Public Inquiry Reports and Civilian Oversight Reforms in Quebec and British Columbia

This paper highlights the public role of the report in two provincial reforms that led to the creation of police oversight bodies. In both cases, a public inquiry was an important part of the process of change. The research data come mainly from documentary sources, supplemented by semi-directed interviews, and the analysis is based on a political sociology of actors and public problems in a comparative perspective. The focus of this research allows a parallel examination of public policy: one longitudinal and cumulative, the other more sociological and strategic. The first focuses on the content of public inquiries reports that have addressed the external control of the police. The analysis highlights the role of the reports in the formulation of a critical discourse of the policies in place and in the emergence of a reform agenda. It also reveals a phenomenon of gradual reinforcement based on the content of previous reports. The second part of the analysis examines the strategic use of the report in public action. Both cases show that the report is a kind of strategic resources put forward by the actors in order to carry out a problematization about “the police investigating the police”.