RCMP Watch

Ottawa (Canadian Press) - A national union has lodged a formal complaint with Quebec’s police ethics commissioner over the actions of undercover police provocateurs at last year’s summit of North American leaders.
But the goal of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada is a full federal inquiry into what they see as a gross [...]

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Ottawa (Reuters) - The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and elections officials raided the Ottawa headquarters of the ruling Conservative Party on Tuesday, but officials declined to comment on the subject of the investigation.
A crowd of reporters watched as two police officers arrived with a trolley-load of cases and entered one of the party’s offices. Other [...]

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Essica Leeder, Ottawa (Globe and Mail) - A high-ranking Mountie ensnared in the RCMP pension scandal said the House of Commons’ top legal officer privately offered her a chance to avoid becoming “roadkill” in a campaign to have her cited for contempt of Parliament.
The proposal by veteran law clerk Rob Walsh would have required that [...]

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(Toronto Star Editorial) A report this week has finally shed some light on the RCMP’s unprecedented intervention in the last federal election campaign, but it still leaves some key questions about this troubling episode unanswered.
It’s hard to fault Paul Kennedy, the chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. As Kennedy noted in [...]

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Ottawa (Canadian Press) - Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says the RCMP will change the way it handles public disclosure of sensitive information such as the income trust probe that sparked a storm in the last federal election.
Day, fielding questions in the Commons, said the reforms urged by Paul Kennedy, the force’s civilian [...]

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Brodie Fenlon and Omar El Akkad (Globe and Mail) - Former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli approved the release of information about a criminal probe into the income trust leak in the middle of the 2006 federal election campaign and directed that a press release name Ralph Goodale, then Liberal finance minister, an RCMP watchdog report [...]

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Theophilos Argitis and Greg Quinn (Bloomberg) - Canada’s federal police may have contributed to the former Liberal Party government’s defeat in the 2006 election by disclosing its plans for a criminal probe during the campaign, a complaints body said.
“I don’t know personally if this action was the one that impacted directly upon the change of [...]

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Meagan Fitzpatrick, Ottawa (Canwest News Service) - Battered and bruised from a series of scandals, the RCMP could take another embarrassing hit to its reputation today when the force’s public complaints commissioner releases his report on the Mounties’ controversial launch of a criminal investigation into the federal Finance Department in the middle of the [...]

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Vancouver, B.C. (Canadian Press) - The B.C. Civil Liberties Association says the RCMP should not disclose the existence of a criminal investigation except in certain limited circumstances.
The association has sent a letter to Paul Kennedy, chairman of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, related to his probe into how the force handled its [...]

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James Travers (Toronto Star) - Canada is too cold, rich and stable to be easily mistaken for a banana republic. But from time to time – and this is one of them – this capital’s willingness to turn a blind eye to bad behaviour explains any confusion.
Sometime too soon this country will plunge into the [...]

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