RCMP Watch

Iain Hunter, Victoria Times Colonist

When the Mounties gave the Disney folks the job of defining their image around the globe under a five-year contract in 1995, they should have known people might laugh at them.

Well, nobody in Canada should be laughing now. It’s sad how the force which did so much to help us develop as a nation in a peculiarly Canadian way has been brought so low.

Now there’s talk of subjecting the RCMP to an overhaul and some form of civilian oversight, as if the force is no longer fit to run its own affairs, enforce the law, and Maintiens le Droit across the land without direction.Sure, the Mounties have been censured for a lot lately — contributing to Maher Arar’s awful ordeal, showing total ineptness in preventing and investigating the Air India disaster, sending rookie members into the Mayerthorpe ambush. And individual Mounties have been charged with, or accused of, criminal offences. The Arar affair led to the resignation of RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

But the latest “scandal” to hit the RCMP is about mismanagement of the force’s pension fund and the way those who complained about it were treated by their superiors.

This sounds to me like something that might affect members of the force, but fascinate only chartered accountants or actuaries among the public. It sounds like the kind of thing the auditor general might devote a full chapter to in her annual report. And it sounds like the kind of thing that could be fixed by bureaucrats.

I get the feeling that resentment over Zaccardelli’s command style and his fancy boots is behind the outpouring of grievances. I get the feeling that a lot of officers who feel themselves superior didn’t like the guy.

I also don’t believe that all the blame being thrown at the RCMP — especially on the Air India file — is deserved. The unwillingness to take seriously the danger posed by Sikh extremism seems to have been a failing of all ranks in all organizations with responsibility to deal with it, right up to the federal cabinet of the day.

I sat through the McDonald Commission of Inquiry into RCMP wrongdoing in the late 1970s when the force was pretty well the only one with a mandate to protect national security.

Now there are 24 governments or agencies involved in national security. The McDonald commission’s recommendation to set up what became the Canadian Security Intelligence Service led to the mistrust, lack of co-operation and even jealousy between CSIS and the RCMP that the Arar and Air India inquiries show exist to a certain extent to this day.

Sure the Mounties bungled a lot of opportunities to prevent the Air India bombing, but so did CSIS, Transport Canada, External Affairs and other police organizations.

How, I wonder, can subjecting the RCMP to civilian oversight, as Solicitor General Stockwell Day seems keen to do, prevent future disasters?

It was a grand moment when former commissioner Norman Inkster calmly informed MPs during an appearance before a Commons committee in the 1980s that his force was investigating several of them for alleged criminal offences — to wit, misappropriating their expense allowances.

Only a few were charged subsequently, but the MPs went berserk. They even tried to pass a law putting them, in effect, above the law. But these were routine investigations by an independent national police force in response to complaints.

Can such a force remain as independent under civilian oversight imposed by the government? Where does oversight become direction? Does it review matters after the fact or become involved in day-to-day operations? And how does it improve transparency and increase public confidence without jeopardizing investigations in process and the integrity of the force?

The Mounties are a paramilitary police force because of their history. Their “best practices” code says that while adherence to policy is necessary to comply with the law, “it does not unduly impede the exercise of discretion, sound judgment and calculated risk.”

If we’re to have a national police force capable of combatting crime and enforcing national security, it needs to be modernized, refocused and out of the business of policing small towns and patrolling provincial highways.

We should put someone in charge who, with the aid of the task force now being set up, can reform the force from within. We don’t need another time-wasting public inquiry.

Neither do we need a committee of busybodies, with agendas that have little to do with policing and national security, telling the Mounties what to do.

Or we’ll start laughing at them again.