The oversight of executive police relations in Canada

We should not lose sight of the fact that attempts to use police forces as an arm of “political administration” of the government of the day has a long and unsettling history in Canada,9 nor should we gloss over the equally long and equally unsettling history of the police acting as a law unto themselves,10 particularly in the context of aboriginal communities.11 This is the classic double-bind of [...] In January of 2004, the Toronto police launched an investigation when news of an investigation into the Chair of the Police Services Board for allegedly inappropriate sexual comments about a child leaked to the press.22 By May of 2004, the Chair of the Toronto Police Services Board was on the verge of asking the province to take over the civilian oversight functions and launch a review of “supervi [...] It appears in the Preamble to the Charter (alongside the “supremacy of God”) and has been held to form a part of the guarantees imported from the U. K. through the Preamble to the Constitution Act, 1867. [...] In the Secession Reference, the Court described the importance of the rule of law in the following terms: The principles of constitutionalism and the rule of law lie at the root of our system of government. [...] Along with courts and the legal system, the policy as instruments of the state appear to violate the division of power that is the hallmark of Canadian federalism.”47 What Smith had in mind was the fact that the RCMP provides one-third of all public police officers in Canada (including the RCMP’s federal police duties and 8 of 10 provinces where the RCMP has contractual arrangements to provide pol