(CBC News) – The federal government is not on track to meet a fast-approaching deadline for reforming the RCMP, as laid out in 2007 by a government-appointed task force.
The report, written by task force leader David Brown, called on the government to make three fundamental changes to the RCMP’s structure and governance by the end of 2009.
The changes include making the RCMP a separate and more independent entity from government, giving the force a civilian board of management, and establishing an independent commission for complaints and oversight.
In an email to CBC News, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan said that before tackling Brown’s recommendations he wants to consider a report from Justice John Major, who led the inquiry into the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182. Major’s report is said to be complete, but no date has been set for its release.
“The government views the recommendations of the Major report as important before finalizing overall changes to oversight of the RCMP,” Van Loan said in his email.
Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland said this is just a delay tactic by the government.
‘Excuse to do nothing’
“I think once they’re finished waiting for Justice Major, they’ll find some new inquiry, some new report as an excuse to do nothing,” Holland said. “And in the meantime, it leaves us vulnerable to further scandals and tragedies.”
Holland said the government already has plenty of studies and reports on the RCMP, including that of Justice Dennis O’Connor, who called for civilian oversight of the Mounties in his report on the case of Maher Arar, who was detained by the U.S. and deported to Syria, where he says he was tortured.
Brown refused to comment on the delay in enacting his task force’s recommendations.
Brown’s report, called “Rebuilding the Trust,” made almost 50 recommendations on everything from workload and safety to ethics. Brown, a Toronto lawyer, said the government would have to make the three fundamental changes to the RCMP’s structure and governance first in order to fully implement all of the recommendations.
Rapid implementation ‘essential’
“The task force believes that a rapid but orderly implementation of our recommendations is essential,” Brown said at the time. He said the three big changes should be “fully in place and operating no later than Dec. 31, 2009.”
Norman Inkster, a member of the Brown task force, said he’s disappointed the changes are taking so long.
“Reports like ours carry influence and weight only for a period of time after they have been tabled,” said Inkster, who was commissioner of the RCMP from 1987 to 1994 and president of Interpol from 1992 to1994.
“And then you run the risk of it becoming business of usual, and it loses that momentum that is necessary to get people’s heads around the recommendations that were made. And I think that maybe the passage of time takes some of the edge off that.”
Brown’s task force spent five months interviewing more than 2,000 RCMP members across the country. Members talked of understaffing, chronic fatigue, equipment shortages and management structures that haven’t worked effectively for years.
The task force was set up after a 2007 report on the RCMP’s scandal-plagued pension fund recommended a review of the overall structure of the federal police force. That previous report was also headed by Brown.
Mounties cite ‘complexity’
RCMP assistant commissioner Keith Clark insisted Brown’s work is not going stale.
“It’s simply a case of the complexity of the files. A lot of work has been done — work started immediately,” said Clark, who heads the RCMP change management team, created to help implement aspects of the Brown report.
Clark said the RCMP has made great strides in how it disciplines and promotes employees. He also said vacancies are way down because the force now pays bonuses to experienced members, and senior staff receive more rigorous management training. Clark said the Mounties are also making inroads in cutting bureaucracy, especially the administrative burden on front-line members.
As for the proposed structural changes, Clark said: “It would have been nice if we had have been able to get to a point that we’re at now sooner. But the reality is it’s a very complicated part of our transformation.”
He added that those changes require legislation and are up to the government, not the RCMP.
Meanwhile, some are growing impatient.
Mike Webster, a psychologist who worked with the RCMP for more than 30 years, said his relationship with the force broke down after he publicly commented on the death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport.
Webster recently wrote a paper entitled “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Organizational Psychopathy,” in which he suggested the RCMP should be more independent of government and its members should be allowed to choose whether they want to unionize. These suggestions mirror recommendations in the Brown report.
Webster also said the RCMP should get out of contract policing for provinces, territories and municipalities, and should scrap its paramilitary structure.
“You want to save the RCMP? Then you’re going to have to do something drastic,” he said. “Puttering around is not going to get it done. It’s not going to restore the public confidence.”
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