RCMP Watch

May 29, 2006
CAROL GOAR Toronto Star

Even if he is stretching the truth, Greg Sorbara is wise to say he bears no malice toward the RCMP for putting him through seven months of hell, damaging his reputation and disrupting his political career.

The reinstated provincial finance minister has little to gain — and possibly a good deal to lose — by hurling brickbats at the national police force.

The Mounties are still probing a property deal involving the Sorbara family’s private company. The public has little sympathy for politicians who complain about unfair police treatment. And Justice Ian Nordheimer of the Ontario Superior Court was sufficiently withering in his criticism of the RCMP’s investigative tactics that Sorbara’s censure would be superfluous.

But it would be a shame to let the matter rest there.

Someone should be asking tough questions about a police force that obtains search warrants without proper evidence; refuses to interview subjects who seek to clear their name; exposes individuals to opprobrium on the basis of suspicion and conjecture and dismisses all questions about its methods with a breezy: “We never comment on ongoing investigations.”

Canadians understand the need for confidentiality in police probes. They know it takes time to build a solid case. They are willing to believe that the RCMP is thorough and professional most of the time.

But the Mounties are making it difficult with their forays into the spotlight:

They bungled the investigation of the bombing of Air-India flight 182 so badly that the Crown could not secure a conviction after one of the longest and costliest murder trials in Canadian history. The families of the 329 victims — who had waited 20 years for answers — are still in the dark. Their only hope is that a public inquiry, announced this month, will shed some light on the mass slaughter.

They provided information to U.S. officials that appears to have precipitated the deportation and torture of Maher Arar. The Canadian engineer was pulled off a plane in New York in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism and shipped to Syria. The extent of the RCMP’s involvement in Arar’s 10-month nightmare will become clearer, this summer, when a public inquiry releases its findings.

They raided the home of Juliet O’Neill, an Ottawa Citizen reporter covering the Arar case, and carted off notebooks, computer hard drives and contact books, alleging a breach of the Security of Information Act. The law, enacted in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, makes it illegal to possess or distribute classified government information. O’Neill has spent 2 1/2 years in court contesting the search warrants the Mounties used. She remains under investigation.

They accused former prime minister Brian Mulroney, in official government documents, of taking kickbacks on the sale of 34 Airbus jets to Air Canada while in office. After an eight-year investigation, they dropped the case for lack of evidence. Mulroney launched a $50 million defamation suit. He won an out-of-court settlement and a public apology from former justice minister Allan Rock.

It is possible that these are unfortunate aberrations. As Sorbara said after running up a legal bill of more than $100,000 to have his name removed from an RCMP search warrant: “No public organization is infallible.”

It is possible that the Mounties do their best work when the media aren’t watching. They certainly appear to be well regarded by law enforcement officials in other countries and respected in the many communities where they provide local policing.

But the high-profile cases do matter. They give Canadians with little direct exposure to the RCMP a glimpse of how it operates and how it treats citizens. The picture that is emerging ought to concern RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.

When citizens see wealthy politicians spending hundreds of thousands of dollars — in Mulroney’s case $2 million — to prove the Mounties made a mistake, they wonder how ordinary Canadians fight back.

When they see journalists who work for large media organizations bullied by the RCMP, they wonder how people without access to publicity and resources get fair treatment.

When they see what happened to Arar, they wonder how all the other individuals who fall under RCMP suspicion because of their nationality, their religion or a chance meeting in a restaurant, extricate themselves from the security net.

Despite his costly brush with the national police force, Sorbara is the wrong person to speak out — at least now. But it would be a mistake to let this incident pass in uneasy silence.