RCMP Watch

Jim Brown, Canadian Press

The RCMP largely ignored the expertise of local police in dealing with the Vancouver Sikh community in the aftermath of the 1985 Air India bombing, a public inquiry has been told.

Don McLean, a former municipal constable who spent two years as a liaison officer with the community, testified yesterday that he wasn’t impressed by some of the Mounties’ investigative techniques in the weeks following the attack.

“They used your usual police methods of going and knocking on doors and presenting themselves as police officers,” McLean told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major. “There was a lot of resistance to that from the community. They would prefer to talk to us.”

McLean said he worked no more than a month and a half with the RCMP after Flight 182 was downed, advising the federal force on the intelligence he had gathered and the confidential sources he had developed prior to the attack.

But he said he soon became no more than a token figure in the joint task force investigating the bombing and felt his presence was mainly symbolic — to allow the RCMP to claim it was utilizing local knowledge.

“I became the Uncle Tom, so to speak … they continued on with their own investigation in their own direction.”