RCMP Watch

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Montreal Gazette
On the face of it, the government was well within its rights to fire Jeffrey Monaghan. If, as the Conservatives claim, the 27-year-old public servant leaked Environment Minister John Baird’s secret plan to abandon the Kyoto accord to the press, then that is, indeed, a firing offence.
But even though it might also be a [...]

[Read more →]

Bruce Cheadle, Canadian Press
Accusations are flying that the Conservative government is using the RCMP to further its political and communications agenda, reviving old controversies that go back at least a decade to the pepper-spraying of protesters at an APEC summit.
When Mounties handcuffed and arrested a junior employee of the Environment Department in front of his [...]

[Read more →]

Neal Hall, CanWest News Service
The RCMP “tailored and targeted” their efforts in a bid to nail two former British Columbia government aides accused of accepting bribes involved the sale of B.C. Rail, and failed to properly probe a close relationship between a lobbyist and a former deputy finance minister, a defence lawyer alleged yesterday.
Kevin [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Rod Mickleburgh - Globe and Mail
The RCMP is under heavy fire for its criticism of Vancouver’s pioneering supervised injection site for heroin users, a project that has won positive reviews from more than a dozen rigorous research studies.
In a critical, three-page report on the site, Staff-Sergeant Chuck Doucette questioned findings of the numerous peer-reviewed studies, [...]

[Read more →]