Meddling with the Mounties

Adam McDowell (National Post) – A senior Mountie is transferred out of the job of running a gun registry he supports, ostensibly to take French lessons. The country is told it must continue to wait for a detailed RCMP report that is expected to declare the gun registry sound at last; six months after the English version was finished, the report still cannot be released because the French version is apparently still in the works. The British Columbia arm of the RCMP drops out of a press conference at the last minute, at which the force would have solidified its support of a safe drug injection site that the government opposes.

Does the Royal Canadian Mounted Police genuinely have a lot of trouble with French and press conferences? Or are Stephen Harper’s Conservatives meddling in the federal police force’s affairs to an inappropriate degree?

The Opposition is convinced all of the above came as a result of political pressure, insisting that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews must be pressuring RCMP Commissioner William Elliott to bend to the government’s agenda, renewing calls for an overhaul of the RCMP’s structure.

“I think whether it’s in the case of Cheliak being reassigned, the suppression of this [gun registry] report, or the Insite safe injection site [matter], not only does there appear to be interference, but there doesn’t seem to be any other plausible explanation for what’s going on,” said Liberal Public Safety Critic Mark Holland. “It’s incredibly inappropriate.”

“I think either directly or indirectly, the pressure is coming from Cabinet or Minister Toews’s office,” said Joe Comartin, Public Safety Critic for the NDP. “The difficulty of pointing to specifics is that all of this is going on behind closed doors in the backrooms. So what you end up doing is looking at patterns.

“I don’t think this is being cynical or paranoid,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Toews reiterated the government’s position on the gun registry issues. First, Chief Superintendant Marty Cheliak was moved out of the gun registry portfolio at the RCMP’s discretion, and second, the gun registry report is not ready yet (possibly because no French version has been approved). The ministry had no comment about its involvement in the RCMP’s Insite stance.

To put an end to suggestions of political meddling in the RCMP, Mr. Holland said, the force should be made more independent and more accountable at the same time.

“Public confidence is really being shaken in the RCMP,” he said. “If we don’t make these kinds of reforms, if the government continues to meddle in certain affairs and ignore the issue of oversight and structural changes, then it could fatally harm the RCMP.”

In the meantime, is it possible for a Public Safety minister to pressure the RCMP commissioner, given the relationship between those roles? Yes, said Paul Kennedy, a former RCMP public complaints commissioner and previously a senior bureaucrat at Public Safety who was involved in high-level meetings between the RCMP and Public Safety before leaving the ministry in 2005. However, “it’s pretty hard to prove anything,” since any conversations could have happened face-to-face, he said in an interview this week.

(Mr. Kennedy was not renewed as complaints commissioner last fall. That was viewed as a political dismissal; the Tories responded that three consecutive terms in the job was enough.)

It would have surprised Mr. Kennedy to see a minister order the removal of an RCMP superintendent from his post as head of the Firearms Program.

“I would never have envisaged a discussion of that nature occurring at that time, but I have no knowledge of the current government and its practices,” he said. Ordinarily, “if a man is appointed, it’s something that the RCMP is responsible for managing. Whether things have changed and become a bit more pointed, I’m not sure. I know that this is a government that has a firm position on the gun registry.”

Messrs. Elliott and Toews have denied that there was any political interference in the decision to move Chief Supt. Cheliak out of his job running the Canadian Firearms Program. Mr. Toews’s staff declined a National Post interview request for this story.

But as innuendoes and accusations of political meddling in the RCMP raise questions about how the RCMP’s political masters exercise control over it, calls for a new way of governing the force have returned.

In the eight provinces in which the RCMP acts as the provincial police, it answers to civilian advisory boards similar to the ones many municipal police forces have. Meanwhile, unlike in Canada, several English-speaking democracies including the United States and the United Kingdom, national law enforcement agencies report directly to dedicated parliamentary committees.

The Public Safety Committee can delve into Mountie matters, but in the absence of an official oversight body that oversees the RCMP directly and with enough secrecy to handle sensitive police matters, the relationship between the Mounties and cabinet is ad hoc, and depends on politics and personalities.

The rules delineate just one clear no-go zone. The Canadian legal tradition, going back to English law, establishes that politicians cannot meddle in criminal investigations. “There can be no interference, influence or anything in that regard by the minister or any other politician in regard to that activity. That’s verboten,” Mr. Kennedy said.

On the other hand, consensus holds that elected politicians must set the broad policy agenda for the RCMP and other federal law enforcement agencies, because ultimately they do the bidding of the Canadian people.

“Clearly there can be direction provided by the [Public Safety] minister to the [RCMP] commissioner,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Because if you look at the RCMP Act itself, the minister is responsible for the RCMP as an institution, and the minister is the one who is accountable to Parliament and to the public.”

Neither the gun registry file nor the Insite reports are criminal matters. Therefore, Mr. Kennedy said, instructions from Cabinet on these files could well have been appropriate. “Maybe it was fair game.”

Mr. Kennedy believes that in the Insite and gun registry questions, “the real issue is someone preventing facts from being properly collected, marshalled and put out,” whether that someone is from inside or outside the RCMP.

“You don’t like the thought that your police are in constant, direct control by political people. That’s what you have in countries that are dictatorships. It doesn’t lead to healthy democracy when that goes on,” said governance consultant Tim Plumptre, who prepared a report for Toronto lawyer David Brown’s task force on reforming the RCMP in 2007.

When presented to Parliament, the Brown report recommended creating a corporate-style board of governors to watch over the RCMP, as had been suggested several times before.

The task force imagined such a board to act in part as a layer of management between politicians and Mountie brass. The RCMP commissioner would be responsible to the board, who would in turn be responsible to the public safety minister and, through him, to Parliament.

Ivan Court, president of the Canadian Association of Police Boards (and also Mayor of Saint John) renewed the call for a civilian oversight board for the RCMP this week. “That’s a safeguard. it guarantees that there is accountability in this country,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Kennedy noted that the Brown task force’s primary concern was to sort out who would pay RCMP officers, not to establish a buffer between the force and politicians. “I didn’t see that as playing that kind of a role,” he said.

The authors also wrote that the RCMP should be set up as a separate entity that would employ its officers directly, managing its own human resources within financial limits established by Parliament. (Legislation presently gives the Treasury Board the authority to set RCMP pay grades and number of officers per rank.)

Regardless of motive, “The government didn’t follow through on the Brown report. It’s just sat there gathering dust ever since,” Mr. Plumptre, the founder of the Ottawa-based think tank Institute on Governance and now a consultant, complained this week.

“The government commissioned it, asked for advice, got the advice, and then took no action on it. Perhaps they wish they had, in view of the controversy that’s been going on recently with regard to the RCMP.”

Mr. Plumptre wrote in 2007 that an RCMP board would mean “less likelihood of interference by the minister or ministerial staff in operational decisions.” And blaming a board could allow the government of the day to avoid wearing certain controversies.

Setting up a board to manage the Mounties would not put to rest all questions of political interference, Mr. Kennedy cautioned. A board “does not cut out the role, as I saw, of the minister and the commissioner,” who would still meet regularly.

Mr. Plumptre said the existence of governing boards has not stopped the Harper government from imposing its will upon arm’s-length government departments, such as the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and Statistics Canada.

“There is a temptation and a tendency for governments to step in when they don’t like what’s going on,” he said.

Mr. Comartin recalled that under the Martin government, all parties had agreed to pass legislation to establish parliamentary committees to oversee federal law enforcement agencies including the RCMP, CSIS and the Canadian Border Services Agency. When elected, the NDP MP said, the Conservatives changed their minds and the bill died.

Had it passed, Mr. Comartin said, “You wouldn’t get what you had with Insite, you wouldn’t get what happened to [Chief Supt.] Cheliak, you wouldn’t get this report being sat on.

“There would be clear policies … which is in accordance with the democracy values that we have.”

Politicized Policing

The sticky question of how to keep politics and the RCMP separate goes right back to the force’s beginnings. In 1876, George Arthur French, the second-ever commissioner of the North West Mounted Police (the forerunner of the RCMP), resigned in frustration with Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal government. Ottawa had repeatedly refused him permission to travel back to the capital from headquarters in Alberta to argue for improvements to the force that the government considered too expensive.

Three (much) more recent controversies have the opposition parties convinced that the Harper government is politicizing policing:

— A magazine article last week accused the RCMP of bowing to Conservative whims by not supporting a safe drug injection site in Vancouver. According to a report in Maclean’s magazine, the RCMP abruptly cancelled a press conference last fall at which the force would have renounced its earlier objections to Insite and instead stood by it, thus risking a rift between the federal government and its police force. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives oppose the Insite project, and have been trying since 2008 to shut it down (it has been kept open by court order).

The director of Insite told the magazine that senior RCMP officers told him they were ordered to cancel the conference. As well, the Maclean’s article says officers commissioned what the magazine called “dubious reports” that undermined the centre’s work, which had been lauded in medical journals.

— Parliament continues to wait for an evaluation report on the national firearms registry, which the RCMP administers. The Liberals say the report was completed in February but the Mounties have delayed releasing it; the RCMP says it is still being translated into French, as required. “I think we’re up to them having one word per day as they’re translating it,” joked Liberal Public Safety Critic Mark Holland. The report is expected to declare many of the registry’s problems solved. The opposition believes the RCMP have been leaned on to delay the report until after a Sept. 22 vote in the House of Commons on whether the registration of long guns should be scrapped (a notion the Conservatives support). However, the report is now expected to be released next week, in advance of that vote. Rumour on the Hill has it that the report will make specific mention of political interference on the gun registry file.

— Earlier this month, Chief Superintendent Marty Cheliak, a supporter of the national gun registry, was shuffled out of his post as Firearms Program director and into French language training. RCMP Commissioner William Elliott angrily denied reports suggesting he was removed due to Conservative political pressure, calling such claims “fiction.’’