Ian Scott and Kent Roach, The Globe and Mail
Ian Scott is the former director of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit and author of Issues in Civilian Oversight of Policing in Canada. Kent Roach is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and served on the Council of Canadian Academies expert panel on policing in Indigenous communities.
Canadians have been sickened by the RCMP dash-cam video of the violent arrest of Chief Allan Adam. Less is known about the police killings in New Brunswick of Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi; the deaths of these two Indigenous people, however, raise suspicions.
More footage of RCMP use of force is tragically inevitable. If the RCMP are to continue their front-line policing work across eight provinces and three territories, there must be national standards for oversight of its use of force, and fundamental reforms to its governance and complaints process.
In some provinces, the RCMP has entered into a protocol with the provincial government to permit its independent investigative agency to conduct these investigations. But in New Brunswick, it has not. Thirty years after the first independent investigator of the police was created in Ontario, New Brunswick still lacks one. That’s why Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes is conducting the two homicide investigations.