(Globe and Mail Editorial) – As early as 1970 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau knew, or should have known, that members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police might be committing crimes. The testimony of the former head of the RCMP security service, John Starnes, before the McDonald royal commission into RCMP wrong-doing, now released by the commission, has finally revealed this.
The Prime Minister has been stonewalling.
Mr. Trudeau was chairman of the cabinet priorities and planning committee. This committee received a report from a group including representatives of the RCMP which pointed out that a royal commission on the security service had recognized in 1969 that “security and intelligence work may require those engaged in it to undertake activities that are contrary to the law,” and that a solution was needed to this “inherent contradiction.”
This report was discussed, with Mr. Starnes present, at two meetings of the cabinet committee headed by Mr. Trudeau.
A meeting of the full cabinet on Dec. 10, 1970, decided that it wanted a study of this “contradiction” problem as well as of “the atmosphere in which the law was administered.”
Mr. Trudeau was also chairman of the cabinet committee on security and intelligence. On Dec. 16, 1970, this committee received a second report from the RCMP group, which said that if the FLQ was to be countered, efforts to penetrate FLQ cells would have to be made, and “the greatest bar to effective penetration … is the problem raised by having members of the RCMP, or paid agents, commit serious crimes in order to establish their bona fides with the members of the organizations they are seeking to infiltrate.”
Mr. Trudeau deferred discussion of this report, and it never came back to the committee’s agenda.
Yet for the past three years, as evidence of RCMP illegalities has been given in courts, before inquiries in Quebec and Edmonton, before the McDonald royal commission, ministers of the Crown have kept repeating, We did not know, we did not know, we did not know.
The RCMP has been left to carry the can .…
On various occasions about various incidents, various ministers including the Prime Minister said that they did not know, should not know, were referring all charges of law-breaking to the McDonald commission, would cure matters by making illegal police activities legal.
It was a cowardly performance which left the Mounties standing alone.
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