RCMP Watch

Jana G. Pruden - Regina Leader-Post
Marlowe K. Lang will never be able to give back the $187,000 he stole from his former employer, but his crime will temporarily cost him his freedom.
The 42-year-old was sentenced Friday to six months in jail for defrauding the canteen at Regina’s RCMP Academy of at least $187,000, pilfered in [...]

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Here NB
New Brunswick is lagging behind the national standard for numbers of women in policing, following a trend of male-dominated police forces throughout the Maritime provinces.
According to a Statistics Canada survey released on December 15, only 13.6 per cent of New Brunswick’s police officers were female in 2005, better than only Nova Scotia with 13.4 [...]

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CBC News
The deputy mayor of one of several Alberta towns temporarily losing RCMP officers to Saskatchewan jails during a guard strike says his community can’t afford to be short-staffed.
Truper McBride said Cochrane lost two of 11 officers to Saskatchewan, despite worries in his booming town northwest of Calgary about increases in break-ins and vandalism.

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There’s been a shortage of RCMP officers in Manitoba over the last five years, says Manitoba’s Conservative justice critic, who questions whether the province can afford to send 90 officers to Saskatchewan as reinforcements in a labour dispute.
“When you take a force that is already under strain with a lack of officers, and then you [...]

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Langley Times
RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli resigned following his revelation that he’d been inaccurate in earlier testimony before a House of Commons committee, looking into the case of Maher Arar.
Arar was sent to Syria where he was tortured, at least partially because of information given by the RCMP to U.S. authorities, suggesting that he was a [...]

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CBC News
After putting Mounties to work in strike-bound Saskatchewan jails for the past week, the RCMP is calling for reinforcements from Manitoba and Alberta.
About 800 jail guards and youth centre workers have been on the picket line since Dec. 20.
RCMP members from detachments around the province have been filling in at correctional facilities since then.

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TheTyee.ca”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 [...]

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Jennifer Ditchburn - Canadian Press
A new passport requirement for travel to the United States is currently the only serious irritant between the two countries, U.S. ambassador David Wilkins said Monday, failing to mention the Maher Arar affair during a prepared speech.
Wilkins, Washington’s top diplomat in Canada, was finally asked by an audience member at a [...]

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The Leader-Post (Regina)
In Brief: The latest report on the Maher Arar case presents suggestions to improve the monitoring of intelligence agencies.
Justice Dennis O’Connor’s recommendations to improve the way Canada’s intelligence agencies are monitored are — at least on paper — encouraging. But how effective they will be in practice is still very much in question.

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Jim Bronskill - Canadian Press
RCMP spies shadowed Tommy Douglas, the fabled Prairie politician, for more than three decades, from his early days as a young firebrand through a tumultuous tenure as NDP leader.
A newly declassified file on Douglas shows the Mounties surreptitiously attended the witty orator’s speeches, dissected his published articles and, during one Parliament [...]

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