Royal Canadian Mounted Mayhem
The RCMP's annus horribilis is The Tyee's pick for number four on the list of year's biggest stories.
Maher Arar
[Editor's note: What were the top five stories of 2006 for B.C. and beyond? Every day this week The Tyee publishes its picks. Yesterday, homelessness, today, the RCMP's disastrous year]
"I believe some aspects of my prior testimony could have been more precise and more clearly stated. A number of misconceptions have resulted," RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli.
2006 was a PR nightmare for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. From January to December, the Mounties lurched from scandal to disaster to national disgrace. By the time Commissioner Zaccardelli resigned on Dec. 6, after admitting he misled a Commons committee, the organization’s enduring funk had earned its place among the year’s top stories.
In fact, if you plunked ‘RCMP’ into Google News any time in the last 12 months, odds were better than even you’d find something embarrassing for the men in red. From an accusation they deliberately interfered in last January’s federal election, to the revelation they spied on Tommy Douglas, it was a year of bad to worse for the most recognizable symbol of Canadiana.
But while most of the bad news stories had a similar theme -- an accusation of misconduct, a tight-lipped closed-door investigation and public unsatisfying result -- nothing about them was especially new. As far back as the FLQ crisis, attacks on RCMP credibility have been par for the course. Toss in the Airbus investigation and the APEC protests, and most of what went down over the past twelve months looks likes business as usual. But this year was different. By the end of 2006 the chorus calling for real reform had grown deafening. The reason: Maher Arar.
Arar is the Syrian born Canadian engineer who, in 2003, was en route to Canada when he was detained in New York and deported to the country of his birth. Arar spent nearly a year in the horror story conditions of a Syrian jail cell, tortured, accused of terrorism and largely abandoned by his own government.
On Sept. 18, former Ontario Supreme Court Justice Dennis O’Connor released the first half of his report on the role Canadian agents and agencies played in the debacle. No one, other that Arar, came out looking good. The former Liberal government, along with many of the reporters who covered the story were cast as self serving and not suitably skeptical. But it was the RCMP that bore the brunt of O’Connor’s scorn.
O’Connor found that RCMP investigators passed faulty evidence to U.S. officials; evidence that led them to believe Arar was a legitimate terrorist suspect. The investigators involved, O’Connor found, were under-supervised and ill-trained for the national security role that had been thrust on them after Sept. 11. What’s more, once they knew the evidence was bad, they did nothing to correct the error. Just the opposite. According to O’Connor RCMP officials did everything they could to hide their mistake. As yet un-named Mounties even leaked outright lies about Arar to journalists to muddy his reputation after the Syrians released him.
The report dealt a seismic blow to the RCMP’s credibility. After it was made public, journalists from left to right attacked the organization’s role in the affair. Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson wrote that “no one… should have any confidence in the ability or integrity of the national police force," while the Post’s Andrew Coyne called the situation “Canada’s Dreyfus Affair.”
But if the Arar boondoggle had been the only piece of bad news for the Mounties in 2006, those blows may well have been glancing; a little more oversight here, a new commissioner there and it’s business as usual for 2007. But such was the torrent of scandal in 2006 that real reform may now be unstoppable.
I have written before about the catalogue of missteps. But the two worth mentioning here -- for B.C. at least -- are both high profile internal investigations. In one, a man arrested for having a beer open in public ended up dead in RCMP custody. While in the other, an officer accused of paying teens for sex was let off after his superiors failed to launch their investigation in a timely manner. Taken together, the two prompted a serious question: who exactly do the Mounties answer to? The answer, at this point, is probably best summed up by B.C. Const. John Ward. He told the Globe and Mail’s Gary Mason that as it stands, “the public doesn’t have a right to know anything.”
So it was not surprising that when O’Connor called, in his second report, for a tough new body to oversee all RCMP activities, the debate among newspaper editorialists was not over whether it was justified, but whether it went far enough. Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, journalist Paul Palango called for a radical downsizing of the force’s duties. Provincial policing should be handed back to the province’s, he argued, and the “RCMP should be converted into a highly skilled FBI-type force.”<
For now, the report rests with the Prime Minister and his
Minister of Public Safety, B.C.’s own Stockwell Day. What they do with it is a
story for another year. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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thomas49
5 years ago
Comments on "Royal Canadian Mounted Mayhem"
The RCMP have been allowed to get away with behaviour that would otherwise be considered CRIMINAL!
Now ,where else could you burn barns,lie to the government of the day and kill citizens without even hesitating ???
ONLY IN CANADA ! YOU SAY .
Must be because the RCMP is a government entity meant to protect the government and not the people.
LIKE THE CIA .
To bad JEAN CRETIN did not disband the RCMP like he did the AIRBORNE,then ,maybe that poor kid from HOUSTON BC would still be alive...THEN AGAIN,HE WAS DRINKING BEER IN PUBLIC !!!
GOOD REASON TO SHOOT SOMEONE IN THE BACK OF THE HEAD...EH?
RCMP= Renegade Cowboys Manipulating Politicians
Lets have a competition to see if we can find out what the RCMP really means to people of CONSCIENCE,besides just being ,OUT OF CONTROL.
DPL
5 years ago
Hey, the boys and girls of the para military RCMP have big things to do. Like watch fellows like Tommy Douglas for about forty years. Never know when Tommy might have snapped. A newspaper editorial today asked if maybe the horsemen thought he might be about to sell the plans for the Avro Arrow to the Russians? The same editorial mentioned that a very large number of politicians of many parties have been under surveillance for years. They screwed up big time on the Arar case.The guy could easily have died in custody of Syria. Everyone but the Commissioner is still on the job. They have been screwing up for years but are still allowed to blunder on. One of the big internal issues is that a number of them want to form a union to get better benefits but the bosses beat them at it every time. Big things to watch, big things to do, busy busy. and when all else slows down, go feed the horses. a review of just what these folks ar supossed to be doing is long overdue.
G West
5 years ago
Given the hysterical reaction to Gary Mason's recent attempt to create sympathy for the Basi boyz in the Globe and Mail, I'm surprised this thread hasn't generated a lot more interest.
I think there are lots of problems with the RCMP - but I had no idea so many people felt the whole case against Basi and Virk boiled down in the public's mind to a dropped dug charge and their victimization by the horsemen.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I don't thing the Mounties list of crimes includes picking on the accused (and their masters) in the BC Rail Case.
Maybe all those commenters had something else in mind....
You can link to the story here and read the comments yourself:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061223.wxbc-mason23/EmailBNStory/National/home
And you can go to this site to get some more explication of the current state of affairs relative to Basi and Virk and the rehabilitation of Mark Marissen's image:
http://bctrialofbasi-virk.blogspot.com/
ps - Don't forget to read the comments section.
G West
5 years ago
should be dropped 'drug' charge in last line of para 2 above; apologies to the Spelling & Grammar Police.
Clear Cut
5 years ago
G West
Thank you for the self-correction. I may soon have to deputize you.
Marysue
5 years ago
The NWMP (which became the RCMP) was created by the Conselfservative Party and it has always followed party line. It explains how Mulroney was able to give our publicly owned airline to privateers who are constantly asking for and getting public handouts ever since. The RCMP never bothered making the Bronfmans return their tax money they took over the border. Most of the ordinary rank and file Mounties are pretty good gals and guys who do wonderful community volunteer work, but we've met some shady Mounties; some bullies. Even the good ones have let certain known drug and alcohol abusers drive drunk for years in our rural communities. While most of these people may not have killed or maimed anyone from their drunk driving ( sheer luck), they eventually died of their addictions, wrecking their families en route. If cops stopped them every time, maybe they would have got help for their addictions. When a new lot of RCMP comes in, it seems they pass the same info along to allow the same drunks and druggies to drive on our streets. Why? Are they afraid of the Hell's Angels? They are omnipresent now. The Hell's Angels own many of our legitimate businesses now. They are workers in unions now. Where they responsible for the demise of the IWA? "We didn't know they were this strong!" claimed one local Mountie I asked. How come they didn't know? It's hard to get the police to act on known drug dealers who are seducing your kids or invading your apartment block. You have to do the dangerous detective work for them, spy on your neighbours and record all comings and goings (with the times) before they'll actually DO something. When corporations fake bankruptcies to bilk their employees and suppliers, few RCMP investigate, but the QCs ignore any info the Mounties bring to them, anyway, rather than work to convict this new type of pirate, and bring humiliation to the governments who made the laws that encouraged these pirates. Mind you, the politically appointed judges are often drunken, useless twits, anyway, so what good does it do for the RCMP to do their job and investigate? Arrrrgghhhhhh!
pender paul
5 years ago
While I have a great deal of respect for the RCMP officers I have known, my over riding memory of the force goes back to the mid-fifties, when, a a boy, I watched RCMP officers at work. Most Fridays the Victoria chapter of the Labour Progressive Party (communist and completely legal) would meet at an office on Broughton Street (site of the present day main branch of the library)and as the LPP members exited the building they were stopped, questioned and photographed--week after week, month after month. This is, I believe, all too typical of much of their work--while real criminals were organizing and carrying out their dastardly deeds, the RCMP was overworked harassing ordinary working class citizens going about their legal business. The RCMP has a history of going after the wrong folks--the Winnipeg situation in 1919, labour rallies in Vancouver in the 30s, campus spies in the 60s and 70s, blowing up mail boxes and burning down barns in Quebec, etc. Maybe it's time for a complete re-think of their role in 'maintaining the right'.
Colin
5 years ago
Marysue
You are right that many in the rank and file are decent hardworking types. As for not going after the known drunks and such. Cops that live in small towns with their families have to work a fine line between enforcing the law while not being overzealous to the point they are ostracized by the community. Also they have to contend with the official and unofficial polices of their superiors. Plus there is the issue of the revolving door justice system, where many offenders are out the door before the cop can finish the paperwork.
As for the Hells Angels, any cop taking them on better have the full backing of their department. The HA are quite smart and have lots of money to hire lawyers to fight any charges, they will also use subtle indicators to show how vulnerable the officer may be. This province lax attitude to organized crime is sowing some seriously troubling seeds that will haunt us for quite some time. Organized crime in this province is also smart enough to keep out of the news as much as possible therefore preventing public opinion forcing the politicians into addressing the problems. Lots of cops I talk to, know what is going on and are quite frustrated.