Nearly five years after the B.C. government struck a special committee to consult and make recommendations on improving policing in the province, progress appears to have ground to a halt.
In June 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, B.C.’s then-public safety minister, Mike Farnworth, responded to calls for police reform by announcing the province would strike an all-party committee to review the Police Act, calling the existing act “outdated” and “out of step” with the government’s current approach.
“Everyone deserves to be treated fairly by the police, and our government acknowledges that for many Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, that hasn’t always been the case,” Farnworth said in the statement. “Ensuring the police are held accountable to the highest standards for fair and unbiased conduct is crucial to maintaining public trust.”
In April 2022, the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act released its report. Among its 11 recommendations were replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force, adopting a new approach to mental health calls and giving First Nations self-determination over policing in their communities.
The goal was to modernize the Police Act and bring it in line with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.
Adam Olsen, then the BC Green Party MLA for Saanich North and the Islands, was among 10 committee members who spent 15 months consulting the public and deliberating on the proposed changes. He described the work, which resulted in consensus across party lines, as a “unique moment of alignment.”
But this week Olsen told The Tyee he’s lost hope that the efforts will result in meaningful police reform.
“It appears the committee was used simply as a way to deflect attention away from the minister,” Olsen said. “It is a failure of the public safety minister, but it's a failure of the institution, governance institutions more generally, that they continue to fail Indigenous people and the public.
“The minister successfully undermined his own project.”
Premier removes mandate to implement recommendations
B.C. recently appointed a new public safety minister. Following the October election, Surrey-Guildford MLA Garry Begg replaced Farnworth, who had served in the position since 2017. Begg, who was first elected in 2017, was previously a career Mountie and sat on the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act alongside Olsen.
Farnworth is now B.C.’s minister of transportation and transit.
When B.C. Premier David Eby delivered mandates to the ministers last week, there was no mention of Police Act reform in Begg’s mandate letter.
Instead, priorities focused on curbing repeat offenders and gang violence, targeting organized crime, reviewing ICBC rates and modernizing B.C.’s liquor licensing.
In an email, the Public Safety Ministry downplayed the omission of the Police Act reforms, saying the mandate letters represent the government’s “high-level commitments.”
“They don’t cover everything the province is doing or everything that is going to be done together in the coming years,” a spokesperson wrote to The Tyee. “The province is going to keep taking action on the issues that matter to people in B.C.”
The Policing and Public Safety Modernization initiative, a working group tasked with moving the recommendations forward, “has continued its work on policy and legislative reforms called for by the 2022 Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act,” the ministry spokesperson added.
The ministry did not respond to followup questions about whether that work remains active or if implementing the recommendations is a priority for the province.
A mandate to move ahead with the committee recommendations did appear in the public safety minister’s previous two mandate letters, in 2020 and 2022.
In November 2020, Farnworth was directed to take “concrete steps to evaluate the recommendations,” which at that time remained under development. That mandate was renewed following a cabinet shuffle two years later. In December 2022, Farnworth was directed to “implement the recommendations of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act,” including continuing to address systemic racism and “interim and long-term” policy changes.
In its statement to The Tyee, the ministry pointed to Bill 17, the Police Amendment Act, which passed last April. The legislation made changes to “municipal police governance, oversight and police superintendence,” the province wrote, responding to some of the committee’s recommendations.
In introducing the legislation, Farnworth described it as a “substantive and complex package” that provided “an initial step” toward broader police reforms.
Olsen disagreed. Speaking last spring in the legislature, he described the changes to police oversight outlined in Bill 17 as “modest,” saying the bill provided “a handful of amendments that allow the minister to crawl out of the hole that has been dug with respect to the chairs of the police boards.”
He said the work had become political, meant to “take the heat off the pressure that was building” in 2020.
“There was no real potential for reform. The public safety minister, it turns out, was not actually engaging in a serious process to reform policing in British Columbia,” Olsen said.
Speaking to The Tyee this week, Olsen said the ministry had implemented “bits and pieces” of the committee’s work while leaving bigger items off the table.
It’s “the opposite of what the committee recommended,” Olsen said.
First Nations engagement ‘paused’ last year
Last year, The Tyee reported that the Policing and Public Safety Modernization initiative’s work to engage with First Nations on moving the recommendations forward had stalled.
In February, Policing and Public Safety Modernization initiative team lead Ardys Baker, who works with the ministry’s policing and security branch, testified at a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal inquiry into the RCMP’s investigation of alleged historical abuses of Indigenous children in northern B.C.
One of the key remedies requested by the inquiry’s complainants is to replace RCMP investigations in Indigenous communities with investigative teams made up of community members and one RCMP officer. Baker was there to testify about the province’s work to reform the Police Act.
During her testimony, Department of Justice lawyers representing the RCMP entered Farnworth’s 2022 mandate letter as evidence that the work was underway.
“That's really the impetus and why we established the [Policing and Public Safety Modernization] initiative,” Baker testified about the mandate letter.
But she added that efforts to consult with the BC First Nations Justice Council and the First Nations Leadership Council had “paused” as the Indigenous groups sought clarity from the province on the degree of their involvement with the reforms.
In a statement provided to The Tyee this week, BC First Nations Justice Council member Cloy-e-iis Judith Sayers did not say whether that work had resumed but noted the absence of police reform from the recent mandate letters.
“Over the years, a tremendous amount of work has gone into developing and advancing the sweeping and transformational recommendations to reform and modernize policing in the province,” Sayers said. “We cannot afford to let this work slip through the cracks.”
She said that police are often an Indigenous person’s first interaction with the justice system and added that systemic racism and bias in policing “can harm and take lives.”
Recently released data from the Victoria Police Department revealed that officers disproportionately used force against Indigenous and Black people in recent years. Olsen, who is also a member of the Tsartlip First Nation, said the stats “completely reflected what we heard” as a committee reviewing the Police Act.
“We made recommendations that could address that,” he said.
Sayers said the council plans to meet with the new public safety minister in early February. She hopes the discussions bring clarity “that Minister Begg and his ministry are ready to advance this important work with us and fulfil the province’s ongoing commitment to reconciliation.”
Attempts at police reform reflected ‘a moment that called for action’
Mike Larsen, an instructor in the criminology department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said that while it’s surprising that work to reform the Police Act was excluded from the recent mandate letters, he believes it reflects shifting political priorities.
The issues that were under the spotlight in 2020 created “a moment that called for action,” he said.
Fast-forward five years and while some of the proposed changes have been “sectioned off” and implemented through Bill 17, its more ambitious priorities have “fallen by the wayside,” he said.
Larsen believes the struggle between Surrey and the province over the city’s transition to a municipal police force monopolized the minister’s time and suspects that’s why the Bill 17 amendments focused on the province’s relationship with municipal governments.
Larsen added that police are “powerful political actors” with influence over government.
“In 2020 there was a moment when public attention was so focused on policing, and there was such a powerful call for reform, the usually quite influential voices of police were simply not as influential,” he said.
But that’s changed, he added.
“Some of these recommended reforms would have represented significant shifts in how policing is done,” he said. “There was pushback.”
What’s next
Speaking to the human rights tribunal last year, Baker said the province planned to table legislation aimed at incorporating some of the committee’s more substantive recommendations by early 2027.
Olsen said that aligns with the timelines put forward by the committee, which envisioned steady progress toward transitioning to a provincial police force when the province’s policing contract with the RCMP expires in 2032.
But with little evidence the process is moving forward, he’s not optimistic B.C. will meet that deadline.
“I think what's going to happen now is they're going to hope that this report just goes away,” Olsen said.
Read more: Indigenous, Rights + Justice, BC Politics
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