Police politicization detrimental to democracy
Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Oct 21, 2022 • 6 minutes ago • 5 minute read
The announcement Friday afternoon that Eric Stubbs, currently assistant commissioner of the RCMP in B.C., will take over as chief of the Ottawa Police Service, was a long time coming — 248 days, in fact, after Peter Sloly stepped down as chief during the “Freedom Convoy” occupation of downtown Ottawa streets.
The timing of the announcement has been contentious in some circles, coming as it did on the last business day before Monday’s municipal election, a campaign during which two of the three leading mayoral candidates — Catherine McKenney and Bob Chiarelli — called for a time-out on the decision, to allow the incoming council, and thus the new Ottawa Police Services Board, to have some input.
Board chair Eli El-Chantiry, however, said it would have been “irresponsible” to do otherwise, noting that the board had been working “non-stop” on the search for a replacement for Sloly since July 25, and that the decision is a board one, not the mayor’s or council’s.
The Police Services Board is a seven-member body consisting of three community members appointed by the provincial government, three city councillors — currently Cathy Curry, Jeff Leiper and El-Chantiry — and a citizen appointed by council.
Neither Curry nor Leiper attended the announcement. When reached later, Curry said that election protocol was the only reason she wasn’t there.
“As a candidate running in the election, I feel the local, national, and potentially international coverage today and in the coming days may give me an unfair advantage over my opponents,” she said in an email. “I didn’t feel it was fair. In conversations and via written correspondence with the City Clerk, we felt it was best to not attend.
“I fully support the choice, the process, and the decision to announce today,” she added. “I felt very badly that I was not there today. I want to be sure that it is clear that there is no other reason than what could be seen as a perceived conflict of interest for me to be there.”
Leiper, meanwhile, released a statement indicating that his absence for Friday’s announcement was similarly because of election protocols, but that he had favoured waiting until a new council was elected to choose the new chief.
“My view has been that we are on the eve of an election,” he said. “With policing issues in the foreground of this election, voters will have an opportunity to send candidates who reflect their priorities around policing to City Hall.
“A new Council and Mayor will bring their perspective, fresh from the doors, to the task of appointing new or returning municipal members to the Police Services Board, which may or may not have had implications for this hiring process had the Board waited.”
Leiper added that Stubbs has his support.
McKenney (who uses they/them pronouns), meanwhile, who earlier in the day described the decision to go ahead with the announcement “shameful,” continued to criticize it afterwards. “The concern with this process has never been about who is being hired,” they wrote. “It is about the process unfolding days before an election and in the middle of a national inquiry. The wave of criticism from the general public has further illustrated how this process was inappropriate.”
Chiarelli shared a similar sentiment in his own tweet on Thursday, noting that the announcement adds to the cynicism that the public already has towards city hall. “That’s not what we need to heal the distrust between the public and the Police, and between the public and City Hall,” he wrote.
The other of the three leading candidates, Mark Sutcliffe, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with the announcement. “I’ve always maintained that the selection of a new police chief is an independent process,” he said in a statement Friday. “It is not up to the Mayor and Council to decide who this individual is. It is the independent Police Services Board, which includes representatives from multiple levels of government as well as citizen representatives. It is critical for community trust that this process be free of political interference and that the incoming Mayor and council be willing to work with whomever this independent group selects.”
He’s absolutely right, except for the fact that police board chair El-Chantiry is also an honourary co-chair of Sutcliffe’s campaign. To suggest that there doesn’t at least appear to be a conflict of interest is ludicrous.
El-Chantiry’s decision to simultaneously hold both positions was a poor one, but it’s not the first time he’s failed to recognize a possible conflict. Recall that he was chair of the Ottawa Police Services Board when, in 2010, he flew to Finland to attend the wedding of then-police chief Vern White.
If El-Chantiry can’t recognize what is at least the perception of a conflict, Sutcliffe should have, but here he showed the same tone-deafness he displayed last month when he was criticized for holding $1,200 fundraisers after, in 2016, taking then-Premier Kathleen Wynne to task for similar, if costlier, functions.
Sutcliffe defended the fundraisers, saying he was simply following the rules like everyone else. “I’m proud of the fact that there are people in the community who share my vision for the city and want to help me bring that vision forward as the next mayor of Ottawa,” he said. The optics, though, weren’t good, but Sutcliffe didn’t acknowledge the fact.
Meanwhile, on a CBC Radio Friday, Sutcliffe said, “I’ve never had any conversations with Eli El-Chantiry about the hiring of the next police chief.”
That well may be true, but it misses the point that there shouldn’t even appear to be a conflict.
All of this comes at a time when the politicization of police is in the news, after Brian Samuel, interim president of the Ottawa Police Association, the union representing 2,000 OPS members, on Tuesday released a statement and video criticizing McKenney for voting to divert some funding away from police and said they had an “extensive history of using harmful and misleading rhetoric against police officers.” The statement identified no other candidates.
Under the Ontario Police Services Act, individual officers are not allowed to be publicly political, and having members of such a powerful body doing so undermines the public’s trust in its ability to do its job fairly and equally for all.
It all calls into mind a take on the familiar line: “Nice house you got there. Too bad about the sign on your lawn.”
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