Nothing Left to Lose by Philip Slayton

Author:Philip Slayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Sutherland House Inc.

In March 2018, the Safer Ontario Act (Bill 175), put forward by the doomed Wynne Liberal government, came into force. Much of the Bill dealt with police accountability. So, for example, a new office, the Inspector General of Policing, was created. The official Explanatory Note to the legislation explained, “Any person may complain to the Inspector General that a member of one of the boards regulated under the Act is not complying with the applicable code of conduct. Complaints may also be made about various other policing matters. The Inspector General is to consider the complaints and, if there are grounds for investigation, investigate them.” The existing Special Investigations Unit, Office of the Independent Police Review Director, and Ontario Civilian Police Commission, were given a limited overhaul and expanded mandates. Reaction to Bill 175, from both police associations and critics of the police, ranged from indifferent to tepid to hostile. On June 7, 2018 Ontario elected a new Conservative government, with Doug Ford as premier. A month later, the Ford government’s Throne Speech said that the government intended to “free police from onerous restrictions that treat those in uniform as subjects of suspicion and scorn.” Bill 175 was characterized as “anti-police.” In 2019, the Comprehensive Ontario Police Services Act (COPS) was introduced to replace Bill 175. COPS narrowed the role of the Special Investigations Unit, and replaced the Office of the Independent Police Review Director with a new Law Enforcement Complaints Agency with limited powers. Strangely, given the official rhetoric, COPS kept much of the maligned Bill 175 intact.

CARDING

“Carding,” sometimes called “street checks” or (absurdly) “community contacts policy,” is the police practice of stopping a person on the street, requesting identification, and asking questions about what that person is doing, where he lives, where he’s been, the names of his friends, and anything else that tickles the policeman’s fancy.225 The encounter is documented, originally on a card, now in a computer database. Typically, documentation includes comments on the person’s appearance, including his ethnicity. Justice Michael Tulloch of the Ontario Court of Appeal, in a 2018 report to the Ontario Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services,226 defined carding as when “a police officer randomly asks an individual to provide identifying information when there is no objectively suspicious activity, the individual is not suspected of any offence and there is no reason to believe that the individual has any information on any offence.”

In various forms, carding has been and still is (at the end of 2018) used in Toronto, Hamilton, Halifax, Ottawa, Windsor, London, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and other Canadian cities. Many studies and investigative reports have concluded that it informally incorporates a form of racial profiling, primarily targeting non-white males.227 Some attempts have been made in some jurisdictions to mitigate the policy by ending arbitrary or race-based stops,228 with limited success.

Journalist and Black activist Desmond Cole published an influential article in 2015 about carding in Maclean’s magazine.229 Cole wrote with passion: “I have been stopped, if not always carded, at least fifty times by the police in Toronto, Kingston, and across southern Ontario.

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