another kick at the can
Post
30/03/07, Editorial, Accountability and the RCMP, (Source).
29/03/07, Timeline: RCMP scandals and setbacks since 2006, (Source).
30/03/07, Daniel Leblanc, Another gust in growing Mountie gale, (Source).
30/03/07, Jeff Sallot & Daniel Leblanc, RCMP faces twin probes in alleged pension fraud, (Source).
28/03/07, Brian Laghi & Oliver Moore, Mounties allege fraud in pension management, (Source).
30/03/07, Greg McArthur, MPs probe case of controversial RCMP agent, (Source).
29/03/07, Kady O'Malley & Chris Selley, RCMP scandal deepens, (Source).
30/03/07, Editorial, Accountability and the RCMP, (Back).
The disturbing allegations of an RCMP pension scandal made at a Commons committee this week are a natural extension of the many disasters of the force's recent past. They appear to reflect the same endemic weaknesses: poor leadership, unsound judgment and a lack of accountability. Goodwill toward the Mounties the public still has aplenty; but confidence, not much.
The big job ahead is to restore proper leadership and insist on accountability. And, of course, to get to the bottom of what went wrong and why in the Mounties' handling of fraud and abuse allegations related to the way it managed its pension plans. That will be the job both of an investigator appointed by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and, separately, of the Commons public accounts committee. Why, for instance, did then-commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli kill a criminal probe into the allegations four years ago and order an internal audit instead? And why, when the matter was ultimately referred to the Ottawa Police Service, did the investigation (which produced no criminal charges) last just long enough that no internal disciplinary charges could be laid under a statute of limitations? A coincidence? And why did the lead investigator from the Ottawa police report directly to an assistant commissioner of the RCMP? "This did not give the investigation an appearance of independence," federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser wrote last fall after probing the matter.
Trust us, the RCMP seems to be saying. On the evidence, Canadians shouldn't. Not blindly. At the Commons public safety committee yesterday, MPs considered the disturbing tale, revealed in The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen last week, of an RCMP informant paid hundreds of thousands of dollars mostly for tainted or false information; the informant went on to commit homicide, but his identity is protected by law. Public scrutiny, not trust, is what the RCMP needs.
Legitimate public doubts about the national force will be reinforced by this week's spectacle: senior Mounties crying from the heart before the public accounts committee about the lack of trustworthiness of RCMP leadership. Retired sergeant Ron Lewis told the committee that in looking into pension-fund irregularities he was "met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies. The person who orchestrated most of the cover-up was Commissioner Zaccardelli." (That allegation has not been proven in court. Mr. Zaccardelli denies a cover-up occurred.)
Under Mr. Zaccardelli, the RCMP acted atrociously in the Maher Arar case. Under Mr. Zaccardelli, the Mounties may have tipped the last federal election toward the Conservative Party by announcing a criminal investigation, mid-campaign, into alleged security leaks in the Liberal finance minister's office. Mr. Zaccardelli is no longer the commissioner -- he resigned after changing his testimony about Mr. Arar before the Commons security committee -- but questions remain about how deep the problems go in the senior management of the RCMP.
An RCMP that loses the faith of its rank-and-file members will not be trusted by the Canadian public, either. The two pension investigations may show how deep the rot went, and point to how the national police force may be rescued from its misbegotten leaders.
29/03/07, Timeline: RCMP scandals and setbacks since 2006, (Back).
• January 2006: Former B.C. Mountie Gary Stevens is sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting two teenage girls while off duty. Mr. Stevens pleaded guilty to attacking a girl in Vancouver in the early 1990s, and a girl in Terrace in 2004. He retired from the Kitimat detachment after he was charged.
• January 2006: Former RCMP Const. Nancy Sulz wins a $950,000 lawsuit for long-term harassment she suffered under her former detachment commander at the Merritt, B.C. detachment.
• February 2006: B.C. Crown prosecutors announce they won't lay charges against the RCMP constable who shot and killed Kevin St. Arnaud. The 29-year-old welder was killed Dec. 19, 2004, after a bungled robbery attempt of a local pharmacy. He was highly intoxicated at the time. Const. Ryan Sheremetta, a Vanderhoof RCMP officer in his mid-20s who at the time of the shooting had about two years experience, had reasonable grounds to believe he needed to use deadly force to protect himself from Mr. St. Arnaud, officials said. Family members maintain there's no way that Mr. St. Arnaud, unarmed and so drunk he could barely stand, could have meaningfully threatened Const. Sheremetta. After a year of waiting for the investigation to conclude, the news was “like a kick in the teeth,” Mr. St. Arnaud's mother, Dolores Young, said.
• May 2006: After a seven-month fight to clear his name, Ontario finance minister Greg Sorbara is vindicated when a Superior Court judge rules that the RCMP did not have enough evidence to accuse him of criminal wrongdoing in an ongoing criminal investigation into Royal Group Technologies Inc. Mr. Sorbara became swept up in the Royal Group case as a former director of the Woodbridge, Ont., building-products company and chairman of its audit committee. He resigned from the board in 2003 when he was sworn into cabinet. The RCMP named Mr. Sorbara in the search warrants over two property deals in the mid-1990s between Royal Group and Sorbara Group, his family's private company. In a blistering condemnation, Judge Nordheimer accused the RCMP of not doing enough investigative work before seeking the search warrants, and of tainting certain transactions to bolster their case before the judge who signed the warrants. “I am left with the nagging concern that the application for a search warrant, at least as it related to [Mr. Sorbara], was very much premature,” Judge Nordheimer said. The judge also said the RCMP provided no evidence to back up their description of the two property deals as unusual.
• July 2006: Two young officers are killed during a police chase and shoot-out in northern Saskatchewan. The RCMP says little about the deaths of constables Marc Bourdages and Robin Cameron, and the attempted murder of a third Mountie. The agency refuses repeated requests for a timeline of events July 7, but corrects earlier statements about the time of the shooting after the Globe and Mail reports the service didn't summon an ambulance until an hour after the officers were shot. The time of the shooting is revised without explanation from about 9:15 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.
• September 2006: Crown prosecutors decide no criminal charges will be laid in the controversial shooting death of a B.C. sawmill worker by a rookie RCMP constable during a jailhouse altercation. The death of 22-year-old Ian Bush in October, 2005, after his arrest over a minor incident involving an opened beer can at the local hockey rink, caused a furor in the tightly knit community of Houston, 300 kilometres west of Prince George. Many, particularly Mr. Bush's family, questioned the manner in which police investigated his death, the scant information provided to the family and the length of time taken by RCMP investigators. They also wondered how an event as insignificant as having an open beer and then giving a wrong name to police could have escalated into a confrontation ending 20 minutes later with Mr. Bush fatally shot. However, the province's Criminal Justice Branch yesterday said that the evidence supports the police officer's assertion that he acted in self-defence. B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal, who personally reviewed the file on Mr. Bush's death, said he is “in thorough agreement” with the decision not to lay charges.
• September 2006: The government promises an overhaul of the RCMP after a devastating inquiry report finds the federal police passed along erroneous and damaging intelligence to the U.S. about Maher Arar. “The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar that was inaccurate, portrayed him in a negative fashion and overstated his importance in the RCMP investigation,” Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor said in his 822-page report. He said that when RCMP officers gave information to the United States, it increased “the risk that the information would be used for the purposes of which the RCMP would not approve, such as sending Mr. Arar to Syria.” Among his findings: - the RCMP provided inaccurate information to American authorities about Mr. Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, characterizing them as Islamic extremists with suspected links to al-Qaeda - the complete RCMP database on Mr. Arar was given to the Americans without the information having been screened for relevance or accuracy. The RCMP failed to give its main investigative unit — Project A-O Canada — clear direction on how to share information with U.S. authorities. Information was shared without important caveats on how it can and cannot be used, breaching RCMP policy - the U.S. government almost certainly detained and removed Mr. Arar to Syria by relying on inaccurate information about him provided by the RCMP - the RCMP, acting through the Canadian ambassador, sent Syria questions for Abdullah Almalki, another Canadian in Syrian custody. The action probably signalled to the Syrians that the RCMP approved of Mr. Almalki's imprisonment and, by extension, Mr. Arar's imprisonment - the RCMP omitted key facts when briefing senior government bureaucrats after Mr. Arar's release. For example, it failed to tell Privy Council officials that it gave information to the U.S. without attaching written caveats. It also failed to reveal that the RCMP had supplied its entire database to U.S. agencies
• September 2006: RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli apologizes to Mr. Arar and his family, but he also tells the House public safety and security committee that the mistakes his Mounties made in the Arar security case do not require him to resign. He says several times that Mounties corrected the record with U.S. authorities while Mr. Arar was still in U.S. custody in New York. Days later, Mr. Zaccardelli offers a new account of when he discovered his force had passed erroneous information about Mr. Arar to U.S. authorities. “Senior officials, including myself, were not informed until the inquiry completed its works,” he says in an address to the Canadian Club of Ottawa. Mr. Zaccardelli says he “made a mistake” in his earlier testimony.
• October 2006: Ontario Superior Court Judge Lynn Ratushny strikes down a federal official secrets law, saying that the RCMP tried to use it to intimidate an Ottawa journalist into revealing who had leaked her material in the Maher Arar affair. In the landmark ruling, Justice Ratushny concluded that so-called anti-leakage provisions in the Security and Information Act are unacceptably broad, vague and wide open to abuse by authorities who would seek to chill diligent journalism. Hurriedly enacted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the anti-leakage provisions were used by the RCMP in 2004 to seize documents from the home and office of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, after articles she wrote caused the Mounties to suspect that she was receiving leaked material. Judge Ratushny ordered that the documents be returned.
• October 2006: The case against a Prince George RCMP officer accused of having sex with underage prostitutes is thrown out by an internal disciplinary tribunal — comprised of three RCMP officers from out of province — because the force failed to bring allegations against the constable in a timely fashion. Const. Justin Harris was one of nine officers in Prince George named in investigative reports alleging links to underage prostitutes. A subsequent investigation led to the conviction of a provincial court judge. Constable Harris, however, was the only officer to face a disciplinary hearing and notified of the case against him in September, 2004. Under the RCMP Act, however, a commanding officer must launch a disciplinary hearing within one year of becoming aware of an officer's alleged misconduct. Senior members of the force in Prince George were aware in 2002 of the allegations against Const. Harris, who was not criminally charged and has maintained his innocence since the allegations against him first surfaced. In testimony before the tribunal, Const. Harris was accused of hitting a teenaged prostitute when she refused to perform oral sex on him because he didn't want to wear a condom. Another teenaged prostitute told an investigating officer Const. Harris was “drunk and aggressive” on the two occasions she had sex with him.
• October 2006: The B.C. Supreme Court hears that RCMP investigators taped a telephone conversation between Premier Gordon Campbell and his then-minister of finance, Gary Collins, during an investigation that led to an unprecedented police raid on the British Columbia Legislature in 2003. Four months later, a wide-ranging application for disclosure is filed by lawyers representing three accused in the raids which alleged the RCMP were not forthright with a judge when requesting permission to wiretap government phones after failing to get similar warrants twice before.
• November 2006: Saskatchewan RCMP Constable Thierry Jacques is sentenced to three years in jail for sexually assaulting a female prisoner while she was in custody. A judge found him guilty of taking the 26-year-old woman from her cell and sexually assaulting her in the garage at the La Ronge RCMP detachment on Sept. 4, 2004.
• November 2006: Auditor-General Sheila Fraser says the administration of the RCMP's pension fund was characterized by nepotism and favouritism in the early 2000s, resulting in the awarding of $1.3-million in wasteful contracts. But because too much time has elapsed, no one in the police force will face sanction over the abuses, Ms. Fraser adds, noting the government has only one year to discipline officials under the RCMP Act, even though audits and investigations often take longer to be completed.
The Auditor-General's report said 49 people who worked on a modernization of the RCMP pension fund in the early 2000s were hired through family and friendship connections, receiving “double the standard rate of pay” at an extra cost of $220,000.
• December 2006: Mr. Zaccardelli becomes the first commissioner in the history of the RCMP to be forced out under a cloud of controversy. He is forced to resign after his admission that he had misled a parliamentary committee on his involvement in the case of Mr. Arar, saying he had “made a mistake” in that testimony and he did not know that Mounties did not try to correct the record with the Americans at the time.
• February 2007: The RCMP lays a criminal charge against a senior Finance Canada bureaucrat after a 14-month probe into whether the former Liberal government's plans for income trusts were leaked to markets ahead of time. But the lengthy investigation, news of which likely helped defeat the Liberals in the last federal election, yielded no charges against politicians or staffers in the former governing party. The RCMP came under criticism for announcing the probe four weeks into the campaign, but insisted it was merely doing its job and not interfering in the political process. But the New Democrats and Harper Conservatives seized on it as proof that the Liberals were corrupt and deserved to be defeated in the Jan. 23, 2006, ballot.
• March 2007: The families of four Alberta Mounties killed in Mayerthorpe March 3, 2005, say they are increasingly frustrated by the wait for answers about what went wrong. The RCMP has yet to complete its internal criminal investigation, which has in turn delayed the launch of any public inquiries into the tragedy. “I would hope that by doing what they're doing they are turning over every piece of gravel, every blade of grass,” said Grace Johnston, whose son, Constable Leo Johnston, was one of the officers gunned down near Mayerthorpe, 130 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. “I would hope they're not just dragging it out for political reasons.” Constables Anthony Gordon, Brock Myrol and Peter Schiemann were also killed on March 3, 2005, when Mr. Roszko, a 46-year-old with a history of violence, ambushed all four inside a Quonset hut on his property, which was being investigated for a marijuana grow-op and stolen-vehicle-parts operation. After shooting the policemen, he killed himself. The RCMP, which was almost immediately criticized for contributing to the deaths, is once again being questioned about how well it can investigate itself. “They did no proper risk assessment, and this was a case of negligent supervision,” a former Mountie tells the Globe and Mail. “It is now two years after the fact and there has been no independent investigation and accounting, and never will be.”
• March 2007: The Commons public safety committee considers probing the witness protection program and the case of Agent E8060 — a paid RCMP informant who manufactured evidence, became a protected witness and then committed a heinous killing under his new identity. A story published by The Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen reports that Richard Young, an unemployed man from Victoria, B.C., was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about a crime that he concocted. His evidence was called a “cruel charade” by British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Dean Wilson. Despite the exposure of his lies, Mr. Young was placed in the federal witness protection program and, under his new identity, he was convicted of killing someone. It is a criminal offence under the Witness Protection Program Act to disclose anything about Mr. Young's new identity or who he killed. Even the victim's family cannot be told the truth.
30/03/07, Daniel Leblanc, Another gust in growing Mountie gale, (Back).
OTTAWA -- The RCMP needs to undergo a culture shift to weather the storm that is slowly engulfing the national police force, critics said yesterday.
In the latest controversy, serving and retired officers took the rare step of publicly criticizing the Mountie leadership for allegedly attempting to put the lid on the mismanagement of the force's pension fund.
Combined with past scandals, the image of the RCMP has been tarnished. For now, the criticism is oriented toward recently departed leaders, including former commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli, and not the RCMP as a whole.
"There was a lack of accountability; there seemed to be a culture at the top of trying to cover things up or push them aside and not deal with them," Liberal MP Mark Holland said.
Mr. Holland said that things will only get better with greater civilian oversight of the RCMP.
"The answer is to have the organization be more transparent and accountable, and to be renewed at the top," he said.
Mr. Zaccardelli, who quit late last year, was seen by critics as overly protective of the force, resisting any outside scrutiny of its handling of internal matters.
That led to controversies involving the case of Maher Arar, suspicions that the RCMP inadequately investigated allegations of police brutality, the hiring of an unreliable informant in Victoria, and the mishandling of funds from the sponsorship program for the RCMP's 125th anniversary.
Lawyers acting for the B.C. Mounted Police Professional Association and the Mounted Police Association of Ontario recently wrote to Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day arguing that the rank and file have lost trust in senior management.
"The cover-up of wrongdoing and the protection of those favoured by senior management has become a common thread running through the members' complaints. In fact, RCMP management's practice of transferring officers facing legitimate complaints by regular members is now being likened to the conduct of the Catholic Church in protecting its priests accused of misconduct," said the letter from the Ontario and B.C. associations' lawyers.
In the letter, the Mounties call on Mr. Day to launch a full inquiry.
"The Force brass must be made to acknowledge its deficiencies in administration and its lacklustre treatment of regular members. The light of public scrutiny and accountability must be brought to bear if there is to be any constructive change," the letter says.
The former head of the RCMP public complaints commission said many Mounties have lost confidence in their superiors, who are seen to be unaccountable.
"The leadership certainly is lacking and the grass-root members are not well protected," said Shirley Heafey in a television interview.
The RCMP is currently headed by acting commissioner Bev Busson, who is not in contention for the permanent position.
The government has indicated that it hopes to hire a new commissioner by June. Some experts are suggesting the RCMP needs to be headed by a civilian or at least an outsider -- a proposition that would be seen inside the force as a blow.
"Sometimes, when there are these types of problems, it is not a bad idea to look outside an organization for somebody with a fresh perspective to come in and . . . be able to offer solutions to allow the organization to renew itself," Mr. Holland said.
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe said any major changes at the RCMP should wait for the conclusion of the inquiry into the mismanagement of the pension fund.
"I prefer to identify the illness before choosing the remedy," he said.
NDP Leader Jack Layton said the RCMP is facing morale problems and needs strong leadership. "Canadians need to have full confidence in the RCMP, and right now, that's severely shaken," he said.
In the Arar case, U.S. authorities deported Mr. Arar to Syria, acting in part on false information provided by the RCMP. The government apologized to Mr. Arar, who was tortured in his home country, and paid him $10-million in compensation.
Mr. Zaccardelli has acknowledged the need for greater oversight of the RCMP.
"I will accept any recommendation of oversight and review as long as it enables me to maintain the trust [of Canadians]," he said during a news conference after Prime Minister Stephen Harper accepted his resignation last year.
30/03/07, Jeff Sallot & Daniel Leblanc, RCMP faces twin probes in alleged pension fraud, (Back).
Ottawa to name independent investigator; ex-chief Zaccardelli denies any wrongdoing.
OTTAWA — Allegations of cover-up in the RCMP pension scandal will soon be the subject of two parallel probes -- one by a Commons committee and the other by a government-appointed investigator.
Meanwhile, Auditor-General Sheila Fraser said yesterday that her office was unable to substantiate allegations that Mounties at the highest ranks covered up nepotism and misallocation of more than $3-million in pension funds when the auditors looked at the question last year.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the allegations that resurfaced this week "are shocking and quite disturbing" and need re-examination. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced that the government will appoint an independent investigator.
Four hours later, the House public accounts committee suggested that this isn't enough, voting unanimously to continue its own probe of the case. The MPs want to hear from former Liberal ministers and will also try to determine if RCMP witnesses may have perjured themselves in testimony before the committee in February.
One of those witnesses, Deputy Commissioner Barbara George, stepped down as head of human resources for the RCMP on Wednesday and was reassigned to other duties.
Former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli denied he tried to sweep the scandal under the rug. He said he wants to counter the claims of former subordinates who accused him on Wednesday of being part of a cover-up. Mr. Zaccardelli resigned in December after he gave contradictory testimony to the House public safety committee about what he knew and when in the Maher Arar torture case.
"I will testify at the committee if I am called, and I have nothing to say until then, other than the allegations that were made before the committee yesterday are absolutely 100-per-cent false," he said.
Interim commissioner Bev Busson said she welcomed the plan to appoint an independent investigator and said she is "determined to get to the bottom of this as quickly and transparently as possible."
On Wednesday, Ron Lewis, a retired staff-sergeant, said he and other rank-and-file Mounties were stonewalled when they tried to get Mr. Zaccardelli and other senior managers to deal with "both criminal and code-of-conduct violations" in pension-fund administration.
"To my disappointment, I was met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies," Mr. Lewis said.
"The person who orchestrated most of this cover-up was Commissioner Zaccardelli."
In addition, Chief Superintendent Fraser Macaulay testified Wednesday that "for the past several years, the RCMP has had a small group of managers who, through their actions and inactions, are responsible for serious breaches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct, and even the Criminal Code."
Chief Superintendent Macaulay said he filed a formal internal complaint in 2003 about "misappropriation of pension funds" and excessive spending on administration. He said he was punished by management and moved out of the picture with a two-year secondment to the Canadian Forces. He also said Deputy Commissioner George told him about this secondment.
Ms. Fraser reported last November the RCMP improperly charged at least $3.4-million to the pension fund, but later paid it back. She also said "an estimated $1.3-million was charged to the pension and insurance plans to pay for commissions or products that provided little or no value, and for excessive payments to employees' friends and family members hired as temporary staff. The pension plan has been reimbursed or credited $270,280 of those unnecessary or wasteful expenditures."
Even though an RCMP disciplinary investigation found that proceeding with disciplinary action was warranted against four of its regular and civilian members, the RCMP decided too much time had elapsed, she reported in November.
Yesterday, Ms. Fraser said she undertook an audit of the pension fund after the completion of an investigation into the matter by the Ottawa police force.
Her team of auditors met with the same retired and serving RCMP officers who raised allegations of a cover-up at the public accounts committee two days ago, yet the auditors were unable to obtain enough proof to publish the information, she said.
"There were cases where people said they were moved from their jobs and that sort of thing. It's hard to get enough proof to support an allegation like that, to be able to publish anything in our report," Ms. Fraser said in an interview.
"We have a very rigorous level of proof before we can conclude on something."
Ms. Fraser said the fact the final audit did not mention the allegations does not mean they were untrue, but simply that there was not enough evidence to support them.
"Would someone have been reassigned for other reasons, and how do you draw that real link to it, was the difficulty. We can't publish allegations and we need really strong proof that that was due to that," she said.
The witnesses at the public accounts committee, she said, are angry that the RCMP did not impose any sanctions against the people responsible for the mismanagement -- a criticism of the process that she also raised in her final audit.
"I think that is probably what is most frustrating to all of those people is that at the end of the day -- there never seems to have been any kind of disciplinary action of any sort that was taken," Ms. Fraser said.
Mr. Day told reporters he will appoint an independent investigator with powers to conduct forensic audits and question witnesses. He expects a report in eight to 12 weeks, and promised it will be made public.
The latest crisis surrounding the RCMP arose so quickly that Mr. Day felt he had to announce the investigation before the investigator has actually been found.
"The abuses in question, which took place from 2000 to the year 2005, are of grave concern to us. Canada's new government believes that managers at all levels should be held accountable," Mr. Day said.
Later in the House, Mr. Day and Mr. Harper blamed the previous Liberal government for allowing the pension issue to drag on and fester for years.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion was having none of it, saying that if the minority Conservative government is serious about the case, it would convene a full-scale judicial commission of inquiry, with broad powers.
Late in the day, Liberals at the public accounts committee won unanimous support for a motion saying the panel will continue its own probe into the "serious issues of potential perjury, fraud and interference in criminal investigations."
The witness list includes Mr. Zaccardelli, Deputy Commissioner Paul Gauvin, Rosalie Burton, the former director general of human resources at the RCMP, and Deputy Commissioner George.
Conservatives on the committee supported the motion with the understanding that two former Liberal ministers -- Anne McLellan, who was the public safety minister, and Reg Alcock, the former treasury board president -- would also be called to testify about what they knew and when.
28/03/07, Brian Laghi & Oliver Moore, Mounties allege fraud in pension management, (Back).
Commons public accounts committee could summon senior RCMP executives to testify at emergency meeting.
OTTAWA AND TORONTO — A House of Commons committee will consider a motion Thursday to force ex-RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and other former senior and current RCMP officers to testify after some of their colleagues alleged fraud Wednesday in the management of their pension plans.
The explosive allegations came at a public accounts committee meeting hearing testimony about claims that millions of dollars in inappropriate charges were made to the force's pension and insurance plans.
"The RCMP has had a small group of managers who through their actions and inactions are responsible for serious breaches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct and even the Criminal Code," Chief Superintendent Fraser Macaulay told the committee members Wednesday.
The committee will hold an emergency meeting Thursday.
"This is just stunning," said Liberal committee member Borys Wrzesnewskyj. "People are misusing rank-and-file officers' pensions. People who put their lives on the line for us."
One of the current officers who broke ranks and criticized his leaders was Sergeant Steve Walker. "Every core value and rule of ethical conduct that I held to be true and dear as a rank-and-file member of the RCMP has been decimated and defiled by employees at the highest levels of the RCMP," he said.
In an interview from his home Wednesday night, Chief Supt. Macaulay said he was shocked over the way senior RCMP officials had dealt with the pension fund allegations.
"At the end of the day, I believe that if the commissioner at the helm today was in charge then this would have not happened," he said. "Internally, things are starting to change."
He said the RCMP had the tools to handle the matter internally, but that individuals failed to react appropriately. "Our choice would have been to do it [investigate] through the processes that were in place, rather than the people in charge of those processes."
Wednesday night, RCMP deputy commissioner of human resources Barb George stepped down. The announcement was made in an e-mail circulated by acting commissioner Bev Busson.
"Deputy Commissioner George felt it would be best for the RCMP to leave her position at this time and I concurred with her decision," said the e-mail, a copy of which was provided to The Globe and Mail. "A permanent replacement will be announced shortly."
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj believes a public inquiry into the matter may be needed. He plans to ask the committee Thursday to have both Ms. George and Mr. Zaccardelli testify.
Other MPs reacted with shock to what they heard at the committee meeting.
"I'm a lawyer and I think a lot of the stuff I've heard, you know, if it was anyone else, they'd be in criminal court ... some of them may have been packing their toothbrushes for the crowbar hotel," Conservative MP Brian Fitzpatrick said.
Another committee member, Liberal MP Shawn Murphy, compared it to the Watergate scandal that toppled former U.S. president Richard Nixon. "The cover-up is worse than the crime," he said.
The committee is examining an Auditor-General's report released last November that said the administration of the RCMP pension fund was rife with nepotism in the early 2000s and that $3.1-million was diverted from the fund to other Mountie accounts. There is no evidence anyone pocketed the money, the Auditor-General's Office said.
"If not malfeasance it was misfeasance," Ms. Busson said of the scandal she inherited from Mr. Zaccardelli, who resigned earlier in the year after giving conflicting accounts to another parliamentary committee.
Assistant auditor-general Hugh McRoberts told the committee that the first whiff of trouble was apparent to an RCMP staffing officer in May, 2002.
This officer complained about nepotism in the hiring of casual employees for work in the pension office. Forty-nine of the 65 casuals were friends or relatives of Mounties, and they were paid twice the specified government rate for their type of office work.
Despite the staffing officer's expressed concerns, it was another 13 months before the RCMP opened a criminal investigation of its own members. Mr. Zaccardelli cancelled the criminal investigation two days later and instead asked for an internal audit, the Auditor-General's Office said.
30/03/07, Greg McArthur, MPs probe case of controversial RCMP agent, (Back).
Informant whose identity is protected was paid thousands, then became a killer
OTTAWA -- The Commons public safety committee passed a unanimous motion yesterday to review the witness protection program and the case of agent E8060, an RCMP informant who was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for false information and later killed someone as a protected witness.
Joe Comartin, the NDP vice-chair of the committee, said recent news reports about the secret agent demand debate about whether Parliament should amend its witness protection law.
"It really does call into question how the program is being used," Mr. Comartin told the committee yesterday.
Rick Norlock, a Conservative committee member, said the case, as well as recent controversy over the RCMP pension plan, is "shaking the public's confidence in our most senior police force in our Dominion."
In 2001, the informant persuaded a group of Asian teenagers to follow Mounties in their cars and stake out the RCMP's Victoria headquarters. He then told his Mountie handler that the teens were conducting counter-surveillance for a suspected drug kingpin.
The phony evidence earned him a spot in the witness protection program -- a contract that was upheld even after British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Dean Wilson called Mr. Young's evidence "a cruel charade."
While in the program, and under his new identity, he killed someone -- but under the Witness Protection Program Act, it is illegal to knowingly reveal Mr. Young's new identity or any details about his crime. It is forbidden to even tell the family of the deceased.
That rigid restriction will complicate the committee's digging, Mr. Comartin said after the meeting.
The only way Mr. Young's identity and crime can be lawfully revealed is if he consents to the release of the information, or if he blabbed about his protected status in such a way that Acting RCMP Commissioner Bev Busson is comfortable releasing it.
Acting Commissioner Busson can also expose him if she deems that it is in "the public interest" and necessary to investigate, or prevent, a serious offence. She may have a difficult decision to make, Mr. Comartin said.
"If I don't get satisfactory answers, I, and I expect the committee, will call upon . . . her to exercise her discretion and revoke his protection," he said after the committee's meeting.
Mr. Comartin also speculated that some meetings might take place in camera because of the sensitivity surrounding the law.
On April 19, the committee is expected to get a general briefing on the program from the RCMP, as well as the departments of Justice and Public Safety. It will also assemble a witness list.
Mr. Comartin said he expects to call Tom Bulmer, the Victoria defence lawyer who exposed Mr. Young's scheme in court and has repeatedly called for a public inquiry into the conduct of the secret agent.
At yesterday's meeting, there was some disagreement about the focus of the review.
Mr. Comartin, who drafted the motion along with Liberal Sue Barnes, said he'd like to explore the particulars of the case, while Conservative Dave MacKenzie said he wanted to stick to the "global picture" of the witness protection program.
29/03/07, Kady O'Malley & Chris Selley, RCMP scandal deepens, (Back).
Officers allege highest levels of force involved in coverup of pension fraud.
The followup:
It's not quite the full judicial inquiry that opposition MPs have been demanding, but it's a start. Following the previous day's incendiary allegations of fraud, theft and corruption within the most senior ranks of the RCMP, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced Thursday that he would be appointing an independent investigator "to determine once and for all what actually happened."
Day was not ready to provide much in the way of details, including the name of the individual he hopes to appoint. But he assured reporters that he would have the confidence of both the public and the government.
As for the decision not to establish a full judicial inquiry, Day pointed out that such probes generally take months or even years to report back. "We want information immediately," he said.
Meanwhile, in a unanimous vote that might have had as much to do with partisan bluffery as all-party solidarity, the Public Accounts Committee voted to continue its investigation - an outcome that may have taken the government by surprise, given the announcement just hours before that it would be appointing an independent investigator to look into the affair.
The various investigations could see two former Liberal cabinet ministers and a senior security advisor to Stephen Harper questioned about what they knew about the pension scandal and when they knew it.
According to Sgt. Ron Lewis, former public safety minister Anne McLellan and former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock were informed of concerns over a coverup that allegedly involved senior officials - including former RCMP Commissioner Giuliiano Zaccardelli - in February 2004, but did nothing.
Lewis says he provided the ministers with a 60-page document that gave "the whole story, basically." That, he says, includes "the inaction, the lies, the obstruction, the delays and the actual allegations of what they were, how much money's involved." He says that he asked the ministers to pass the information on to the Auditor General - who ultimately concluded that the matter lay outside the scope of her audit. - but that there "was no response from them."
In fact, he said, when questioned in the House of Commons about the matter, McLellan replied that there was "no reason" to investigate the RCMP Commissioner.
During Thursday's Question Period, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day blamed his Liberal predecessors - going so far as to suggest the current Liberal caucus is attempting to stonewall further investigation into the case.
But the current government may not be untouched by the controversy, either. According to Lewis' testimony, he also tried unsuccessfully to get a response from McLellan's deputy, Margaret Bloodworth - since appointed National Security Advisor by Harper.
The story:
The Commons Public Accounts Committee held an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss allegations of fraud at the highest levels of the RCMP.
Following the meeting, Committee chair Shawn Murphy joined fellow Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj in calling for a full public inquiry into alleged corruption and cover-ups among senior RCMP brass.
Conservative MP John Williams echoed calls for a more thorough investigation, telling CTV News that he "would rather see a judicial inquiry into this, because… the forum of the public accounts committee can never get to the bottom of this."
Nevertheless, Williams said he was eager to give former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli an opportunity to appear before the committee to "explain his role."
On Wednesday, RCMP officers testified before the committee that there was a cover-up in the abuse of the police force's pension fund. They said senior members of the force - including then-commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli - tried to stall an investigation into the matter after the allegations first arose.
"I was met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies," retired staff sergeant Ron Lewis told the committee. "[The] person who orchestrated most of this coverup was commissioner Zaccardelli."
At the time, Lewis was in charge of internal staff relations. He asked the Auditor General to further investigate the allegations; her subsequent report found the pension fund had fallen victim to nepotism and that useless contracts had been awarded using money from the pension and insurance funds.
On Wednesday, several other officers backed Lewis' claims about the misuse of the pension funds.
"For the past few years, the RCMP has had a small group of managers who, through their actions and inactions, are responsible for serious breeches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct and even the Criminal Code," Chief Supt. Fraser MacAulay said.
"Every core value and rule of ethical conduct that I held to be true and dear as a rank-and-file member of the RCMP has been decimated and defiled by employees at the highest levels of the RCMP," Sgt. Steve Walker added.
The committee is now considering a motion to force Zaccardelli and other senior officers to testify about the allegations.
"This is just stunning," Liberal committee member Borys Wrzesnewskyj said. "People are misusing rank-and-file officers' pensions. People who put their lives on the line for us."
The Deputy Commissioner of human resources for the RCMP, Barb George, resigned on Wednesday night following the officers' testimony.
Background:
Wednesday's testimony only emboldened accusations of a cover-up expressed by committee members last month after they received unsatisfying answers from senior Mounties about the Auditor General's report.
Fraser found that dozens of employees had been hired through nepotism and in some cases been overpaid, at a total cost to the taxpayer of around $1.3-million. The report also found that $3.1-million had made its way from the pension fund to other RCMP accounts - though not to any individuals.
The slow pace of the investigation, conducted by Ottawa police, meant that a statute of limitations under the RCMP Act expired before anyone could be held to account.
"The real question we're asking here is whether there has been a cover-up," NDP MP David Christopherson said at the time. "Nobody has called it that, but that's really what's in front of us."
"Are we to forget everything that happened with this case? Is it really too late to do something?" asked frustrated Bloc Québécois MP Paule Brunelle.
Rank-and-file officers have also expressed their disgust with the situation. In September of last year, members of the RCMP's staff relations representative committee drafted a memo describing the handling of the investigation as "truly unacceptable."
"'Accountability,' as specific and tough as that word sounds, has become a vague, loose term in our organization," the memo read. "We will not accept this behaviour from employee/members of the RCMP at any category or years of service, just as we would not expect members in the field to drop the ball on alleged wrongdoings/investigations in their communities."
This week's developments cast further doubts on the RCMP as a whole. Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, who presided over the pension fund investigation, resigned in December after months of withering criticism over the Mounties' involvement in Maher Arar's deportation to Syria - particularly over his conflicting testimony to a Commons committee.
Questions about the adequacy of training and communications in the force have been raised in the wake of fatal shooting incidents in Meyerthorpe, Alta. and Mildred, Sask., which saw six officers shot and killed in less than two years. The one-year statute of limitations in the RCMP Act was also criticized in October of last year, after a British Columbia officer escaped sanction for various prostitution-related allegations.
(Back)
29/03/07, Timeline: RCMP scandals and setbacks since 2006, (Source).
30/03/07, Daniel Leblanc, Another gust in growing Mountie gale, (Source).
30/03/07, Jeff Sallot & Daniel Leblanc, RCMP faces twin probes in alleged pension fraud, (Source).
28/03/07, Brian Laghi & Oliver Moore, Mounties allege fraud in pension management, (Source).
30/03/07, Greg McArthur, MPs probe case of controversial RCMP agent, (Source).
29/03/07, Kady O'Malley & Chris Selley, RCMP scandal deepens, (Source).
30/03/07, Editorial, Accountability and the RCMP, (Back).
The disturbing allegations of an RCMP pension scandal made at a Commons committee this week are a natural extension of the many disasters of the force's recent past. They appear to reflect the same endemic weaknesses: poor leadership, unsound judgment and a lack of accountability. Goodwill toward the Mounties the public still has aplenty; but confidence, not much.
The big job ahead is to restore proper leadership and insist on accountability. And, of course, to get to the bottom of what went wrong and why in the Mounties' handling of fraud and abuse allegations related to the way it managed its pension plans. That will be the job both of an investigator appointed by Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and, separately, of the Commons public accounts committee. Why, for instance, did then-commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli kill a criminal probe into the allegations four years ago and order an internal audit instead? And why, when the matter was ultimately referred to the Ottawa Police Service, did the investigation (which produced no criminal charges) last just long enough that no internal disciplinary charges could be laid under a statute of limitations? A coincidence? And why did the lead investigator from the Ottawa police report directly to an assistant commissioner of the RCMP? "This did not give the investigation an appearance of independence," federal Auditor-General Sheila Fraser wrote last fall after probing the matter.
Trust us, the RCMP seems to be saying. On the evidence, Canadians shouldn't. Not blindly. At the Commons public safety committee yesterday, MPs considered the disturbing tale, revealed in The Globe and Mail and The Ottawa Citizen last week, of an RCMP informant paid hundreds of thousands of dollars mostly for tainted or false information; the informant went on to commit homicide, but his identity is protected by law. Public scrutiny, not trust, is what the RCMP needs.
Legitimate public doubts about the national force will be reinforced by this week's spectacle: senior Mounties crying from the heart before the public accounts committee about the lack of trustworthiness of RCMP leadership. Retired sergeant Ron Lewis told the committee that in looking into pension-fund irregularities he was "met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies. The person who orchestrated most of the cover-up was Commissioner Zaccardelli." (That allegation has not been proven in court. Mr. Zaccardelli denies a cover-up occurred.)
Under Mr. Zaccardelli, the RCMP acted atrociously in the Maher Arar case. Under Mr. Zaccardelli, the Mounties may have tipped the last federal election toward the Conservative Party by announcing a criminal investigation, mid-campaign, into alleged security leaks in the Liberal finance minister's office. Mr. Zaccardelli is no longer the commissioner -- he resigned after changing his testimony about Mr. Arar before the Commons security committee -- but questions remain about how deep the problems go in the senior management of the RCMP.
An RCMP that loses the faith of its rank-and-file members will not be trusted by the Canadian public, either. The two pension investigations may show how deep the rot went, and point to how the national police force may be rescued from its misbegotten leaders.
29/03/07, Timeline: RCMP scandals and setbacks since 2006, (Back).
• January 2006: Former B.C. Mountie Gary Stevens is sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting two teenage girls while off duty. Mr. Stevens pleaded guilty to attacking a girl in Vancouver in the early 1990s, and a girl in Terrace in 2004. He retired from the Kitimat detachment after he was charged.
• January 2006: Former RCMP Const. Nancy Sulz wins a $950,000 lawsuit for long-term harassment she suffered under her former detachment commander at the Merritt, B.C. detachment.
• February 2006: B.C. Crown prosecutors announce they won't lay charges against the RCMP constable who shot and killed Kevin St. Arnaud. The 29-year-old welder was killed Dec. 19, 2004, after a bungled robbery attempt of a local pharmacy. He was highly intoxicated at the time. Const. Ryan Sheremetta, a Vanderhoof RCMP officer in his mid-20s who at the time of the shooting had about two years experience, had reasonable grounds to believe he needed to use deadly force to protect himself from Mr. St. Arnaud, officials said. Family members maintain there's no way that Mr. St. Arnaud, unarmed and so drunk he could barely stand, could have meaningfully threatened Const. Sheremetta. After a year of waiting for the investigation to conclude, the news was “like a kick in the teeth,” Mr. St. Arnaud's mother, Dolores Young, said.
• May 2006: After a seven-month fight to clear his name, Ontario finance minister Greg Sorbara is vindicated when a Superior Court judge rules that the RCMP did not have enough evidence to accuse him of criminal wrongdoing in an ongoing criminal investigation into Royal Group Technologies Inc. Mr. Sorbara became swept up in the Royal Group case as a former director of the Woodbridge, Ont., building-products company and chairman of its audit committee. He resigned from the board in 2003 when he was sworn into cabinet. The RCMP named Mr. Sorbara in the search warrants over two property deals in the mid-1990s between Royal Group and Sorbara Group, his family's private company. In a blistering condemnation, Judge Nordheimer accused the RCMP of not doing enough investigative work before seeking the search warrants, and of tainting certain transactions to bolster their case before the judge who signed the warrants. “I am left with the nagging concern that the application for a search warrant, at least as it related to [Mr. Sorbara], was very much premature,” Judge Nordheimer said. The judge also said the RCMP provided no evidence to back up their description of the two property deals as unusual.
• July 2006: Two young officers are killed during a police chase and shoot-out in northern Saskatchewan. The RCMP says little about the deaths of constables Marc Bourdages and Robin Cameron, and the attempted murder of a third Mountie. The agency refuses repeated requests for a timeline of events July 7, but corrects earlier statements about the time of the shooting after the Globe and Mail reports the service didn't summon an ambulance until an hour after the officers were shot. The time of the shooting is revised without explanation from about 9:15 p.m. to 10:15 p.m.
• September 2006: Crown prosecutors decide no criminal charges will be laid in the controversial shooting death of a B.C. sawmill worker by a rookie RCMP constable during a jailhouse altercation. The death of 22-year-old Ian Bush in October, 2005, after his arrest over a minor incident involving an opened beer can at the local hockey rink, caused a furor in the tightly knit community of Houston, 300 kilometres west of Prince George. Many, particularly Mr. Bush's family, questioned the manner in which police investigated his death, the scant information provided to the family and the length of time taken by RCMP investigators. They also wondered how an event as insignificant as having an open beer and then giving a wrong name to police could have escalated into a confrontation ending 20 minutes later with Mr. Bush fatally shot. However, the province's Criminal Justice Branch yesterday said that the evidence supports the police officer's assertion that he acted in self-defence. B.C. Attorney-General Wally Oppal, who personally reviewed the file on Mr. Bush's death, said he is “in thorough agreement” with the decision not to lay charges.
• September 2006: The government promises an overhaul of the RCMP after a devastating inquiry report finds the federal police passed along erroneous and damaging intelligence to the U.S. about Maher Arar. “The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar that was inaccurate, portrayed him in a negative fashion and overstated his importance in the RCMP investigation,” Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor said in his 822-page report. He said that when RCMP officers gave information to the United States, it increased “the risk that the information would be used for the purposes of which the RCMP would not approve, such as sending Mr. Arar to Syria.” Among his findings: - the RCMP provided inaccurate information to American authorities about Mr. Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, characterizing them as Islamic extremists with suspected links to al-Qaeda - the complete RCMP database on Mr. Arar was given to the Americans without the information having been screened for relevance or accuracy. The RCMP failed to give its main investigative unit — Project A-O Canada — clear direction on how to share information with U.S. authorities. Information was shared without important caveats on how it can and cannot be used, breaching RCMP policy - the U.S. government almost certainly detained and removed Mr. Arar to Syria by relying on inaccurate information about him provided by the RCMP - the RCMP, acting through the Canadian ambassador, sent Syria questions for Abdullah Almalki, another Canadian in Syrian custody. The action probably signalled to the Syrians that the RCMP approved of Mr. Almalki's imprisonment and, by extension, Mr. Arar's imprisonment - the RCMP omitted key facts when briefing senior government bureaucrats after Mr. Arar's release. For example, it failed to tell Privy Council officials that it gave information to the U.S. without attaching written caveats. It also failed to reveal that the RCMP had supplied its entire database to U.S. agencies
• September 2006: RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli apologizes to Mr. Arar and his family, but he also tells the House public safety and security committee that the mistakes his Mounties made in the Arar security case do not require him to resign. He says several times that Mounties corrected the record with U.S. authorities while Mr. Arar was still in U.S. custody in New York. Days later, Mr. Zaccardelli offers a new account of when he discovered his force had passed erroneous information about Mr. Arar to U.S. authorities. “Senior officials, including myself, were not informed until the inquiry completed its works,” he says in an address to the Canadian Club of Ottawa. Mr. Zaccardelli says he “made a mistake” in his earlier testimony.
• October 2006: Ontario Superior Court Judge Lynn Ratushny strikes down a federal official secrets law, saying that the RCMP tried to use it to intimidate an Ottawa journalist into revealing who had leaked her material in the Maher Arar affair. In the landmark ruling, Justice Ratushny concluded that so-called anti-leakage provisions in the Security and Information Act are unacceptably broad, vague and wide open to abuse by authorities who would seek to chill diligent journalism. Hurriedly enacted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the anti-leakage provisions were used by the RCMP in 2004 to seize documents from the home and office of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, after articles she wrote caused the Mounties to suspect that she was receiving leaked material. Judge Ratushny ordered that the documents be returned.
• October 2006: The case against a Prince George RCMP officer accused of having sex with underage prostitutes is thrown out by an internal disciplinary tribunal — comprised of three RCMP officers from out of province — because the force failed to bring allegations against the constable in a timely fashion. Const. Justin Harris was one of nine officers in Prince George named in investigative reports alleging links to underage prostitutes. A subsequent investigation led to the conviction of a provincial court judge. Constable Harris, however, was the only officer to face a disciplinary hearing and notified of the case against him in September, 2004. Under the RCMP Act, however, a commanding officer must launch a disciplinary hearing within one year of becoming aware of an officer's alleged misconduct. Senior members of the force in Prince George were aware in 2002 of the allegations against Const. Harris, who was not criminally charged and has maintained his innocence since the allegations against him first surfaced. In testimony before the tribunal, Const. Harris was accused of hitting a teenaged prostitute when she refused to perform oral sex on him because he didn't want to wear a condom. Another teenaged prostitute told an investigating officer Const. Harris was “drunk and aggressive” on the two occasions she had sex with him.
• October 2006: The B.C. Supreme Court hears that RCMP investigators taped a telephone conversation between Premier Gordon Campbell and his then-minister of finance, Gary Collins, during an investigation that led to an unprecedented police raid on the British Columbia Legislature in 2003. Four months later, a wide-ranging application for disclosure is filed by lawyers representing three accused in the raids which alleged the RCMP were not forthright with a judge when requesting permission to wiretap government phones after failing to get similar warrants twice before.
• November 2006: Saskatchewan RCMP Constable Thierry Jacques is sentenced to three years in jail for sexually assaulting a female prisoner while she was in custody. A judge found him guilty of taking the 26-year-old woman from her cell and sexually assaulting her in the garage at the La Ronge RCMP detachment on Sept. 4, 2004.
• November 2006: Auditor-General Sheila Fraser says the administration of the RCMP's pension fund was characterized by nepotism and favouritism in the early 2000s, resulting in the awarding of $1.3-million in wasteful contracts. But because too much time has elapsed, no one in the police force will face sanction over the abuses, Ms. Fraser adds, noting the government has only one year to discipline officials under the RCMP Act, even though audits and investigations often take longer to be completed.
The Auditor-General's report said 49 people who worked on a modernization of the RCMP pension fund in the early 2000s were hired through family and friendship connections, receiving “double the standard rate of pay” at an extra cost of $220,000.
• December 2006: Mr. Zaccardelli becomes the first commissioner in the history of the RCMP to be forced out under a cloud of controversy. He is forced to resign after his admission that he had misled a parliamentary committee on his involvement in the case of Mr. Arar, saying he had “made a mistake” in that testimony and he did not know that Mounties did not try to correct the record with the Americans at the time.
• February 2007: The RCMP lays a criminal charge against a senior Finance Canada bureaucrat after a 14-month probe into whether the former Liberal government's plans for income trusts were leaked to markets ahead of time. But the lengthy investigation, news of which likely helped defeat the Liberals in the last federal election, yielded no charges against politicians or staffers in the former governing party. The RCMP came under criticism for announcing the probe four weeks into the campaign, but insisted it was merely doing its job and not interfering in the political process. But the New Democrats and Harper Conservatives seized on it as proof that the Liberals were corrupt and deserved to be defeated in the Jan. 23, 2006, ballot.
• March 2007: The families of four Alberta Mounties killed in Mayerthorpe March 3, 2005, say they are increasingly frustrated by the wait for answers about what went wrong. The RCMP has yet to complete its internal criminal investigation, which has in turn delayed the launch of any public inquiries into the tragedy. “I would hope that by doing what they're doing they are turning over every piece of gravel, every blade of grass,” said Grace Johnston, whose son, Constable Leo Johnston, was one of the officers gunned down near Mayerthorpe, 130 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. “I would hope they're not just dragging it out for political reasons.” Constables Anthony Gordon, Brock Myrol and Peter Schiemann were also killed on March 3, 2005, when Mr. Roszko, a 46-year-old with a history of violence, ambushed all four inside a Quonset hut on his property, which was being investigated for a marijuana grow-op and stolen-vehicle-parts operation. After shooting the policemen, he killed himself. The RCMP, which was almost immediately criticized for contributing to the deaths, is once again being questioned about how well it can investigate itself. “They did no proper risk assessment, and this was a case of negligent supervision,” a former Mountie tells the Globe and Mail. “It is now two years after the fact and there has been no independent investigation and accounting, and never will be.”
• March 2007: The Commons public safety committee considers probing the witness protection program and the case of Agent E8060 — a paid RCMP informant who manufactured evidence, became a protected witness and then committed a heinous killing under his new identity. A story published by The Globe and Mail and the Ottawa Citizen reports that Richard Young, an unemployed man from Victoria, B.C., was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for information about a crime that he concocted. His evidence was called a “cruel charade” by British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Dean Wilson. Despite the exposure of his lies, Mr. Young was placed in the federal witness protection program and, under his new identity, he was convicted of killing someone. It is a criminal offence under the Witness Protection Program Act to disclose anything about Mr. Young's new identity or who he killed. Even the victim's family cannot be told the truth.
30/03/07, Daniel Leblanc, Another gust in growing Mountie gale, (Back).
OTTAWA -- The RCMP needs to undergo a culture shift to weather the storm that is slowly engulfing the national police force, critics said yesterday.
In the latest controversy, serving and retired officers took the rare step of publicly criticizing the Mountie leadership for allegedly attempting to put the lid on the mismanagement of the force's pension fund.
Combined with past scandals, the image of the RCMP has been tarnished. For now, the criticism is oriented toward recently departed leaders, including former commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli, and not the RCMP as a whole.
"There was a lack of accountability; there seemed to be a culture at the top of trying to cover things up or push them aside and not deal with them," Liberal MP Mark Holland said.
Mr. Holland said that things will only get better with greater civilian oversight of the RCMP.
"The answer is to have the organization be more transparent and accountable, and to be renewed at the top," he said.
Mr. Zaccardelli, who quit late last year, was seen by critics as overly protective of the force, resisting any outside scrutiny of its handling of internal matters.
That led to controversies involving the case of Maher Arar, suspicions that the RCMP inadequately investigated allegations of police brutality, the hiring of an unreliable informant in Victoria, and the mishandling of funds from the sponsorship program for the RCMP's 125th anniversary.
Lawyers acting for the B.C. Mounted Police Professional Association and the Mounted Police Association of Ontario recently wrote to Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day arguing that the rank and file have lost trust in senior management.
"The cover-up of wrongdoing and the protection of those favoured by senior management has become a common thread running through the members' complaints. In fact, RCMP management's practice of transferring officers facing legitimate complaints by regular members is now being likened to the conduct of the Catholic Church in protecting its priests accused of misconduct," said the letter from the Ontario and B.C. associations' lawyers.
In the letter, the Mounties call on Mr. Day to launch a full inquiry.
"The Force brass must be made to acknowledge its deficiencies in administration and its lacklustre treatment of regular members. The light of public scrutiny and accountability must be brought to bear if there is to be any constructive change," the letter says.
The former head of the RCMP public complaints commission said many Mounties have lost confidence in their superiors, who are seen to be unaccountable.
"The leadership certainly is lacking and the grass-root members are not well protected," said Shirley Heafey in a television interview.
The RCMP is currently headed by acting commissioner Bev Busson, who is not in contention for the permanent position.
The government has indicated that it hopes to hire a new commissioner by June. Some experts are suggesting the RCMP needs to be headed by a civilian or at least an outsider -- a proposition that would be seen inside the force as a blow.
"Sometimes, when there are these types of problems, it is not a bad idea to look outside an organization for somebody with a fresh perspective to come in and . . . be able to offer solutions to allow the organization to renew itself," Mr. Holland said.
Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe said any major changes at the RCMP should wait for the conclusion of the inquiry into the mismanagement of the pension fund.
"I prefer to identify the illness before choosing the remedy," he said.
NDP Leader Jack Layton said the RCMP is facing morale problems and needs strong leadership. "Canadians need to have full confidence in the RCMP, and right now, that's severely shaken," he said.
In the Arar case, U.S. authorities deported Mr. Arar to Syria, acting in part on false information provided by the RCMP. The government apologized to Mr. Arar, who was tortured in his home country, and paid him $10-million in compensation.
Mr. Zaccardelli has acknowledged the need for greater oversight of the RCMP.
"I will accept any recommendation of oversight and review as long as it enables me to maintain the trust [of Canadians]," he said during a news conference after Prime Minister Stephen Harper accepted his resignation last year.
30/03/07, Jeff Sallot & Daniel Leblanc, RCMP faces twin probes in alleged pension fraud, (Back).
Ottawa to name independent investigator; ex-chief Zaccardelli denies any wrongdoing.
OTTAWA — Allegations of cover-up in the RCMP pension scandal will soon be the subject of two parallel probes -- one by a Commons committee and the other by a government-appointed investigator.
Meanwhile, Auditor-General Sheila Fraser said yesterday that her office was unable to substantiate allegations that Mounties at the highest ranks covered up nepotism and misallocation of more than $3-million in pension funds when the auditors looked at the question last year.
Nevertheless, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the allegations that resurfaced this week "are shocking and quite disturbing" and need re-examination. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced that the government will appoint an independent investigator.
Four hours later, the House public accounts committee suggested that this isn't enough, voting unanimously to continue its own probe of the case. The MPs want to hear from former Liberal ministers and will also try to determine if RCMP witnesses may have perjured themselves in testimony before the committee in February.
One of those witnesses, Deputy Commissioner Barbara George, stepped down as head of human resources for the RCMP on Wednesday and was reassigned to other duties.
Former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli denied he tried to sweep the scandal under the rug. He said he wants to counter the claims of former subordinates who accused him on Wednesday of being part of a cover-up. Mr. Zaccardelli resigned in December after he gave contradictory testimony to the House public safety committee about what he knew and when in the Maher Arar torture case.
"I will testify at the committee if I am called, and I have nothing to say until then, other than the allegations that were made before the committee yesterday are absolutely 100-per-cent false," he said.
Interim commissioner Bev Busson said she welcomed the plan to appoint an independent investigator and said she is "determined to get to the bottom of this as quickly and transparently as possible."
On Wednesday, Ron Lewis, a retired staff-sergeant, said he and other rank-and-file Mounties were stonewalled when they tried to get Mr. Zaccardelli and other senior managers to deal with "both criminal and code-of-conduct violations" in pension-fund administration.
"To my disappointment, I was met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies," Mr. Lewis said.
"The person who orchestrated most of this cover-up was Commissioner Zaccardelli."
In addition, Chief Superintendent Fraser Macaulay testified Wednesday that "for the past several years, the RCMP has had a small group of managers who, through their actions and inactions, are responsible for serious breaches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct, and even the Criminal Code."
Chief Superintendent Macaulay said he filed a formal internal complaint in 2003 about "misappropriation of pension funds" and excessive spending on administration. He said he was punished by management and moved out of the picture with a two-year secondment to the Canadian Forces. He also said Deputy Commissioner George told him about this secondment.
Ms. Fraser reported last November the RCMP improperly charged at least $3.4-million to the pension fund, but later paid it back. She also said "an estimated $1.3-million was charged to the pension and insurance plans to pay for commissions or products that provided little or no value, and for excessive payments to employees' friends and family members hired as temporary staff. The pension plan has been reimbursed or credited $270,280 of those unnecessary or wasteful expenditures."
Even though an RCMP disciplinary investigation found that proceeding with disciplinary action was warranted against four of its regular and civilian members, the RCMP decided too much time had elapsed, she reported in November.
Yesterday, Ms. Fraser said she undertook an audit of the pension fund after the completion of an investigation into the matter by the Ottawa police force.
Her team of auditors met with the same retired and serving RCMP officers who raised allegations of a cover-up at the public accounts committee two days ago, yet the auditors were unable to obtain enough proof to publish the information, she said.
"There were cases where people said they were moved from their jobs and that sort of thing. It's hard to get enough proof to support an allegation like that, to be able to publish anything in our report," Ms. Fraser said in an interview.
"We have a very rigorous level of proof before we can conclude on something."
Ms. Fraser said the fact the final audit did not mention the allegations does not mean they were untrue, but simply that there was not enough evidence to support them.
"Would someone have been reassigned for other reasons, and how do you draw that real link to it, was the difficulty. We can't publish allegations and we need really strong proof that that was due to that," she said.
The witnesses at the public accounts committee, she said, are angry that the RCMP did not impose any sanctions against the people responsible for the mismanagement -- a criticism of the process that she also raised in her final audit.
"I think that is probably what is most frustrating to all of those people is that at the end of the day -- there never seems to have been any kind of disciplinary action of any sort that was taken," Ms. Fraser said.
Mr. Day told reporters he will appoint an independent investigator with powers to conduct forensic audits and question witnesses. He expects a report in eight to 12 weeks, and promised it will be made public.
The latest crisis surrounding the RCMP arose so quickly that Mr. Day felt he had to announce the investigation before the investigator has actually been found.
"The abuses in question, which took place from 2000 to the year 2005, are of grave concern to us. Canada's new government believes that managers at all levels should be held accountable," Mr. Day said.
Later in the House, Mr. Day and Mr. Harper blamed the previous Liberal government for allowing the pension issue to drag on and fester for years.
Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion was having none of it, saying that if the minority Conservative government is serious about the case, it would convene a full-scale judicial commission of inquiry, with broad powers.
Late in the day, Liberals at the public accounts committee won unanimous support for a motion saying the panel will continue its own probe into the "serious issues of potential perjury, fraud and interference in criminal investigations."
The witness list includes Mr. Zaccardelli, Deputy Commissioner Paul Gauvin, Rosalie Burton, the former director general of human resources at the RCMP, and Deputy Commissioner George.
Conservatives on the committee supported the motion with the understanding that two former Liberal ministers -- Anne McLellan, who was the public safety minister, and Reg Alcock, the former treasury board president -- would also be called to testify about what they knew and when.
28/03/07, Brian Laghi & Oliver Moore, Mounties allege fraud in pension management, (Back).
Commons public accounts committee could summon senior RCMP executives to testify at emergency meeting.
OTTAWA AND TORONTO — A House of Commons committee will consider a motion Thursday to force ex-RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and other former senior and current RCMP officers to testify after some of their colleagues alleged fraud Wednesday in the management of their pension plans.
The explosive allegations came at a public accounts committee meeting hearing testimony about claims that millions of dollars in inappropriate charges were made to the force's pension and insurance plans.
"The RCMP has had a small group of managers who through their actions and inactions are responsible for serious breaches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct and even the Criminal Code," Chief Superintendent Fraser Macaulay told the committee members Wednesday.
The committee will hold an emergency meeting Thursday.
"This is just stunning," said Liberal committee member Borys Wrzesnewskyj. "People are misusing rank-and-file officers' pensions. People who put their lives on the line for us."
One of the current officers who broke ranks and criticized his leaders was Sergeant Steve Walker. "Every core value and rule of ethical conduct that I held to be true and dear as a rank-and-file member of the RCMP has been decimated and defiled by employees at the highest levels of the RCMP," he said.
In an interview from his home Wednesday night, Chief Supt. Macaulay said he was shocked over the way senior RCMP officials had dealt with the pension fund allegations.
"At the end of the day, I believe that if the commissioner at the helm today was in charge then this would have not happened," he said. "Internally, things are starting to change."
He said the RCMP had the tools to handle the matter internally, but that individuals failed to react appropriately. "Our choice would have been to do it [investigate] through the processes that were in place, rather than the people in charge of those processes."
Wednesday night, RCMP deputy commissioner of human resources Barb George stepped down. The announcement was made in an e-mail circulated by acting commissioner Bev Busson.
"Deputy Commissioner George felt it would be best for the RCMP to leave her position at this time and I concurred with her decision," said the e-mail, a copy of which was provided to The Globe and Mail. "A permanent replacement will be announced shortly."
Mr. Wrzesnewskyj believes a public inquiry into the matter may be needed. He plans to ask the committee Thursday to have both Ms. George and Mr. Zaccardelli testify.
Other MPs reacted with shock to what they heard at the committee meeting.
"I'm a lawyer and I think a lot of the stuff I've heard, you know, if it was anyone else, they'd be in criminal court ... some of them may have been packing their toothbrushes for the crowbar hotel," Conservative MP Brian Fitzpatrick said.
Another committee member, Liberal MP Shawn Murphy, compared it to the Watergate scandal that toppled former U.S. president Richard Nixon. "The cover-up is worse than the crime," he said.
The committee is examining an Auditor-General's report released last November that said the administration of the RCMP pension fund was rife with nepotism in the early 2000s and that $3.1-million was diverted from the fund to other Mountie accounts. There is no evidence anyone pocketed the money, the Auditor-General's Office said.
"If not malfeasance it was misfeasance," Ms. Busson said of the scandal she inherited from Mr. Zaccardelli, who resigned earlier in the year after giving conflicting accounts to another parliamentary committee.
Assistant auditor-general Hugh McRoberts told the committee that the first whiff of trouble was apparent to an RCMP staffing officer in May, 2002.
This officer complained about nepotism in the hiring of casual employees for work in the pension office. Forty-nine of the 65 casuals were friends or relatives of Mounties, and they were paid twice the specified government rate for their type of office work.
Despite the staffing officer's expressed concerns, it was another 13 months before the RCMP opened a criminal investigation of its own members. Mr. Zaccardelli cancelled the criminal investigation two days later and instead asked for an internal audit, the Auditor-General's Office said.
30/03/07, Greg McArthur, MPs probe case of controversial RCMP agent, (Back).
Informant whose identity is protected was paid thousands, then became a killer
OTTAWA -- The Commons public safety committee passed a unanimous motion yesterday to review the witness protection program and the case of agent E8060, an RCMP informant who was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for false information and later killed someone as a protected witness.
Joe Comartin, the NDP vice-chair of the committee, said recent news reports about the secret agent demand debate about whether Parliament should amend its witness protection law.
"It really does call into question how the program is being used," Mr. Comartin told the committee yesterday.
Rick Norlock, a Conservative committee member, said the case, as well as recent controversy over the RCMP pension plan, is "shaking the public's confidence in our most senior police force in our Dominion."
In 2001, the informant persuaded a group of Asian teenagers to follow Mounties in their cars and stake out the RCMP's Victoria headquarters. He then told his Mountie handler that the teens were conducting counter-surveillance for a suspected drug kingpin.
The phony evidence earned him a spot in the witness protection program -- a contract that was upheld even after British Columbia Supreme Court Judge Dean Wilson called Mr. Young's evidence "a cruel charade."
While in the program, and under his new identity, he killed someone -- but under the Witness Protection Program Act, it is illegal to knowingly reveal Mr. Young's new identity or any details about his crime. It is forbidden to even tell the family of the deceased.
That rigid restriction will complicate the committee's digging, Mr. Comartin said after the meeting.
The only way Mr. Young's identity and crime can be lawfully revealed is if he consents to the release of the information, or if he blabbed about his protected status in such a way that Acting RCMP Commissioner Bev Busson is comfortable releasing it.
Acting Commissioner Busson can also expose him if she deems that it is in "the public interest" and necessary to investigate, or prevent, a serious offence. She may have a difficult decision to make, Mr. Comartin said.
"If I don't get satisfactory answers, I, and I expect the committee, will call upon . . . her to exercise her discretion and revoke his protection," he said after the committee's meeting.
Mr. Comartin also speculated that some meetings might take place in camera because of the sensitivity surrounding the law.
On April 19, the committee is expected to get a general briefing on the program from the RCMP, as well as the departments of Justice and Public Safety. It will also assemble a witness list.
Mr. Comartin said he expects to call Tom Bulmer, the Victoria defence lawyer who exposed Mr. Young's scheme in court and has repeatedly called for a public inquiry into the conduct of the secret agent.
At yesterday's meeting, there was some disagreement about the focus of the review.
Mr. Comartin, who drafted the motion along with Liberal Sue Barnes, said he'd like to explore the particulars of the case, while Conservative Dave MacKenzie said he wanted to stick to the "global picture" of the witness protection program.
29/03/07, Kady O'Malley & Chris Selley, RCMP scandal deepens, (Back).
Officers allege highest levels of force involved in coverup of pension fraud.
The followup:
It's not quite the full judicial inquiry that opposition MPs have been demanding, but it's a start. Following the previous day's incendiary allegations of fraud, theft and corruption within the most senior ranks of the RCMP, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announced Thursday that he would be appointing an independent investigator "to determine once and for all what actually happened."
Day was not ready to provide much in the way of details, including the name of the individual he hopes to appoint. But he assured reporters that he would have the confidence of both the public and the government.
As for the decision not to establish a full judicial inquiry, Day pointed out that such probes generally take months or even years to report back. "We want information immediately," he said.
Meanwhile, in a unanimous vote that might have had as much to do with partisan bluffery as all-party solidarity, the Public Accounts Committee voted to continue its investigation - an outcome that may have taken the government by surprise, given the announcement just hours before that it would be appointing an independent investigator to look into the affair.
The various investigations could see two former Liberal cabinet ministers and a senior security advisor to Stephen Harper questioned about what they knew about the pension scandal and when they knew it.
According to Sgt. Ron Lewis, former public safety minister Anne McLellan and former Treasury Board president Reg Alcock were informed of concerns over a coverup that allegedly involved senior officials - including former RCMP Commissioner Giuliiano Zaccardelli - in February 2004, but did nothing.
Lewis says he provided the ministers with a 60-page document that gave "the whole story, basically." That, he says, includes "the inaction, the lies, the obstruction, the delays and the actual allegations of what they were, how much money's involved." He says that he asked the ministers to pass the information on to the Auditor General - who ultimately concluded that the matter lay outside the scope of her audit. - but that there "was no response from them."
In fact, he said, when questioned in the House of Commons about the matter, McLellan replied that there was "no reason" to investigate the RCMP Commissioner.
During Thursday's Question Period, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day blamed his Liberal predecessors - going so far as to suggest the current Liberal caucus is attempting to stonewall further investigation into the case.
But the current government may not be untouched by the controversy, either. According to Lewis' testimony, he also tried unsuccessfully to get a response from McLellan's deputy, Margaret Bloodworth - since appointed National Security Advisor by Harper.
The story:
The Commons Public Accounts Committee held an emergency meeting on Thursday to discuss allegations of fraud at the highest levels of the RCMP.
Following the meeting, Committee chair Shawn Murphy joined fellow Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj in calling for a full public inquiry into alleged corruption and cover-ups among senior RCMP brass.
Conservative MP John Williams echoed calls for a more thorough investigation, telling CTV News that he "would rather see a judicial inquiry into this, because… the forum of the public accounts committee can never get to the bottom of this."
Nevertheless, Williams said he was eager to give former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli an opportunity to appear before the committee to "explain his role."
On Wednesday, RCMP officers testified before the committee that there was a cover-up in the abuse of the police force's pension fund. They said senior members of the force - including then-commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli - tried to stall an investigation into the matter after the allegations first arose.
"I was met with inaction, delays, roadblocks, obstruction and lies," retired staff sergeant Ron Lewis told the committee. "[The] person who orchestrated most of this coverup was commissioner Zaccardelli."
At the time, Lewis was in charge of internal staff relations. He asked the Auditor General to further investigate the allegations; her subsequent report found the pension fund had fallen victim to nepotism and that useless contracts had been awarded using money from the pension and insurance funds.
On Wednesday, several other officers backed Lewis' claims about the misuse of the pension funds.
"For the past few years, the RCMP has had a small group of managers who, through their actions and inactions, are responsible for serious breeches in our core values, the RCMP code of conduct and even the Criminal Code," Chief Supt. Fraser MacAulay said.
"Every core value and rule of ethical conduct that I held to be true and dear as a rank-and-file member of the RCMP has been decimated and defiled by employees at the highest levels of the RCMP," Sgt. Steve Walker added.
The committee is now considering a motion to force Zaccardelli and other senior officers to testify about the allegations.
"This is just stunning," Liberal committee member Borys Wrzesnewskyj said. "People are misusing rank-and-file officers' pensions. People who put their lives on the line for us."
The Deputy Commissioner of human resources for the RCMP, Barb George, resigned on Wednesday night following the officers' testimony.
Background:
Wednesday's testimony only emboldened accusations of a cover-up expressed by committee members last month after they received unsatisfying answers from senior Mounties about the Auditor General's report.
Fraser found that dozens of employees had been hired through nepotism and in some cases been overpaid, at a total cost to the taxpayer of around $1.3-million. The report also found that $3.1-million had made its way from the pension fund to other RCMP accounts - though not to any individuals.
The slow pace of the investigation, conducted by Ottawa police, meant that a statute of limitations under the RCMP Act expired before anyone could be held to account.
"The real question we're asking here is whether there has been a cover-up," NDP MP David Christopherson said at the time. "Nobody has called it that, but that's really what's in front of us."
"Are we to forget everything that happened with this case? Is it really too late to do something?" asked frustrated Bloc Québécois MP Paule Brunelle.
Rank-and-file officers have also expressed their disgust with the situation. In September of last year, members of the RCMP's staff relations representative committee drafted a memo describing the handling of the investigation as "truly unacceptable."
"'Accountability,' as specific and tough as that word sounds, has become a vague, loose term in our organization," the memo read. "We will not accept this behaviour from employee/members of the RCMP at any category or years of service, just as we would not expect members in the field to drop the ball on alleged wrongdoings/investigations in their communities."
This week's developments cast further doubts on the RCMP as a whole. Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, who presided over the pension fund investigation, resigned in December after months of withering criticism over the Mounties' involvement in Maher Arar's deportation to Syria - particularly over his conflicting testimony to a Commons committee.
Questions about the adequacy of training and communications in the force have been raised in the wake of fatal shooting incidents in Meyerthorpe, Alta. and Mildred, Sask., which saw six officers shot and killed in less than two years. The one-year statute of limitations in the RCMP Act was also criticized in October of last year, after a British Columbia officer escaped sanction for various prostitution-related allegations.
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