Elizabeth speaks in House emergency debate on RCMP killings of Indigenous people скачать в хорошем качестве

Elizabeth speaks in House emergency debate on RCMP killings of Indigenous people

2024-09-16 20:47 [p.25410] Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich—Gulf Islands: Madam Speaker, I thank my esteemed colleagues who are here tonight. First, I would like to sincerely thank the member for Nunavut. I want to thank my friend, the member of Parliament for Nunavut, for bringing this forward for an emergency debate. It has been an emergency for some time. That is why I was relieved when the Speaker decided that it met the definition of an emergency for debate. However, as the hon. member put it when she made the argument to the Speaker, it is now almost expected that, when police forces are confronted with a first nations person, an indigenous person in this country, the person in question is killed. This happens even on a wellness check, when they are supposed to be sent to make sure that the person in question is safe. It has become far too common. There have been a number of studies in Canada. We can talk about them. I know the specific examples that lead us into the debate tonight. I will start with this APTN headline: “15 days and 6 Indigenous people have died when coming in contact with police across Canada”. The hon. parliamentary secretary quite rightly pointed out that we were told this in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in the report on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. We were told this in a report that came out in June 2021 from this Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security entitled “Systemic Racism in Policing in Canada”. That report refers to a witness, the Hon. Michel Bastarache, who actually said that the culture within the RCMP is “toxic”. Let us be clear: This is not one or two incidents that can be explained away by saying an RCMP officer thought something was a threat because they were faced with an indigenous person who they thought was threatening them. Steven Dedam was shot and killed by the RCMP just earlier this month. After he had been shot three times, he was handcuffed and told he was under arrest as he lay there dying. He had been shot in the chest in Elsipogtog First Nation in the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy territory. That is not the first time. As we know, in June 2020, there were two people killed in the territory of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy people. Rodney Levi of another New Brunswick first nation was shot and killed by the RCMP on a wellness check. Chantel Moore, a young woman from the territory of Vancouver Island, was killed by a member of the Edmundston, New Brunswick, police force on June 4, 2020. I am honoured to be a friend of her family, and I know them well. Her killing is one for which there are no answers yet; the reports have been whitewashed. She was killed by a lone Edmunston police officer, who was a tall, burly man. He woke her up at three in the morning because he had been called to do a wellness check. He did not have a second officer with him. He shot her four times. She was five foot nothing. This is an insufficiently investigated murder. Let us get back to what kinds of solutions we could look to. I have mentioned a number of reports. One that does not come up very much in this context, although it contains many clues for what we need to do for solutions, is the mass casualty report on the RCMP's massive failure to stop a killer on what is sometimes described as a “shooting spree”, which makes it sound as though he was shopping. It was a murderous rampage by a known dangerous man. He was known to be dangerous because of multiple reports for over a decade before he started killing people in Portapique, Nova Scotia, two years ago in April. He was known because many reports had been made to the RCMP that he had illegal guns. When we read the report, we find that various racialized people had reported him for beating up on or robbing them over the years. It was known that he was a threat to people around him. The RCMP notes to the report say that the RCMP did not believe the complainant. Why would a wealthy denturist beat up on poor and racialized people? We might insert the word “white”. The RCMP never investigated the complaints against him over a 10-year period. The Globe and Mail, the national newspaper, is certainly not a left-wing or radical press; it is establishment with a capital E. The Globe and Mail editorial, after reading the mass casualty report, said the RCMP as an institution must be torn down to its foundations and then the foundations must be dynamited. Those are strong words. When we read that report, we realize that there is institutionalized systemic racism, as well as sexism and the unwillingness to believe that because someone had a domestic violence situation and was reported constantly to be a threat to the life of his intimate partner but was not reported by the intimate partner, there was an issue of coercive control... --- Read the rest of the debate here: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentVie...