Douglas Quan (Postmedia News) – A “cloak of secrecy” still exists over the RCMP management’s internal fighting, which is why the House of Commons public safety committee is calling some of Commissioner William Elliott’s critics to testify in the new year, Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland says.
Appearing before the committee late last month, Elliott said he was “quite pleased” with the current state of relations between him and other senior brass, but Holland says questions remain.
“I’m not sure we have a clear sense of what’s going on,” Holland said Tuesday in a phone interview. “You see nothing but diffused colours.”
Holland said the committee is not interested in delving into personnel issues but feels it is important to get to the bottom of the management conflicts because they could be hampering the agency’s ability to reform.
The government hired Reid Morden, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, to conduct a “workplace assessment” of the RCMP’s senior management this summer, but Holland said Morden’s probe yielded few answers.
Holland added that if there was a truly independent RCMP watchdog able to shine a light into the agency’s “darkest corners,” the public safety committee wouldn’t have to dig into this issue.
The two critics who have been asked to appear are Mike McDonell and Raf Souccar, both former members of the RCMP’s senior executive committee. They had actually been asked to appear before the public safety committee as well last month but didn’t show up, prompting questions from the committee about whether Elliott had asked them not to. Elliott said he had not.
McDonell, a former assistant commissioner, wrote a scathing letter to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews in July, accusing Elliott of being tactless and treating staff in a manner that was “brutal, disrespectful, intimidating and careless.”
He characterized Elliott’s leadership as a dictatorship and said senior managers had effectively stopped giving advice to the commissioner “for fear of backlash.”
McDonell subsequently left the force to join the Ontario Provincial Police as a detachment commander.
Souccar, a deputy commissioner, also reportedly complained about Elliott to the top levels of government. In early November, Souccar was stripped of his role overseeing federal and international policing as part of a major reshuffling of the force’s senior ranks.
However, Elliott has insisted that the changes are not an attempt to quell dissent.
In fact, Elliott told the public safety committee that the RCMP has made “very considerable progress” in encouraging members to speak up.
“As I often say, I believe that everyone has an opportunity — in fact, an obligation — to speak, to raise issues, and to have those issues resolved,” Elliott testified.
Internal emails recently obtained by Postmedia News through the Access to Information Act show no hints of animus between Souccar and Elliott in the months since feuding among senior Mounties came to light.
In fact, the emails show that Souccar helped Elliott draft a memo that went out to the entire force in late July reassuring officers that senior managers were working through their problems.
Meanwhile, another deputy commissioner who had been identified in media reports as being one of the senior Mounties who complained about Elliott to senior government officials, insists he did no such thing.
Appearing alongside Elliott before the public safety committee last month, Tim Killam testified that he was “not part of a formal grievance in any way, shape or form” and that, in his opinion, complaining to outside parties was “not useful to anyone.”
Killam is one of several senior managers who have recently retired or will soon retire from the force.
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