RCMP Watch

Former RCMP commissioner Norm Inkster has acknowledged the force put a positive spin on its relations with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and soft-pedalled conflicts with the spy agency during a 1992 review of the Air India bombing.

“It didn’t serve any organization well, whether the RCMP or CSIS, to be criticizing one another,” Inkster told a public inquiry yesterday.

“It would just bring harm to their relationship. … So we wanted to put a positive front on it as best we could, while recognizing we had very different mandates.”
At issue was a study by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the watchdog group that monitors CSIS, that examined the turf wars that erupted between police and security officers after the 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 with the loss of 329 lives.

One of the key issues in the 1992 review was the erasure by CSIS of hundreds of pre-bombing wiretap tapes of Sikh extremists who became the key suspects in the post-bombing criminal investigation.
The review criticized the security service for the erasures but also said it was unlikely any important evidence was lost — a conclusion challenged by frontline RCMP investigators who thought the tapes could have provided valuable leads.

Inkster testified yesterday that, even before he became commissioner, he was among those who argued that CSIS ought to be retaining anything of potential use for a criminal prosecution.

When he was informed at one point that the spy agency was still erasing tapes — even after the bombing had occurred — Inkster said he put in an immediate call to then-CSIS director Ted Finn.

“I said ‘Ted, if that is continuing it has to stop.’ ”

At the time, Inkster was deputy commissioner for criminal operations, the No. 2 post in the force. He took over the top job from Robert Simmonds in 1987 — and his public views on the wiretap tapes started to get less clear.

As commissioner, Inkster told a parliamentary committee he didn’t think the tape erasures had hindered the RCMP investigation. But he fine-tuned his words Thursday, saying what he really meant was that the loss of the tapes didn’t halt the investigation.

“We’re going to do the best we can with what we have,” he said.

“But it would certainly have been beneficial to have all the tapes so we could listen to them and determine their relevance to the investigation.”

Inkster also recalled that, by the time of the 1992 review, he and Reid Morden — a career diplomat who had succeeded Finn as director of CSIS — were trying to patch up the tattered relations between their agencies.

“We undertook to do everything we possibly could to co-operate as fully as we could. No one wanted to say anything to upset that relationship.”

Norm Boxall, a lawyer for the families of the Air India victims, agreed it was important to mend fences between CSIS and the RCMP. But he contended the “homogenized view” of things presented to the review committee actually undermined its work.