a local and arguably national crisis, then that means we wouldn't need to invoke emergency measures to try to remedy, because ultimately, we need robust governance mechanisms.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So, as I documented in my book, Public Security and Federal Policies, there is no other democratic federation in the world that either sturtures their police services the way Canada has or that funds their police services that Canada has. And so, inherently, there’s only so much we’re going to be able to do if we try to adjust governance mechanisms as long as we have a model that seems rather peculiarly unique, and so I think those are questions we need to ask. We also have a federal and national police force where the commissioner has a span of control that is unlike that of any other national or federal police force in a democratic country across the world. I mention this in the context of the current review of federal policing by the National Security Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians that was announced in February. And so I do think that the Commission may perhaps want to take the RCMP’s and the commissioner’s span of control into consideration because I am not sure that this is a model that serves the public interest particularly well, in part because the RCMP is torn in too many directions, and when called upon when a situation, such as in Ottawa, transitions from public safety to national security, and you need federal involvement on the national security side, we had a considerable, I think, breakdown in both resources and interagency collaboration. I also believe that there need to be clear qualifications and certification laid out for members of police services boards because that’s essential to them performing their function. And so simply getting an appointment, I think, is not enough. We need to have -- Canada is also a bit of an outlier in the way we generate police managers and police leaders. Many of the functions that in other democracies are managed by civilians, in Canada are managed by folks in uniform. I’m not sure that necessarily serves the best interest. Similarly, on the leadership side, there’s not a country -- a federal country that I’m aware of that requires less in terms of education of senior police leaders that Canada does. And so we have this assumption that somehow people will acquire the skillsets for this extremely complex task, and the fact that only a couple of months ago, I believe, 13 forces in Ontario had been looking for a chief of police, suggests that we’re perhaps not quite generating the leaders that the country needs under these particular circumstances. And I’ll close on saying that effective policing -- adequate and effective policing is essential for democratic legitimacy, and I think what happened at Ottawa severely undermined the legitimacy of our democratic institutions and so it's inherently essential for the health of our democracy that the Commission find ways to ensure that we not witness these types of breakdowns again, not just for operational and tactical reasons, but for the broader reasons of safeguarding our democracy and our democratic institutions and our public's faith in them.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Yeah, I think this sounds good in theory, but in practice -- look, I mean, when you have multiple police forces that are under different sort of jurisdiction, and each of them has sort of either been given some different directions or has sort of different -- been given different priorities, I think the integrated command structure here is critical, and how do you generate appropriate oversight and governance of an integrated command structure, especially when you have some forces that have boards, and some forces that don’t. The other issue that I would raise is that the question here is a function also of, do you have sort of just straightforward criminality, or are you facing a political protest? And police are the first to know that there is no law enforcement solution to a political protest. You will not arrest your way out of a political protest, and officers know that. And I think there would have been a rebellion of -- initially, at least, when there weren’t enough resources of officers in Ottawa had they just been told, “You go and just arrest people.” And so I think there needs to be -- police will look for top cover in terms of, “What approach do you want us to take?” Because if they take an aggressive approach, they know that there’s going to be repercussions. So when in doubt, I think, police will err on, “We’re here to keep the -- to maintain public safety, so that’s what we’re going to do, and we’re going to find a gradual strategy out of the situation that we find our ways in.” If the political authority is unhappy with that approach, then it needs to set a clear signal that federally, provincially, and municipally they will have the back of the police forces that are in place. The governance asymmetries that we have make that difficult in Canada, and especially in Ottawa.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
So there are other models in this country. So this is one approach. The other approach is in Quebec, where Quebec has a tiered policing structure, and my understanding is if, for instance, the equivalent protest had happened in Gatineau across the river, under the tiered policing structure, it would not have been the Gatineau Police, because the tiered policing structure sets out competencies for police in light of the size of the police service. And so by default, the Sûreté du Québec would have had the operational command and control of a national protest. And so we either need to have a tiered structure or, as the Chief and as Mr. Teschner have pointed out, need to have a clear governance set up for a multi -- for joint force operation. And I think that was certainly one of the challenges that we saw.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
I think from a board’s perspective there's also a question about is there a plan? So you have to be able to develop a Plan B and alternatives. You have to present those alternatives; you have to present the trade-offs of those alternatives to the board. So that needs to be conferenced by the board that the plan can actually work, or for the chief and the board to come together and say that this is simply beyond our capacity and so we’re going to need someone else to take command and control of the situation. So I think we can’t just, based on the event, suggest, “Oh, we’d better call for an emergency.” We need to see what an effective plan actually looks like, and the plan that both the chief and the board can either have confidence in or say, “We don’t have the capacity to develop a plan so we’re going to need to scale this up” -- classic sort of economies of scale -- “to a force that actually has the command and control capacity and the planning logistics, intelligence capacity to run this type of operation.”
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
There’s considerable asymmetry in Canada with regards to the expectations Attorney Generals have and lay out for the RCMP, so they are quite detailed, but the most detailed, to my understanding, in British Columbia; in other jurisdictions there is very little in terms of the overall expectations. And so I think there’s probably some of the expectations and the relationship also by the Ontario and Quebec Attorney Generals, and the relationship with the RCMP because, of course, in both provinces the RCMP normally only does federal and national policing duties. And so are there circumstances where the Attorney General will need to make those federal units essentially request that they become operational units because if you’re flying in people from British Columbia, it's going to take you a very long time to surge capacity in Ottawa. And so I think clarifying that relationship of the federal and national policing capabilities and when that federal, national police service provides, effectively, contract-quasi services, even in Ontario and Quebec, that relationship, with regards to the expectations from the Attorney Generals, needs some clarification.
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Christian Leuprecht, Prof. (Political Science – Royal Military College)
Just to point out that ultimately it's up to the people to decide. We live in a democracy, and the people create the framework under which police boards, governance, and so forth transpires. And so we can blame police, we can blame boards or whatever, but ultimately the importance of the Commission and the Inquiry is that it's a question of are the frameworks appropriate and are they fit for purpose. And the nature of the discussion today suggests to me that they are not entirely fit for purpose for the 21st century.