RCMP Watch

David Ljunggren, Reuters

Royal Canadian Mounted Police management and culture will be overhauled to address major flaws at the force, which twice in the past year has been damned by investigations , the government said on Monday.

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day made clear to reporters that some senior Mounties would be removed but brushed aside calls from opposition legislators for a full public inquiry, saying there was no time to waste.
“We have enough information now that we can act and that is what we are going to do. We are taking action,” he said.

Day said he was setting up a task force to recommend ways of transforming the RCMP, which has 26,000 employees and an annual budget of C$3 billion. The task force will issue its report by the end of this year.

Last week an independent investigation into misuse of the Mounties’ insurance and pension funds concluded that the culture inside the Mounties was “horribly broken” and said regular members had little faith in their managers.

The probe — run by lawyer David Brown — put much of the blame on what it called the outdated and autocratic management style of former Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

Zaccardelli quit last December over the case of Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, who was deported by U.S. agents to Syria, where he was tortured, based partly on false information from the Mounties.

An acting commissioner is now in charge, although Ottawa is due to announce a permanent replacement for Zaccardelli soon.

Brown also criticized other senior officials. Asked about their fate, Day replied: “I can tell you that the commissioner is also seized with those issues and I would just ask that you watch personnel developments as time moves along.”

Opposition legislators insisted on a full inquiry, saying Brown could not have properly reviewed the evidence — which included 400,000 electronic documents and 35,000 pieces of paper — after starting work in late March.

David Christopherson of the left-leaning New Democrats told Parliament that Brown had not looked into new allegations of fraud involving the pension fund.

“How can this minister (Day) claim to have all the answers when he hasn’t even asked all the questions?” he asked. “This is a minister who is clearly afraid of the truth.”

Day said there had already been enough inquiries involving problems at the RCMP over the last few years. Last September, a probe into what happened to Arar castigated the Mounties for incompetence and dishonesty.