I imagine the problem is greater within the force than in public perception. This article does not mention the problem of overseers of the force. A former head of the complaints commission, Shirley Heafey, has written much and complained much of the lack of co-operation she received in her job. The Iacobucci inquiry may also reveal more problems in the intelligence work of the RCMP. The issue that really bothers me is that no one suffers any punishment from errors or misdeeds. In fact if the Arar case is a good example precisely the opposite happens. As in isolating and punishing whistleblowers no bad deed goes unrewarded it seems.
Long list of Mountie miscues precedes claims of high-level corruption
Sue Bailey
Canadian Press
Friday, March 30, 2007
OTTAWA (CP) - Allegations of a pension scandal covered up by RCMP brass may be the straw that broke the horse's back.
Claims by RCMP officers of high-level corruption are just the latest round of embarrassing misadventures for a storied national police force that's had no end of bad press in recent years - from the Maher Arar affair to the infamous break-in at 24 Sussex Drive.
If true, the claims can't be dismissed by simply pinning the blame on former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, says University of Ottawa criminologist Wade Deisman.
It's apparent that something is rotten at the force's core, he said in an interview.
"Now we have a laundry list - a litany of misdeeds, corruption, lawlessness, failures of oversight, coverups.
"I think the government is kidding itself if they think the decision to have another inquiry is going to get to the heart of the issue. I think the heart of the issue now is about the public having lost confidence in the RCMP."
The men and women who wear the revered scarlet serge have been beset by stumbles and fumbles for at least a decade.
A commission of inquiry into the Arar case last year found that the Ottawa engineer's year-long torture nightmare in Syria very likely stemmed from faulty data passed on to the U.S. by the Mounties.
The force has been skewered for an epic but virtually fruitless investigation into the Air India bombing. Much of the bungling was blamed on former turf wars between the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Other notable fiascos include a libellous letter sent by the Mounties and the federal Justice Department to Swiss authorities in the initial and ill-fated stages of the Airbus probe. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney received a $2-million settlement in compensation for the libel.
A shameful security snafu saw a mentally ill man slip undetected into the prime minister's residence in 1995 while the Mounties stood watch. Aline Chretien slammed the bedroom door shut and called the crack RCMP squad on duty while Jean Chretien armed himself with a heavy Inuit carving. They were not injured, and the intruder was arrested.
The government's decision to call a narrow inquiry into the pension allegations is "backward looking," Deisman says. More vigourous measures are needed for Canadians to have their faith in the national police force.
"To restore public confidence they have to create a forum to discuss how we can have more transparency, and more robust mechanisms of oversight and accountability."
Especially disturbing are rampant reports of internal harassment campaigns against anyone who speaks out, he said.
"What it suggests more than anything else is there are not the proper rewards or protections in place for people on the ground in the RCMP who see this stuff going on and want to report it, but fear for their futures."
A senior investigator who left the force after being blacklisted for years said anyone who crosses superiors is in for a long, tough fight.
"If you open your mouth, say, in a small detachment in Northern Manitoba you're going to be crucified," the officer said on condition of anonymity. "In a larger city ... they'll reassign you.
"You're refused trips, you're sent to places you don't want to go."
Toronto law firm Doane Phillips Young, which represents several Mounties pursuing complaints against their employer, called last fall for a ministerial inquiry into the RCMP.
In a letter to Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day dated Dec. 7, 2006, the firm cited an "institutional culture" that protects "troublesome" supervisors to the detriment of the rank and file.
"Faced with unrelenting harassment, sexual and racial discrimination, abuses of authority and widespread corruption among management, many regular RCMP members, like the public itself, have become disillusioned."
© The Canadian Press 2007
Showing posts with label Shirley Heafey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shirley Heafey. Show all posts
Friday, March 30, 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
Thomas Walkom article on Iacobucci etc.
This is an old article from the Star that was captured by my Google alert. I thought it worth republishing. I will post updated articles on the Iacobucci inquiry. The parts about Heafy's experience are interesting and reveal the sort of nonsense that sometimes occurs in investigation, nonsense that harms innocent people and for which the perpetrators are never punished or held responsible in any way.
Fans of civil liberties get a boost
TheStar.com - News - Fans of civil liberties get a boost
December 13, 2006
Thomas Walkom
OTTAWA—After giving the RCMP and other security agencies unprecedented authority to fight terrorism, maybe — just maybe — the government is starting to rein them back in.
True, the Conservative government is being typically cagey about proposed reforms to the RCMP and six other security agencies (some of which, like Transport Canada's intelligence branch, most people have never heard of).
True also, Canadian security services — and the RCMP in particular — have a history of successfully staring down those who would tame them.
Still, among those who like the idea of civil liberties, the mood in this cold and rainy capital is almost optimistic.
On one side of downtown Wellington St., Justice Dennis O'Connor releases part two of his report into national security, a detailed blueprint for reform designed to deter the RCMP and other security agencies from engaging in the kinds of excesses that resulted in the arrest and torture four years ago of Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar.
On the other side of Wellington St., in the basement of the Parliament Buildings, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announces a new inquiry into yet another case of Canadian Muslims who were arrested without charge, jailed and mistreated abroad.
This one, under retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, is to determine the role of Canadian security agencies and other government officials in these Arar-like travesties.
More specifically, the latest inquiry should, in the words of Amnesty International's Alex Neve, be able to determine whether the cases of Arar, Ahmed Elmaati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin form a pattern — a kind of Canadian version of America's now notorious extraordinary rendition program, whereby Washington ships terror suspects abroad to be tortured by friendly dictatorships.
What Neve means is that the four have much in common. All are Muslim-Canadians; all were under investigation by either the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service; all ended up in jail in Syria where, they say, they were interrogated by men who possessed information that could only have come from the Canadian government; all say they were tortured.
Exactly what will come of the Iacobucci inquiry won't be known for months. The government says it wants the inquiry to be held mostly in secret. But it says Iacobucci can hold as much in public as he wants — assuming that the government agrees.
This is in contrast to the Arar inquiry, which was supposed to be public but, thanks to government rules on national security, was often held in secret.
Nonetheless, Iacobucci can take hope in the fact that the O'Connor exercise was a singular success. In the first part of his report, released in September, O'Connor categorically cleared Arar, concluding that not a shred of evidence exists to suggest he is anything but a loyal Canadian caught up in circumstances not of his own making.
In part two, released yesterday, O'Connor outlines a series of proposed reforms for the RCMP and most other Canadian security agencies (with the significant and somewhat mysterious exception of military intelligence). His proposals are clear and doable. Best of all, they make sense.
He would set up a real review body to monitor the RCMP, one with the power to subpoena documents, compel witnesses to testify and otherwise get to the bottom of the kind of dubious police practices he found when looking into the Arar case.
He would give the body that already monitors CSIS more power so it could do the same thing. Other unmonitored civilian intelligence units (such as those in the transport and immigration departments) would be covered by one of these two review bodies.
And he would set up an overarching structure in order to ensure that those wronged by the country's security agencies don't get bogged down in a bureaucratic runaround.
The need for review — particularly in the case of the RCMP — is pressing. Yesterday, Shirley Heafey explained why.
Heafey, former chair of the RCMP's existing and toothless public complaints commission, has had her own well-publicized run-ins with the Mounties. As she noted in her annual reports, the RCMP regularly stonewalled her efforts to investigate even the most menial complaints.
But Heafey is also a veteran of the somewhat more potent Security Intelligence Review Committee that oversees CSIS. She worked as an investigator there for four years after the intelligence service was set up in 1984.
Yesterday, she described one case she encountered during her time there, that of a foreign-born journalist under surveillance — first by the Mounties, later by CSIS. The reason for this surveillance was that once, 25 years earlier, the man had written something for a Spanish-language journal that was later reprinted by a publication in communist Cuba.
This was enough to get him marked a subversive. For 25 years, his home, office and car were bugged. Yet as Heafey discovered, the listeners found nothing because there was nothing to find. He was, she eventually concluded, exactly what he claimed to be — a journalist.
This might have been funny, in a Kafkaesque way, except that by the time Heafey looked into the target's case, he was about to be deported. She made her report; the deportation was stopped and CSIS modified the way it dealt with surveillance targets.
"Of literally hundreds of cases I reviewed — involving deportation or security clearances — only a handful were justified," Heafey said.
"It was a real eye-opener."
So Shirley Heafey, who has some experience in these matters, applauds the O'Connor reforms. Security services have so much power to wreak havoc on innocent people that some kind of counterbalance is needed.
Maher Arar, who has experience of another kind, agrees.
"We are in a great country," he said yesterday. "We are a great people.
"We can't allow ourselves to become a police state."
Fans of civil liberties get a boost
TheStar.com - News - Fans of civil liberties get a boost
December 13, 2006
Thomas Walkom
OTTAWA—After giving the RCMP and other security agencies unprecedented authority to fight terrorism, maybe — just maybe — the government is starting to rein them back in.
True, the Conservative government is being typically cagey about proposed reforms to the RCMP and six other security agencies (some of which, like Transport Canada's intelligence branch, most people have never heard of).
True also, Canadian security services — and the RCMP in particular — have a history of successfully staring down those who would tame them.
Still, among those who like the idea of civil liberties, the mood in this cold and rainy capital is almost optimistic.
On one side of downtown Wellington St., Justice Dennis O'Connor releases part two of his report into national security, a detailed blueprint for reform designed to deter the RCMP and other security agencies from engaging in the kinds of excesses that resulted in the arrest and torture four years ago of Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar.
On the other side of Wellington St., in the basement of the Parliament Buildings, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announces a new inquiry into yet another case of Canadian Muslims who were arrested without charge, jailed and mistreated abroad.
This one, under retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, is to determine the role of Canadian security agencies and other government officials in these Arar-like travesties.
More specifically, the latest inquiry should, in the words of Amnesty International's Alex Neve, be able to determine whether the cases of Arar, Ahmed Elmaati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin form a pattern — a kind of Canadian version of America's now notorious extraordinary rendition program, whereby Washington ships terror suspects abroad to be tortured by friendly dictatorships.
What Neve means is that the four have much in common. All are Muslim-Canadians; all were under investigation by either the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service; all ended up in jail in Syria where, they say, they were interrogated by men who possessed information that could only have come from the Canadian government; all say they were tortured.
Exactly what will come of the Iacobucci inquiry won't be known for months. The government says it wants the inquiry to be held mostly in secret. But it says Iacobucci can hold as much in public as he wants — assuming that the government agrees.
This is in contrast to the Arar inquiry, which was supposed to be public but, thanks to government rules on national security, was often held in secret.
Nonetheless, Iacobucci can take hope in the fact that the O'Connor exercise was a singular success. In the first part of his report, released in September, O'Connor categorically cleared Arar, concluding that not a shred of evidence exists to suggest he is anything but a loyal Canadian caught up in circumstances not of his own making.
In part two, released yesterday, O'Connor outlines a series of proposed reforms for the RCMP and most other Canadian security agencies (with the significant and somewhat mysterious exception of military intelligence). His proposals are clear and doable. Best of all, they make sense.
He would set up a real review body to monitor the RCMP, one with the power to subpoena documents, compel witnesses to testify and otherwise get to the bottom of the kind of dubious police practices he found when looking into the Arar case.
He would give the body that already monitors CSIS more power so it could do the same thing. Other unmonitored civilian intelligence units (such as those in the transport and immigration departments) would be covered by one of these two review bodies.
And he would set up an overarching structure in order to ensure that those wronged by the country's security agencies don't get bogged down in a bureaucratic runaround.
The need for review — particularly in the case of the RCMP — is pressing. Yesterday, Shirley Heafey explained why.
Heafey, former chair of the RCMP's existing and toothless public complaints commission, has had her own well-publicized run-ins with the Mounties. As she noted in her annual reports, the RCMP regularly stonewalled her efforts to investigate even the most menial complaints.
But Heafey is also a veteran of the somewhat more potent Security Intelligence Review Committee that oversees CSIS. She worked as an investigator there for four years after the intelligence service was set up in 1984.
Yesterday, she described one case she encountered during her time there, that of a foreign-born journalist under surveillance — first by the Mounties, later by CSIS. The reason for this surveillance was that once, 25 years earlier, the man had written something for a Spanish-language journal that was later reprinted by a publication in communist Cuba.
This was enough to get him marked a subversive. For 25 years, his home, office and car were bugged. Yet as Heafey discovered, the listeners found nothing because there was nothing to find. He was, she eventually concluded, exactly what he claimed to be — a journalist.
This might have been funny, in a Kafkaesque way, except that by the time Heafey looked into the target's case, he was about to be deported. She made her report; the deportation was stopped and CSIS modified the way it dealt with surveillance targets.
"Of literally hundreds of cases I reviewed — involving deportation or security clearances — only a handful were justified," Heafey said.
"It was a real eye-opener."
So Shirley Heafey, who has some experience in these matters, applauds the O'Connor reforms. Security services have so much power to wreak havoc on innocent people that some kind of counterbalance is needed.
Maher Arar, who has experience of another kind, agrees.
"We are in a great country," he said yesterday. "We are a great people.
"We can't allow ourselves to become a police state."
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