RCMP Watch

Barbara George, the first high-ranking Mountie threatened with contempt of Parliament for misleading MPs, says she will fight until she’s exonerated and reinstated in her job.

Kathryn May, The Ottawa Citizen

Exclusive: Suspended RCMP deputy commissioner Barbara George, who lost her job after being accused of perjury and becoming the public face of the Mounties’ pension-fund fiasco, speaks for the first time about what she says really went wrong — and insists she’ll return to the force she loves.
The high-flying deputy commissioner, who could have been an inside contender for the force’s top job, was suspended three months ago in the fallout over the RCMP pension fiasco and now awaits the findings of two investigations. An accusation of perjury by Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj threw her into the spotlight of a parliamentary probe, as well as disciplinary and criminal investigations led by the force she served for nearly three decades.

“I bear no malice or ill will. I can see how this came to pass and why people are so agitated,” she says in an interview with the Citizen at her OrlEans home, the first time she has told her story since news of the $13-billion scandal broke.

“I guess I’m collateral damage, but this is where I sit. And what am I focused on? Quite honestly, at getting my life back in order, rebuilding my reputation, working on my career and getting back my sense of self and place. Who I am is Barb George, but a lot of that is connected with the RCMP, so I need to feel good about that and get back the pride of those 30 years.”

She believes much of her plight was caused by misunderstandings and poor communication. A string of minor incidents, unexpected turns of events and personalities gathered in a “perfect storm” that took away her job, reputation and life as she knew it.

She might have jumped to the same conclusion in his shoes, chasing the same trail of letters, e-mails and conflicting stories.

George is the first deputy commissioner in the force’s history to be suspended, forced to surrender her badge, security pass, her uniform and the powers of a peace officer.

She still recalls the “catastrophic event” and “numbness” she felt when then-interim commissioner Beverley Busson quietly called her into her office and told her it would be best for the force if she stepped aside as the RCMP’s chief human resources officer.

It was the evening of March 26, two days before five Mounties would break ranks and stun a parliamentary committee with allegations of corruption and coverup among senior managers, including former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, in the misuse of the force’s pension fund.

Busson knew what was coming. She had spent hours interviewing the five in previous weeks about their complaints, many of which had been confirmed by earlier investigations. But her predecessor had let them fester and now they were about to explode.

Busson knew Frizzell would tell MPs he believed George had him removed from the Ottawa police investigation because he suspected she wrongly transferred money from the insurance to the pension fund. She also knew George had told the same committee a month earlier “with absolute finality” neither she nor Zaccardelli had anything to do with Frizzell’s removal.

But George wasn’t privy to those talks. That evening, she sat incredulously as Busson assured her she believed her. The interim commissioner said she had considered finding George a different portfolio or a senior job in a federal department. Instead, she had decided George could cushion some of the damage of that explosive testimony if she stepped down.

“Barb, I can’t leave you in HR,” George recalled Busson saying. “I believe everything you told me and I can’t ask you to resign because you have done nothing wrong, but it’s going to be horrible. These people are going to say horrible things about the force.”

“And you feel if I am out of my position that it will go much better for us?” George asked.

“Yes, I do,” Busson replied.

“If I’m gone, it will go better?”

“I believe so,” Busson said.

Recalling the exchange, George’s steely resolve breaks down, her voice cracks and her eyes well with tears.

“I’m getting emotional,” she says in a voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s about time you got emotional,” says her husband, Tom Maybee, a former Mountie and CSIS intelligence agent who sits next to her during the interview. (A lawyer and a RCMP staff representative also sat in on the interview.)

By the time she left Busson’s office later that night, she had agreed to step aside for the sake of the force and take an education leave to finish a master’s degree.

“I got out and I was a zombie,” George says. “I honestly don’t know how I drove home. I’m not being overdramatic, but all I can hear is the swish of the blood rushing through my ears. I’m stunned and came home to an empty house.”

But that was only the beginning. As expected, the five Mounties testified before MPs, publicly accused senior RCMP management of nepotism, breaking contracting rules, sidelining whistleblowers, burying evidence and improperly diverting funds from the force’s pension and insurance funds.

The next several days were a blur. MP Wrzesnewskyj publicly accused George of perjury over conflicting testimony about Frizzell’s removal. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day met with Busson and called for a special investigation to sort out the mess. Busson backed away from her agreement and suspended George from her job as deputy commissioner.

Then, George discovered the RCMP had launched internal and criminal

investigations into allegations of perjury. It all unfolded in a week. George and the pension fiasco were a top news story for six days running, along with Conrad Black’s trial.

She’s been unable to watch the televised hearings of the public-accounts committee and the parade of witnesses who, she said, need “titanium in (their) spine” to attend. She read some transcripts, but has largely left that to her husband who leads the “Vindicate Barb” campaign from the family room of their home.

He isn’t as sanguine as his wife and gets agitated, defiantly poking holes in witnesses’ testimony as George tries to tell her side of the story.

“Let it go,” she tells him. “Don’t go there.”

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Up until then, the 56-year-old George had had an exemplary record. A native of Newfoundland, she joined the force after her husband was posted to Ottawa. She spent her career here, sailing through the ranks.

They have three sons. One is a Mountie and two had plans to join until they watched what happened to their mother.

She wasn’t among the managers originally implicated in the misuse of pension funds. In fact, she had nothing to do the affair until then-commissioner Zaccardelli made her deputy commissioner and chief human resource officer in the fall of 2003 to clean up the department. Zaccardelli removed her predecessor, Jim Ewanovich, from the job when an internal audit confirmed the misappropriation of pension funds.

George said the human resources department was a disaster when she took over. The office crackled with gossip and innuendo about the wrongdoings uncovered in the audit. Staff felt “battered and bruised,” morale was at rock-bottom and rumours were rife that “millions were ferried off by nefarious means.”

George said this “noise” was hanging over the department like a cloud when retired staff sergeant Ron Lewis, then a staff-relations representative, told her he would go public if an investigation wasn’t called.

Lewis and Denise Revine, the human resources director who first uncovered the misuse of pension funds, wrote a report detailing the problems. George says she realized her department would never recover unless an investigation cleared the air. She got the report Jan. 5, 2004, and asked Zaccardelli to call an investigation or find her another job.

“I put it on the line and said, ‘You might as well take me out of this job because we cannot move forward and the only way is to call a full investigation and find out who did what and what needed to be done’,” she said.

In February, she gave the report to Assistant Commissioner David Gork, who quickly recommended a criminal and internal investigation. By March, the Ottawa police were brought in to investigate — the probe was code-named Project Probity — but most of the investigators were Mounties who were seconded to help in the investigation.

During the investigation, investigators stumbled on a document that broadened the probe to the RCMP’s life and disability insurance plans. The 2003 document showed Ewanovich had struck a deal with the insurance committee to use pension funds to cover the mushrooming administration costs of the insurance plans.

In March 2005, four Mounties were gunned down at Mayerthorpe, Alta., bringing the insurance plans to the top of mind of investigators. Frizzell, one of the Mounties seconded to Project Probity, found no legal authority to divert pension funds for insurance costs and took his concerns to a meeting of senior management. He told them managers had also been wrongly dipping into insurance funds to cover administration costs — which they also had no authority to do.

At the meeting, Paul Gauvin, the RCMP’s chief financial officer, agreed the pension funds had to be repaid and would be reimbursed out of the force’s appropriations or annual budget from Treasury Board.

After the meeting, however, Gauvin discovered the money couldn’t legally be taken out of the budget and began negotiations with Treasury Board over who had the authority to administer the insurance funds. That legal wrangling is still under way.

But George says the pension money still had to be repaid and Gauvin advised her to take it out of the insurance plan. She signed a letter authorizing the transfer of nearly $600,000 from the insurance plan back to the pension plan.

That letter became the “smoking gun,” sounding an alarm for Frizzell that money was still being improperly used — under George’s watch.

“I was assured this was a necessary and corrective action. Little did I realize that (letter) was going to be a catalyst for being accused of wrongdoing,” she says.

The letter became key evidence at the parliamentary hearings at which George was accused of being complicit in the misappropriation of insurance funds. In dramatic testimony, Frizzell played the voicemail he had left for Rosalie Burton, an executive who worked for George, when he discovered the transfer.

In the recording, Frizzell said the latest $600,000 transfer left him no choice but to report that “what started through a criminal act is ongoing and seemingly condoned by senior management and that is not what I wanted to say.”

George was stunned by the allegation. The pension scandal was too complicated for most Canadians to understand, but now there was a public face to put to the story — her’s.

“This was an internal transaction, moving money from one cup to another,” she says. “Nobody came in with a suitcase of money and said ‘Here, Barbara, is $500,000, what do you want me to do with it?’”

Looking back, George says the big problem was that no one explained to Frizzell what happened.

“You don’t have to be a police officer to see how Frizzell thought he smelled a rat, found the smoking gun; and we will never know, but if he been allowed to continue (his investigation) for another week or 10 days, he might have had that ‘aha, I understand’,” she said.

George insists that the miscommunication was compounded by a series of confusing events that unfolded the week after the voicemail Frizzell left Burton on June 10, 2005.

Frizzell testified that the voicemail triggered his removal from the investigation 10 days later. He said two superintendents came to his office with a written order, pulling him off the case. Later, when his computer was returned, his files had been wiped off the hard drive.

Burton had sent a written version of the message, which she considered harassment, to George several days later. George said she had already had complaints from Burton that Frizzell was so aggressive that several of Burton’s staff had fled in tears from his interviews. (Later testimony revealed that Frizzell had not interviewed these people.)

As a result, George said she felt Frizzell had to be reined in and decided to track down his supervisors to “take him aside and get him to tone it down a notch.”

Those calls have been portrayed as George, a senior-ranking officer and possible suspect, interfering in the investigation to muzzle Frizzell. MPs on the public-accounts committee heard as much from two assistant commissioners who testified that an upset George had called them up to get Frizzell removed.

But George argues her actions were misinterpreted from the start. She says it would be “unthinkable” and “career-suicide” for her to try to muzzle or remove an investigating officer.

“Why in God’s name would I do that?” she asks. “What motive could I have?

“But what I have learned is that from Staff Sgt. Frizzell’s perspective, he thought he had the smoking gun with the letter and (George) has her hands on $600,000 of my insurance money. I was the criminal and I was trying to cover my tracks. That’s what he thought he was on to.”

It was Assistant Commissioner Gork who issued the written “cease and desist” order served on Frizzell, and Gork testified that the decision to do so was his, not George’s.

Meanwhile, Ottawa police Insp. Paul Roy, who told MPs of his own run-ins with Frizzell, was winding up the 15-month investigation. He told MPs the order came too late; Project Probity was already over, so Frizzell couldn’t be removed.

It’s now up to MPs to sort through the tangle of confusing and contradictory evidence on how and why Frizzell left the investigation and whether they think George lied or misled them.

MPs have met secretly to discuss George’s testimony and compare her version of events with the conflicting testimony of other witnesses. MPs won’t meet on the pension issue again until early September, but they have several key documents that will invariably affect their decision.

Last month, Special Investigator David Brown issued his stinging report into the fiasco, vindicating Frizzell, along with other whistleblowers — Staff Sgt. Ron Lewis; Staff Sgt. Steve Walker, Chief Supt. Fraser Macaulay and Revine, the human resources director who unearthed the misspending during a budget review.

Busson has since honoured the five at a private dinner and gave them the Commissioner’s Commendation, the highest honour bestowed on members of the force.

In his report, Mr. Brown concluded the treatment of Frizzell — who as a young constable had helped write the RCMP’s mission and values statement — was particularly unfair because he was “trying so hard to protect the organization from itself.”

“Even if (Staff) Sgt Frizzell’s style runs to one that is somewhat aggressive in some contexts, it seems to me that allegations of harassment on his part were manufactured in this case to discredit him,” Brown wrote.

The report also suggested some of this could have been avoided if Frizzell had been told senior management was trying to resolve the insurance issue.

Brown said the order issued to stop Frizzell from further investigating the insurance plan was meant to “demean” him. It also showed the RCMP’s influence on the investigation because, as subject of the investigation, it shouldn’t have had the authority to stop it.

Brown’s report barely mentions George.

Busson also delivered a lengthy report on the circumstances surrounding Frizzell’s removal, but MPs haven’t seen it yet because it hasn’t been translated into French. For her part, Busson earlier told MPs that, based on the evidence she’s seen, Frizzell had been “removed.”

The committee also has a recent letter from Chief Supt. Bob Paulson, who headed the RCMP’s disciplinary and criminal investigations into allegations George committed perjury during her Feb. 21 testimony. They focus on her role in the removal of Frizzell.

A Federal Court judge already ruled the RCMP couldn’t use her testimony against her in the internal investigation because it is protected by parliamentary privilege.

With that ruling, all allegations were dropped against her except a charge of disgraceful conduct for failing to brief Busson fully for a report to the committee about the complaints surrounding Frizzell’s behaviour. That internal hearing is expected in the late fall. George said the force is seeking her dismissal, but any sanction will be determined by the adjudicators.

In his letter, Paulson asked MPs to waive privilege so he could use her testimony in his criminal investigation and as evidence in a prosecution.

“I have a belief that her testimony before the committee was deliberately false and provided with the intent to mislead the committee,” he wrote.

The committee, however, refused the request. MPs, however, can still take action and waive privilege if they conclude she lied or misled them. That testimony could be turned over to the Crown to lay perjury changes or the House of Commons could pursue contempt-of-Parliament charges.

Until then, she continues her fight to “get the truth out” and go back to work. The RCMP was betrayed by a handful of trusted senior managers who “put efficiency and quickness before integrity,” she says.

“It is the best force in the world. We recruit the best, train them well and the esprit de corps is a thing of beauty that I think needs to be cherished and polished a bit so we get back to members swelling with pride when they wear the red serge.”