Lorne Gunter (National Post) – I can’t for the life of me figure out why Conservative Senators would refuse, before prorogation, to endorse a report by the Senate national security committee on how to fix the RCMP. At the very least, they could have attached their own minority opinion.
Both the Mounties and their image are in bad need of a fix, which is something one would expect the Tories to get behind, particularly considering that much of the rot in our national police force occurred before their watch. It’s a good cause and they don’t have to take the blame for the underlying problem.
One Conservative Senator told me they balked at signing off on Liberal Senator Colin Kenny’s Red Serge Revival, released Monday, because it is “pure grandstanding.” The figures in it are “fabricated.” And the suggestion that the Mounties should come under more strident civilian oversight would “cripple the force’s ability to do police work.”
Maybe that’s true, but I suspect it’s spin.
Perhaps the Tories did find Mr. Kenny’s analysis shoddy and partisan. Colin Kenny is a politician, so, of course, he is not above playing games to embarrass the Tories and boost his own Liberal party’s fortunes. But that would be out of character for Mr. Kenny, who was just as willing to slam his own party when it was in office over its policy failings on military matters, national security and policing.
There was a time under prime minister Jean Chretien when Mr. Kenny seemed like the only non-peacenik, non-flower child in the Liberal caucus. When our troops were short good, modern equipment under the previous Liberal government, Mr. Kenny said so. When our national intelligence agencies needed new ways to deal with terror threats, Mr. Kenny championed them. Indeed, for a while he looked like the most hawkish Parliamentarian on either side of the aisle.
I can’t say I am impressed with everything in his “policy paper” — because Parliament is not sitting and because Tory Senators would not consent to a joint release during prorogation, Red Serge Revival is not officially a Senate “report.” But if Colin Kenny is behind it, it deserves at least serious consideration. He’s earned that must for all his years of dogged work to make Canada safer.
I don’t, for instance, think that increasing the percentage of women and minorities in the ranks of the RCMP–a move Mr. Kenny advocates — will do anything to restore its reputation. In fact, it could further tarnish the force in the eyes of Canadians.
The RCMP’s problems are not based on how the force is perceived by feminists and new Canadians. Its problems, rather, stem in part from the force becoming too politically correct, which comes from it being too much under the control of politicians.
The colour of an officer’s skin or the makeup of his or her chromosomes has nothing whatever to do with good, impartial police work, and Canadians know it. So, if you take a police force that Canadians already think is too much in the thrall of the government of the day and make it even more an instrument of social policy, you risk raising Canadians’ suspicions, not lowering them.
What the Mounties need is a new accountability and independence born of a new internal culture.
Every observer of the force in the past two decades, Mr. Kenny included, has noted its “broken” culture. The RCMP has lost the sense of what it is.
The main reason: it is now part of the Ottawa bureaucracy, a branch of the Public Safety department and not an independent police force accountable to Parliament and a strong civilian oversight board. The Mounties, at least at the upper ranks, have adopted the worst habits of the public service — secrecy, defensiveness, paralysis against change– while also understanding they and their officers are largely immune from discipline.
Back when the Mounties were more at arm’s length from the politicians and bureaucrats, they moved swiftly to discipline their own in the name of duty. Now they resist meaningful internal discipline, just as all good civil servants do.
For all of its alleged flaws, Mr. Kenny’s report at least acknowledges that a cultural shift must be part of any reform.
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