Editorial (Ottawa Citizen) – Liberal Senator Colin Kenny and his five colleagues in the Red Chamber likely expected the Conservative government to denounce them (as it has) for releasing a paper on the state of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, while Parliament is prorogued.
If the Conservatives don’t like it, that’s their problem. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to suspend Parliament might have been legal, but because he did so for partisan reasons — to shut down inconvenient questioning from pesky opposition MPs — the prorogation has rightly been perceived as illegitimate. Parliamentarians who have decided to stay put and continue working, even unofficially, deserve to be commended.
The only accommodation Senator Kenny and his colleagues were forced to make was to call their study a “position paper” rather than a committee report. No matter what it’s called, the 97-page document, Toward a Red Serge Revival, is useful reading — a reminder that the dysfunction inside the RCMP continues, despite promises of reform.
The senators are right that the RCMP “is in need of serious repair.” The force’s credibility has suffered in recent years, the result both of front-line police bungling and behind-the-scenes executive misjudgment. Some of the highest profile instances of law enforcement gone wrong have involved the RCMP, from the tasering death of a Polish immigrant to the Maher Arar affair.
The Senate paper adds one more voice, an influential one, to the consensus view that public confidence in the RCMP cannot be restored so long as the Mounties enjoy the prerogative of investigating themselves in cases of misconduct and incompetence. It is wrong, the Senators agree, that for so long “the RCMP has maintained firm control over the process of assessing questionable behaviour on the part of its officers, reaching its own conclusions about culpability and meting out whatever kind of discipline it deems to be warranted.”
A number of reports and reviews of the RCMP — including Justice Dennis O’Connor’s into the Maher Arar affair — have similarly recommended the creation of transparent, outside scrutiny of RCMP. The existing Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP could have served some of that role, but as former head Paul Kennedy conceded, the commission in its current form is toothless.
Both government and RCMP officials have grudgingly recognized the need for more transparency and oversight. Some steps have been taken, but not nearly enough.
Not everything the senators say makes sense. They propose paying bonuses to RCMP managers for hiring specified numbers of recruits from disadvantaged groups. The senators say they don’t want to compromise the merit principle, but a crude money-for-minorities plan sounds like a quota system, and quota systems almost always compromise merit.
Yet even when they’re wrong, it’s clear that the authors have undertaken such a sharp critique of the RCMP because they want to see this fabled national institution strengthened, not weakened, and one hopes that most Canadians feel that way, too.
I think it is obvious Senator Kenny has no clue what he is talking about. I’ve said it before, but the senators of this country need to be elected and I have very little respect for his position in the patronage chamber.
The liberal answer for everything is to throw a politically correct magic bullet at the problem. How is discriminating against one group over another going to fix the problems that the organization is facing?
You can thank the liberals for bringing in the charter and handcuffing the police to properly do their job. You can thank the liberals for the improper funding over the years where continuing training was shelved. You can thank the liberals for depot shutting down. You can thank the liberals for decades of reverse discrimination. You can thank the liberals for establishing a culture where your sex or your skin color is more important that than your ability to do the job. You can thank the liberals for putting the kind of people in charge that have mismanaged the force, brought in a useless promotion system and demilitarized the training to the point it resembled a coconut college.
If Senator Kenny wants to examine an institution that is plagued with problems, he should spend a lot more time examining the upper chamber. Clean out your own corners first!
Hot debate. What do you think?
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In my humble oppinion the RCMP are in trouble because the politician turned a blind eye over the many years they have been operating in this way and have created department(s) to help them rather than to deal with the many issues within this government organization, creating the illusion of a police force without over sight, control or restrictions.
The RCMP are not the problem here itès the poor leadership we see in this country that has hurt this organazation.
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Useful RCMP reforms
Toronto Star
February 23, 2010
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police need to be better supervised, better staffed, better educated and more open to women and minority groups to regain public respect after a series of scandals that have battered the iconic force.
That’s the view from Sen. Colin Kenny and the other Liberal members of the Senate national security committee. They make a good case for reform. It’s a wonder that Conservative committee members couldn’t agree.
Kenny took the unusual step of issuing a Liberal “position paper” yesterday after failing to get the Conservatives to sign off on a joint report prior to prorogation. And because recent appointments have given the Conservatives a plurality in the Upper House, they likely have the votes to prevent any report critical of the government from ever emerging from the committee when Parliament resumes sitting.
All this raises the question of whether the Senate’s role of providing useful insights on the big issues of the day may be hobbled now that the Conservatives are in charge. But that’s a debate for another day.
On the immediate issue of fixing what one probe has called a “horribly broken” RCMP, the Liberals begin with a proposal for far stronger oversight. They say Ottawa should “move quickly” to set up a civilian agency – such as Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit – to review cases when RCMP officers are linked to deaths, serious injury or crimes. As well, Ottawa should consider letting the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which oversees CSIS, expand its mandate to include RCMP security activities.
The RCMP’s nearly 29,000 police and civilian staff should grow by 5,000, the senators urge. And the force should recruit more women (currently just 20 per cent of officers) and more visible minorities (6 per cent). Finally, the RCMP should hire recruits with university degrees and offer senior officers higher academic training.
It’s a pricey agenda, but one that addresses many of the problems plaguing the force. The government, which has been promising reform for years, ought to pay attention to the ideas rather than just dismiss them as unworthy because the senators are Liberals.