RCMP Watch

Greg McArthur - Globe and Mail
RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli has overseen criminal investigations that didn’t hesitate to wade into Canadian political spheres, whether those probes targeted journalists, cabinet ministers — or even if they fell during an election.
But now it is politics that is quickly closing in on him.
As Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government weigh his conflicting testimony before a Commons committee, Mr. Zaccardelli’s six-year reign — filled with unresolved plots and political intrigue, will be not be left out of their final decision.

He arrived in Canada in the 1950s from the village of Prezza, Italy. As a boy in Montreal, he delivered newspapers and took part-time jobs in restaurants. After attending Loyola College, he became one of the few non-Canadian-born recruits to join the RCMP.

It was in New Brunswick, where Mr. Zaccardelli was head of criminal operations, that the reality of police work would become clear. It’s muddy, and the mud sticks.

During his tenure on the East Coast allegations began to surface about the Kingsclear Youth Training School near Fredericton. A school guard was convicted of sexually assaulting young boys, but many residents claimed in a civil lawsuit that they were abused by an RCMP officer and that the force covered it up.
Mr. Zaccardelli called the alleged cover-up a sham — “There were three major investigations, there was an inquiry,” he said in 2004.
A Quebec judge questioned the RCMP when he dismissed all the charges against François Beaudoin, former president of the Business Development Bank of Canada. The RCMP raided Mr. Beaudoin’s home, chalet and golf club in 2001. Mr. Beaudoin had refused to grant a loan extension to a hotel in the riding of former prime minister Jean Chrétien. Mr. Justice André Denis, in throwing out charges against Mr. Beaudoin, noted “the ferocity and unkindness with which [Mr. Beaudoin] was treated in this affair.”

Former National Post reporter Andrew McIntosh was also served with a search warrant by the RCMP after he wrote stories that questioned whether Mr. Chrétien tried to influence the bank’s decision.

An RCMP raid on the home and office of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neil generated more recent headlines. Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushney has admonished Mr. Zaccardelli’s force for the search, which she called an attempt to use Ms. O’Neill to find who leaked classified documents in the case of Mr. Arar.

However,it is the RCMP probe into how the private sector learned in advance about a Liberal government income-trust announcement that may affect history the most.

In the middle of last January’s federal campaign, the commissioner faxed a letter to the office of an NDP MP confirming that the RCMP had launched an investigation into the leak — perhaps the tipping point for the faltering campaign of former prime minister Paul Martin.