Ben Gelinas, Edmonton, AB (Edmonton Journal) – The head of the RCMP wants to make it easier to fire culpable cops and plans to petition Parliament for a broader variety of officer punishments.
“I think it should be easier for us to fire members of the RCMP where that’s appropriate,” said RCMP Commissioner William Elliott in a weekend interview with the Edmonton Journal. “It doesn’t happen very often, but right now it takes a very long time to fire an officer for gross misconduct.”
“It’s very rare that a situation arises where the conduct of an officer should give rise to dismissal, but in the cases where it happens now, it’s not uncommon for the process to drag out, literally, for years.”
Elliott said reprimands for misconduct are often too lenient and there aren’t enough options for punishment.
“We have sanctions now, but the stiffest monetary penalty at the moment for an RCMP officer is two weeks’ pay,” Elliott said. “I don’t think that’s adequate.”
He pointed out that the only option for anything beyond a two-week pay suspension is dismissal.
“There should be more options than that. And across the board we need to speed things up. There’s truth to the old adage that justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.
The force is developing proposals to amend the RCMP Act to streamline the disciplinary process, though Elliott cannot yet say what they will specifically propose.
It routinely takes years for a disciplinary charge to reach a conclusion, leaving the officer in limbo, maintaining a paycheque without working.
The process resembles a court proceeding, but senior officers act as judges to oversee the disciplinary case and decide if the officer is guilty or innocent and how that officer should be punished.
Unlike many workers, a police officer can’t just be called into his boss’ office and fired, and Elliott doesn’t want to go that far. He just wants to expedite a process he says is bogged down by red tape.
Often, an internal review of an officer’s conduct is preceded by a criminal investigation.
Elliott said he also recognizes there’s controversy around the issue of police investigating police.
“We can’t provide adequate policing services to Canadians if Canadians don’t support us, and they won’t support us if they don’t trust us,” he said.
Elliott said it is especially difficult to enlist non-RCMP investigators to probe RCMP officers accused of wrongdoing in remote areas like the territories, where the Mounties are the only enforcers.
“Despite our desire not to do these types of investigations, sometimes we’re compelled to because there’s nobody else to do them.”
Any decision made by a Federal body including the RCMP is subject to review by the Federal Court of Canada. You merely have to file, which costs less than 100 dollars. They even provide you with sample filings as easy as a fill in the blanks system. Any law student or legal aid storefront operation can tell you that for free. their actions against you are measured with the principals of fundamental justice and procedural fairness.
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Its great for the Master and Chief to state he feels things should be easier to get rid of members. When a Division is trying to get rid of a member and the member feels they are being mistreated try calling on the Commissioners Office to step in , they run and hid. Second if the Force wants someone gone they just work around policy and cut the members pay(starving out a member), a member has no choice mounting legal bills, living expense they must quit and find other work. Once you quit you can’t appeal to anyone, your jobs gone. The only time they keep paying a member and drag their investigations out is when they want to keep the member and want the public to forget about what happened so no one will question why? If a member quits and they still come at him he fights the fight on his own, and when you quick an organization like the RCMP and have a record, then unlike leaving another job with a record good luck in getting on with your life especially when the RCMP keeps popping up its ugly head.
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Spot on SC. One step overlooked by some organizations is the conditions of employment aspect. If you are a signatory to a document that simply outlines your conditions of employment, such as: shift work mandatory, carrying a firearm mandatory, exposure to listed risks, valid license to drive, etc., and are told that the absence of any one of theses abilities will result in termination, it would make it easier to go through the process.
I would surmise of course that legal beagles would still try and get around it. If you suffered a conviction for an indictable criminal offense, and having one breached your conditions of employment, the steps to termination would be, in my view, shortened.
However the system we have is our own doing. We have met the enemy and he is us.
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In employment law termination is the equivalent of capital punishment because it is considered the most severe penalty which may be meted out. For this reason it usually takes the longest time to be resolved when contested. Arbitrators, Judges, and Tribunals which may hear grievances of wrongful termination quite properly seek to be very sure the avenues of appeal have been given every opportunity to function thus affording the employee intended to be terminated every opportunity to exercise his or her rights. Termination is of course, unless capriciously and cavalierly applied, reserved for the most severe of employee misconduct. Think in terms of sabotage causing serious financial damage, high value theft, assault causing severe harm, gross negligence, towering incompetence, or gross insubordination. We aren’t talking in the vast majority of termination cases of an isolated screwup in an otherwise stellar career, or being late for work once in 20 years.
Add to the carefully administered protections built into adjudicating a contested termination the existing administrative inefficiencies in the systems in use and you begin to see the frustration with the time taken to process a termination of employment. Sure, you may get a termination heard by an arbitrator and granted it may take a couple of days of hearings in which management and the employee representatives respectively present their case. But getting on the agreed arbitrator’s calendar may take months and then there is waiting for the decision which can also take months before it is published for implementation.
Who likes waiting? Well, frankly no one enjoys the suspense. Management? Hardly. When it has decided someone has to go, it wants the deed done quickly. Le Grand Fromage des Frommages Elliott confirms this. He isn’t alone. The employee hanging by a thread? Nope. The employee’s bargaining agent (where one exists)? Not them either.
So what to do? Well maybe the administrative process can be speeded up. Maybe. But if someone suggests short cutting the fundamental principles of justice which underpin a fair hearing process we better all watch out. As messy and slow as those processes are, they protect the accused from capricious and heavy handed treatment, while still allowing management to get to it’s termination if it has a case that stands scrutiny. So if we can gain efficiencies in process fairly applied to both sides I say well done! But if management wants to speed up the process by taking a meat cleaver to employee rights, or seeks to lower the bar of proof they have to meet because they are too lazy or too busy to do the considerable work involved in defending a termination before a hearing body, I invite them all to take a long walk off a short pier. And I used to represent management so I know the work is exacting but doable so take your complaints to someone more gullible.
And while we are at it, I reject the idea that some cases are so clear cut that the accused shouldn’t have any rights. Everyone has rights in this country. Not just those who are likable or where conventional street wisdom says there can be a well attended popular execution without trial. The only difference between a very clear cut case of employee wrongdoing and a murky one is that the former makes for a clear cut hearing and the latter a much more complicated one.
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