RCMP watchdog still pushing for new powers.

Norma Greenaway, Ottawa (Canwest News Service) – Paul Kennedy has embraced the snail as a symbol for his persistent campaign to push the federal government into creating an independent RCMP watchdog with real teeth.

An elegant Murano glass sculpture of the slow-moving, spiral-shelled mollusk, a gift from his wife Judy during a recent trip to Italy, has become a treasured addition to his office decor.

Kennedy, the head of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, also opened his latest annual report with a phrase taken from the writings of Charles Haddon Spurgeon – one of Britain’s best-known 19th-century preachers – which Kennedy clearly finds comforting.

“By perseverance the snail reached the ark,” it reads.

Or, so Kennedy hopes. After all, it has been more than 2 1/2 years since Dennis O’Connor, the judge who came down hard on the RCMP in his report on the Maher Arar affair, recommended the CPC be renamed and restructured into a muscular, independent body with the power to review all RCMP national security activities, as well as the activities of the Canada Border Services Agency.

The current CPC is a toothless wonder by most accounts because it has to rely on voluntary input from the RCMP for its largely complaints-driven investigations.

By contrast, the proposed new review body would have access to all RCMP files and also have the power to initiate investigations and to subpoena documents and compel testimony from any individual or entity it deems of possible use to its work. O’Connor gave the new body a rather unwieldy moniker: Independent Complaints and National Security Review Agency for the RCMP.

O’Connor also called for stricter oversight of the national security activities of four other agencies, including the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre, and the federal departments of Foreign Affairs, Transport and Immigration. He suggested the job be assigned to the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which currently oversees the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Since O’Connor’s report in December 2006, his call for increased independent oversight of the RCMP and the country’s national security apparatus has been echoed in a handful of other reports, among them two from parliamentary committees.

The Conservative government has greeted the recommendations with positive rhetoric. But it has not yet proposed oversight legislation, and critics are losing patience.

“We are at the point where this is no longer acceptable,” Kennedy said in an interview.

“Two and a half years of rhetoric just isn’t going to cut it anymore,” added Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International’s Canadian branch.

The inaction means Kennedy, a lawyer and senior bureaucrat who took the CPC post in October 2005 thinking the job would last no more than 18 months, has been reappointed three times to one-year terms.

At the time of his initial appointment, the former Liberal government had appointed O’Connor and asked him, as part of his mandate, to craft a new review mechanism for the RCMP that, Kennedy said, he thought would be accepted and implemented in good time.

Two elections and almost four years later, Kennedy is still pleading the case for effective RCMP oversight at every opportunity, and said he doesn’t want to leave the job until legislation is in place.

“I can’t give up,” he said, arguing a credible review system is critical to erasing the force’s “trust deficit” with the Canadian public. “The people need it and want it.”

In his report, O’Connor backed Kennedy’s take on the CPC’s impotence. “I conclude that the difficulties that the CPC has encountered in obtaining access to information from the RCMP can undermine the effectiveness of its review function and public confidence in the effectiveness of the review,” he wrote.

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan’s explanation for the delay in proposing a “new comprehensive oversight mechanism” is that the government wants to wait for the recommendations from the inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing under former Supreme Court justice John Major.

Major’s five-volume report, which is expected to advocate changes to Canada’s security and intelligence operations, still needs to be copy-edited and translated and is at least two months away from being released, according to the latest estimates.

Although Major’s final report is taking longer to deliver than the government had hoped, Van Loan said, the findings are needed to see whether draft legislation, already on its way, needs to be beefed up or modified in some way.

Considering the inquiry deals with the “most serious terrorist event” in Canadian history, there’s no point in introducing legislation that hasn’t taken Major’s findings into account, Van Loan said in an interview.

“We could effectively almost roll forward with the new oversight mechanisms right now,” Van Loan said. “The preference is to make sure that we respect the commitment that was made to have an Air India inquiry occur and make its findings meaningful.”

Opposition MPs said there is no excuse for delaying legislation because the recipe for restoring the credibility of the RCMP is already well known.

“Why hold up all the action for yet another inquiry? It’s preposterous,” said Liberal MP Mark Holland, the party’s public safety critic.

Don Davies, the NDP public safety critic, dismissed the Air India excuse as a “cop-out” and said, “I don’t see what that’s going to add that could change any of the fundamental recommendations that we’ve got several times now. ”

Martin Rudner, an Ottawa-based national security expert, disagreed, and said it makes sense to wait for Major’s report.

Rudner, a professor emeritus at Carleton University, was a member of a panel that advised O’Connor while he was writing his report on a new review mechanism for the RCMP.

Rudner said Major is likely to recommend significant changes to the architecture of the security and intelligence community in a bid to ensure it’s better designed and equipped to tackle terrorism. “You want to fit the oversight program into the new architecture,” Rudner said.

Amnesty International’s Neve contended, however, that the slowness in enacting an O’Connor-style oversight has left an unacceptable gap in the system for too long.

For example, he said, Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian who was detained and stranded in Sudan for six years, could have turned to that oversight body when he got home in a bid to get to the bottom of what role, if any, Canadian officials or agencies played in his ordeal.

“Instead, he comes back to the same black hole of review and oversight that Maher Arar and Abdullah Almalki and all the others did,” Neve said.

Neve was referring to the experience of Almalki and two other Arab-Canadian men, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad El Maati, whose brutal treatment in Syria became the subject of a federal inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci. In the end, Iacobucci concluded the actions of Canadian officials from the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Foreign Affairs Department contributed indirectly to the three men in Syria.

Critics also point to the case of Robert Dziekanski, the Polish immigrant who died after he was Tasered by RCMP officers at the Vancouver International Airport, as a painful reminder of why strengthened oversight of the RCMP can’t wait.

“The longer the government dithers, or whatever they are doing behind closed doors, the number of cases of injustice that have no obvious and immediate recourse only continue to grow,” Neve said.