RCMP Watch

CBC News

Former public safety minister Anne McLellan says she did everything in her power to deal with problems in the RCMP, and that included being tough on former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

The ex-minister, a Liberal, testified Thursday before an all-party committee in Ottawa looking into problems in the national police force.

Zaccardelli resigned in December over the handling of the Maher Arar case, in which U.S. officials grabbed an Ottawa man during a New York stop-over, accused him of links to al-Qaeda and sent him to Syria, where he was tortured.

The commissioner’s resignation came at a time when the force was also under fire for allegations it tried to silence officers who tried to come forward with concerns over their pension fund.

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre asked McLellan, who was public safety minister from 2003 to 2006, whether she was “too unquestioning in your support of him as the commissioner while all of this was going on under your nose?”

McLellan said she doubts Zaccardelli thinks she was too soft on him. “He would find that probably fairly amusing because we had fairly aggressive engagements on a wide range of matters.”

McLellan said she followed the right procedures and it wasn’t her job to interfere with how the commissioner ran the RCMP internally.

The committee is asking how things can be improved within the force, especially for officers who want to come forward with suspicions of wrongdoing.

Paul Kennedy, head of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, told the politicians, “You want more powerful and effective oversight to deal with these issues. Only Parliament, through statutes, can give us those powers to make it more relevant.”

When Parliament dissolves later this month and a new session begins in October, the current committee, with its current members, will no longer exist.