Ottawa (Canadian Press) – Former RCMP commissioner Norm Inkster acknowledged the force put a positive spin on its relations with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, soft-pedalling conflicts with the spy agency during a 1992 review of the Air India bombing.
“It didn’t serve any organization well, whether the RCMP or CSIS, to be criticizing one another,” Inkster told a public inquiry yesterday.
“It would just bring harm to their relationship. . . . So we wanted to put a positive front on it as best we could, while recognizing we had very different mandates.”
At issue was a study by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which monitors CSIS, of the turf wars between police and security officers after the 1985 downing of the Air India flight.
One of the key issues was the erasure by CSIS of hundreds of pre-bombing wiretap tapes of Sikh extremists who became bombing suspects.
Inkster testified yesterday that when he was informed that the spy agency was still erasing tapes after the bombing, he immediately called then-CSIS director Ted Finn.
“I said, ‘Ted, if that is continuing, it has to stop.’ ”
At the time, Inkster was deputy commissioner. He took the top job in 1987 — and his public views on the wiretap tapes started to get less clear.
As commissioner, he told a parliamentary committee he didn’t think the tape erasures had hindered the investigation. Yesterday, he said he meant the loss of the tapes didn’t halt the investigation.
“We’re going to do the best we can with what we have.”
Inkster also recalled that, by the time of the 1992 review, he and Reid Morden, who succeeded Finn, were trying to patch up tattered relations between their agencies.
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