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Bad management plagues RCMP: study

 Problems In Quebec

William Marsden, Canwest News Service Published: Thursday, January 08, 2009

A secret RCMP report confirms the findings of two earlier studies that indicated the national police force is in turmoil and lays bare specific problems within Quebec.

The Quebec division of Canada's previously most vaunted police force is beset by bad management, poor employee communications and unfair promotion procedures that reward cronyism and sycophants while keeping good officers down, the report says.

"The system favours [the] development of careerism, which members explain is a genuine plague that taints relations and decisions within the RCMP," it states. This careerism often interferes with sound police work, the report says: "It creates 'individualists' that invest in projects and initiatives not out of interest or for their intrinsic value, but simply to garnish their promotion file with 'good examples.'"

The report cites officers who claimed that competition for promotion has destroyed the force's teamwork by creating a system where everybody is out for his or her own career interests.

Quoting RCMP officers, it says the promotion procedure at the RCMP "fails dismally at 'putting the right people in the right places.'"

Officers also told the report's authors that RCMP managers turn a "blind eye to mediocre performance, incompetence and especially reprehensible actions when it suits them."

The report also claims senior officers are not trained to handle disciplinary problems. They also cover up bad conduct to "preserve the image and reputation of the RCMP and avoid, at all costs, conflicts with members that could attract media attention," it says. "From the members' standpoint, 'image policing' weighs too heavily among management's concerns."

The RCMP said yesterday that it would not comment on the report.

The report was written by three professors at the Universite de Montreal's Research Group on Language, Organization and Governance.

The writers interviewed 668 Quebec-based RCMP employees of whom 85% were officers and the rest civilians. The interviews were voluntary and confidential and were held between Sept. 21, 2007, and Aug. 29, 2008.

The RCMP commissioned the report as part of its effort to address serious problems within the force that came to light over the mismanagement of its pension funds as well as such operational tragedies as the slaying of four officers in Alberta in 2005 and the death of newly arrived immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in October, 2007.

The authors of the most recent report said their study should give senior RCMP officers "additional reasons to take these diagnoses and the spirit of their respective recommendations very seriously."

The authors found that the Mounties' senior officers seem unaware of the gravity of the problems inside the force because they live in a different reality from that of the rank and file. Officers claimed the senior ranks treat the force as a business rather than a police force.

"They forgot that the essence of their work is to be police officers," one officer told the authors.

The two earlier studies conducted of the RCMP recommended a major overhaul of the force. See: Report
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1154467



Straight.com
Dec. 4th, 2008

Paul Palango: Democracy and accountability are an illusion
By Paul Palango
“Aren’t you afraid?”

That is a question I’ve been asked hundreds of times over the past two years as I researched, wrote, and published my latest book, Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP.

The question has been asked of me by curious politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, a judge and an ex-judge, my friends and acquaintances, and members of my own family.

The very fact that it is asked suggests that Canadians are not entirely comfortable in their own country. We think we live in a safe, open society, but at the same time so many Canadians seem to believe that it is dangerous to ask questions or raise issues that might strike at the heart of something darker going on within the country.

Am I afraid?
No and yes.
In my career as a journalist and author, I’ve seen how power is wielded in the shadows.

In the early 1980s, as a reporter at the Globe and Mail, I undertook an investigation into the Urban Transportation Development Corp., an Ontario Crown corporation. The UTDC, as it was known, was the baby of then-premier William Davis, who had received international recognition for promoting the company’s linear-induction train technology. I found that the technology was extremely expensive and would not likely sell in a competitive market without enormous government subsidies.

The UTDC never sold another train after that article.

Back then, Davis took aim at me both personally and professionally. He called me a traitor to Ontario and complained privately to the publisher of the Globe and Mail about my “biased” reporting.

A few weeks later, while I was stopped at a traffic light on University Avenue in Toronto, a reporter for the Toronto Star pulled up beside me, rolled down his window, and said: “I hear you’re going to sports.”

And so it happened. Three weeks later, I was a sports reporter, but the sidetracking did not deter me. A year later I was the sports editor, then city editor and, finally, national editor at the Globe and Mail.

Nevertheless, I continued fighting to the end, driven by the belief that journalism was a calling, not a profession.

Over the years, I witnessed the gradual transformation of newsrooms. New reporters had better and more elaborate pedigrees. I remember one time when then–Globe editor William Thorsell posted the biography of a new young reporter on the bulletin board as an example of what we should all aspire to be. The reporter, Mark Kingwell, had multiple degrees and was an accomplished pianist. As it turned out, he wasn’t much of a reporter, but he turned out to be a notable pop philosopher and author.

Pedigree and university degrees became more important than instinct in the news business. Newsrooms, once rowdy and noisy, became like insurance company offices: neat, tidy, and lifeless. It was no surprise, therefore, that the stories emanating from these newsrooms became just as predictable. News decisions were replaced by business decisions, and the news business still wonders why it is not so highly regarded by the public.

In the 1990s, I wrote two books about the RCMP: Above the Law and The Last Guardians. The first book was widely praised; the second was all but ignored by the mainstream media. I think the reason for this was that I had begun to focus on the unseemly political realities of Canada, for example, the politicization of the bureaucracy and the lack of checks and balances built into the system.

At one point in the mid-1990s, I began to investigate the Vancouver Stock Exchange and the influence and activities of members of the Church of Scientology. Nobody would publish the piece, mainly because Time magazine was facing a $500-million lawsuit after having written a slice of that story.

In 1996, I became involved in an investigation in Hamilton, Ontario, of a waste-management company. By just asking questions, I attracted an $11-million lawsuit and death threats

In that investigation, I was among the first—if not the first—to uncover and recognize large-scale accounting fraud. I mistakenly believed that government, police, the banks, and the accounting industry would rush to the rescue, but I had not come to appreciate how much the world had changed in such a short period of time. The mainstream media, fed to the point of satiation on news releases and marketing by governments, business, and themselves, did not want to hear the story. In fact, they were more interested in attacking me.

I was made out to be the enemy, even though the company in question had hired private investigators to conduct surveillance on me and my family. Attempts were made to steal our trash. Someone tried to poison our dogs. My family lived in fear, and our circumstances were severely reduced, but we wouldn’t give in. It took me a decade to fight that lawsuit off and win a favourable settlement.

The two books I had written during this period were not published because of the outstanding litigation. The roaring tigers of the media and publishing world had been reduced to cowering kittens and stenographers.

By the time I came to write Dispersing the Fog, I was battle-hardened. That doesn’t mean I was not fearful, but I was careful and cautious, particularly so when I stumbled into the underlying story of Maher Arar.

The official Arar story was that he was an innocent man who was betrayed by incompetent RCMP and CSIS officers and shipped by the Americans to Syria, where he was tortured for a year. The O’Connor Commission held hearings and the Harper government awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation in February 2007, and another $2 million for legal fees. I had publicly bashed the RCMP for what it had done on numerous occasions on radio, on television, and in print.

However, as I researched the book, there was much about the Arar story that did not make sense to me, especially after I began to dig deeper into the official story. An apparent typo in the O’Connor Commission report eventually led me back into Arar’s past to a convicted arms dealer. The timing and the circumstances of the arrest of the arms dealer, as well as the fact that documents about the case went missing from a Montreal courthouse in 2000, were extremely suspicious.

As I pursued the Arar story in the fall of 2007, each step I took was measured and thought out in advance. I didn’t want to talk to too many people I did not know, because that could be dangerous. The entire Arar affair had been hidden under the veil of national security. Reporter Juliet O’Neill and the Ottawa Citizen had already been raided by the police after having written stories about Arar’s past, based on tips from anonymous sources. I felt I had to fly under the radar and get my story out before anyone realized what I was doing.

However, strange things did begin to happen. By October 2007, my sources were telling me that the government and the RCMP had issued strict orders that no one discuss the Arar case with me.

In November, my computer started acting weirdly. I found that it was heavily infected with viruses. I installed a new computer on a Wednesday afternoon. It had a Windows firewall and another firewall on its router. The next morning, my brand-new computer was barely functioning. A technician from my Internet provider, Eastlink, worked over the phone with me for more than an hour trying to determine what was wrong. Finally, a technician came to my house. He discovered that overnight someone had hacked into the system and deposited 1,105 copies of viruses and Trojan horses on my hard drive. Eastlink security said that whoever had attacked me had targeted me and was “extremely sophisticated. You should call the police.”

I did not do that. I just changed computers and used my laptop. The next week, my laptop wasn’t working. Someone had managed to get into the registry and flip off my product code.

“Whoever did this must have been in your house,” a security technician from Eastlink told me. “You should call the police.”

I was certain that no one had been in my house, but I asked Eastlink to record both situations in its logs.

I had one more attack similar to the others. I called Halifax police chief Frank Beazley and asked him for advice. He told me to complain to the RCMP about it, but I declined to do so. I knew how the RCMP might try to use something like that against me by suggesting that I was paranoid. I asked Beazley to note my call and concerns in his diary.

So I just soldiered on, changing computers and improving my defences but never going off-line and working on a computer unconnected to the Internet. Call it doublethink. I believed that if I had done so and tried to hide what I was doing, I might have invited an intrusion by whoever was interested in my work.

“Are we in danger?” my wife, Sharon, asked me.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” I told her. “But I may have to go to jail for a while on some trumped-up charge. Will you visit me?”

Things seemed to settle down after that, but when I told my editor, Jonathan Schmidt, at Key Porter Books what had happened, he was stunned. “Our computers have been down for days,” Schmidt said. “Our technicians can’t figure out what happened.”

Maybe there was a connection and maybe not. Maybe it was all just a coincidence, but I had to take whatever was happening seriously.

My phones and computers were always acting up. As I reported in the book, I was mysteriously blocked from some Web sites while probing possible connections to Arar. Nevertheless, I talked openly on the phones and through e-mails and made it clear that copies of my stories were regularly being sent to my publisher, agent, lawyers, and others, including two working journalists. I kept these people in the loop at all times because the dumbest thing for a vulnerable freelancer to do is try to protect an explosive story alone. Ask Danny Casolaro. He ended up dead in August 1991 in a West Virginia motel bathtub, and his file on the “Octopus”, as he called it, went missing forever.

I did not flinch in pursuing this story because I see myself as merely the agent of the story, and the story demanded that I go as far as I possibly could to tell it.

Should I be afraid for my life? It seems like such an unreasonable proposition to even consider, but that’s the way Canadians seem to think. Like a vast colony of J. Alfred Prufrocks, far too many of us are afraid of our shadows, of making a scene or getting peach juice on our clothing. We are caught up in our creature comforts, our ATVs, iPhones, and scripted reality television, willfully oblivious that everything we have can be taken away at a moment’s notice, because no one really seems to believe in anything but the easy life.

Dispersing the Fog is more than the story of Maher Arar; it is an investigation and analysis of the past 30 years of Canadian politics. It conclusively shows, based upon hard and irrefutable evidence, that we have lost control of our own country. There is an appearance of democracy, but real democracy and accountability are an illusion. There is no will at the highest levels to incorporate checks and balances in the system that would serve to protect us all. I guess that’s too dangerous an idea to be discussed openly.

I love Canada. I want Canada to be fair, progressive, and governed by the rule of law. It is a battle worth waging for everyone, even if it means in the short term being personally smeared by politicians, police, and members of the media who are all too cognizant of their own culpability.

That’s the only thing to fear in Canada. You don’t get killed for being on the cutting edge in Canada; you either are ignored or shunned, or get heaps of mud thrown at you. Over the past few weeks, I’ve experienced all three.

I was booked to do a number of shows on national television—CTV’s Canada AM, the CBC’s Sunday Morning—and the CBC radio syndicate, among others. Each cancelled at the last minute. Why? We can’t find out. My public-relations person, Pat Cairns, says she has never seen a media response like that. She’s astonished. It’s clear that not only my well-researched Arar story but everything else in the book—about the RCMP, Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, and the state of Canada—is making too many people nervous.

Although the media is aware of what I have written, no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to confirm or refute what I report. To do so would only open a can of worms that no one—the government, political parties, or, especially, the mainstream media—wants to touch.

Instead, the official Arar story is perpetuated ad nauseam as if I had written nothing. The CBC’s Anna Maria Tremonti was almost in tears in early November while interviewing Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, about her recently published memoirs.

An executive producer for The Hour said George Stroumboulopoulos wasn’t interested in my story, and a week later, on November 27, Stroumboulopoulos interviewed Arar and Mazigh again, promoting Mazigh’s book without ever popping a meaningful question about Arar’s mysterious past.

I have been tarred as a conspiracy theorist—the lowest of the low—which is the Canadian way of shooting the messenger. I’ve even heard reporters say that my Arar story is not credible because I do not have “official sources” confirming it, as if the government would admit to what it has done. Many of the facts I dug out were unknown to the original RCMP investigators in the Arar case, hidden from them by their own force. The great irony is that the Canadian media got sucked into the Arar story because it relied religiously only on official sources who manipulated it into a box. The facts speak for themselves—the emperor is in the buff.

Those who have read it tell me Dispersing the Fog is a powerful and important story about the way Canada works and who is pulling the strings.

My brave publisher at Key Porter Books believes Dispersing the Fog is a landmark work—an elephant in the room that cannot be ignored forever. Just how long it will take to break through this journalistic blockade is anyone’s guess.

Thank you for letting me take this shower in public. And no, I have no problems sleeping at night.


http://www.straight.com/article-173196/democracy-and-accountability-are-illusion


Amazon - Best Book of November - Here.

CHCH TV News Hamilton, Ontario Canada - TV News Video

Chief slams RCMP in new book
Beazley calls federal policing a ‘scandal’
By DAN ARSENAULT Crime Reporter
Published: 2008-11-05


Chief Frank Beazley of the Halifax Regional Police fires off several serious complaints about the RCMP in a critical new book about the national force. "The biggest scandal in Canada today is the state of federal policing," he states on page 349 of Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP.

"Our municipal force and our municipal taxpayers have been asked to shoulder the burden of federal policing in our community."

The book came out Oct. 26 and is the work of Paul Palango, a former Globe and Mail reporter and editor who now lives in Chester Basin.

Key Porter Books is the publisher of the hardcover edition, which sells for $32.95.

In an interview this week, Mr. Palango said he started a series of interviews with Chief Beazley in August 2007, and the chief’s most startling comments came in the first sessions.

He said the chief toned it down later, claiming he would have the Mounties all over him otherwise.

Const. Jeff Carr, a regional police spokesman, said Monday Chief Beazley wouldn’t be discussing his comments with the media.

Provincial RCMP spokesman Sgt. Mark Gallagher said they are aware of the book.

"We don’t agree with most of Mr. Palango’s theories and positions," he said, noting that independent polls show most Canadians support and trust the RCMP. Mr. Palango said Chief Beazley is one of several police chiefs who have advocated a change to create a stronger policy framework that sets out what police agencies should be responsible for.

"He has been a leader . . . saying that government has to live up to its responsibility with regard to policing."

Mr. Palango also said Halifax was the first community to make the RCMP change to a municipal force’s records system.

He said Mayor Peter Kelly backed the municipal police about five years ago to make that change.

Mr. Kelly confirmed that he supported the regional police on that issue.

"We don’t need two systems that we’re paying for," he said Monday. "Let’s make sure we get the best bang for the buck for the taxpayers."

Mr. Kelly said he spoke to the chief about his comments, but he doubts that his statements will hurt the relationship between regional police and the local RCMP.

"This was over 18 months ago when the chief made his comments and, as you can see, there was a bit of frustration, but things have improved substantially since then."

The book also quotes Chief Beazley complaining about the RCMP’s work policing the ports here.

"We have to police it because nobody else does, even though we don’t have the proper tools for the job. To police the ports, you need an overseas intelligence capability. You need manpower to conduct searches of ships and containers. You need things that we just don’t have. The ports are wide open. National security is a joke."

Mr. Palango said the RCMP is weakest at the federal level but is also troubled at the provincial and municipal levels.

He finds it wrong that municipal officers answer to Ottawa and thinks the regular rotation of officers to different communities keeps them from building relationships with citizens.

"The very structure of the force is wrong for Canada," he said. "The force is largely unaccountable."

Mr. Palango said he can see a future where the regional police become the sole agency for Halifax Regional Municipality. Right now, there are about 518 regional police officers and about 180 Mounties here.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/search.html
Commanding Officer’s Communique
November 4, 2008

No doubt many of you have read the Commissioner’s and Deputy Commissioner Pacific Region’s communiqués of earlier today concerning the recent publication of a work called, “Dispersing the Fog”, by Paul Palango. Unfortunately, the book is full of many inaccuracies and, as a result, dubious conclusions about the RCMP, and the fine men and women who work here.

As part of his research, Mr. Palango spoke to some current and retired Chiefs of police across Canada, including Chief Frank Beazley of Halifax and former Chief Edgar MacLeod of Cape Breton. While I do not wish to burden you with context and background, I believe it is important to state that open and professional discussions amongst police partners is the foundation for trust and effective service to citizens. To that end I have met with Chief Beazley and expressed my and your concerns over comments attributed to him. Chief Beazley stated he believes some of his comments were taken out of context and he confirmed his, and his management team’s support, for working collaboratively with us in an integrated manner.

I have further discussed this book with senior officials within the Province, alerting them to my concern for its inaccuracies and questionable conclusions. Although the RCMP went out of its way to provide access and accurate information to the author prior to publication, it was not considered. We have a long tradition of innovative and effective policing approaches; indeed, some of our work around Crime Reduction is literally driving crime down by double digit percentages annually, making communities safer and healthier places to live. That said, we are not perfect. When fault is found in our actions or approaches, we must immediately change practice, improve training, and learn constantly; this assures improvement and the ongoing professionalism of our organization.

A year ago, Cst. Sandy Savage of “J” Division shared with me a front cover article published in the Star Weekly Magazine entitled, “Can the Mounties’ new boss make them popular again?” The story highlighted that “[t]he famous force in recent years has lost some hard-won prestige. Its [employees] are the same high calibre, its principles are unchanged, but its public support has weakened, and with it, morale and effectiveness.”1 The story was published in July, 1960! We are not the same organization we were in 1960, or even 2000 for that matter. We learn, change and grow.

I want to thank you for your hard work and commitment to making this the best police agency in the world. It is by working together at all levels, learning from our mistakes, and demonstrating great value to the communities where we serve, that trust and support of citizens are earned. Steve Graham, A/Commr.

Commanding Officer
“H” Division - Nova Scotia
Was Maher Arar linked to the FBI?

By Charlie Smith

A journalist who has written three books on the RCMP says a typographical error in a federal commission of inquiry report led him to discover a great deal about Maher Arar’s past. Paul Palango, author of the new book Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP (Key Porter Books, $32.95), told the Straight in a phone interview that he wonders if Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, has had a long-standing relationship with the FBI. Palango also said he thinks that the federal government made former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli a fall guy, possibly to cover this up.

Zaccardelli resigned in 2006 after revelations that the RCMP shared information about Arar with U.S. authorities, who detained him at an airport in New York. “They had to have a scapegoat to hammer home this Arar story,” Palango said. “And he was made a scapegoat.”

A commission headed by Ontario associate chief justice Dennis O’Connor had a mandate to report on the period between Arar’s detention in the United States on September 26, 2002, and Arar’s return to Canada in October 2003. O’Connor determined that Arar was shipped to Syria by the Americans and tortured, even though he posed no threat to national security. Prime Minister Stephen Harper later announced a $12.5-million settlement (including legal fees) for Arar, who never testified under oath to anyone about his experiences.

Palango, a former national news editor at the Globe and Mail, said he had originally planned to write one chapter on Arar as an example of RCMP bungling. But it mushroomed into a much larger portion of the book as he learned more about the case. He noted that the O’Connor commission report provided very little information about Arar’s past.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Palango said. “If you asked the basic questions of journalists—who, what, where, when, why, and how—he’s like an invisible man.”

Palango discovered that the O’Connor commission report misspelled the name of a company that was listed as part of Arar’s employment history. In one place, it was identified as “CIM21000 Inc.”, and in another, it was written as “CIM2000”.

Palango later discovered that Arar had set up a company with a slightly different name, CIM 2000 Inc., which was registered between 1997 and 2000 in the name of his former sister-in-law, Parto Navidi. At the time, she and her ex-husband, Mourad Mazigh, were living in a house owned by an arms dealer named Pietro Rigolli. Rigolli was later jailed for violating a U.S. embargo on selling military hardware to Iran. Palango reports in his book that search warrants were executed on Navidi’s house and at a building at a Montreal airport, but that the affidavits to support the search warrants disappeared from a Montreal courthouse in 2000. In the book, Palango notes that it’s unclear whether Arar lived in the house with his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s then-wife.

Palango said that if in fact Arar was living there, “In light of the Rigolli investigation, which was conducted on both sides of the border in 1999 and 2000, Arar and his family would have been identified as being the tenants of Rigolli’s house. And all of those connections would have been made.” In 1999, Arar went to Boston to work for a company called MathWorks, which Palango said was a contractor for the CIA and the U.S. defence department. Palango said that Arar appeared to have no difficulty obtaining work permits for the U.S., adding that it’s unlikely Arar was ever linked to terrorism.

“You can only infer from this that there is a special relationship between the U.S. government and Arar that had to be protected,” Palango maintained. “So what is that relationship? And why I lean towards the American angle is because of his access into the States. He can renew his work permits. He goes to work for MathWorks. You know, it seems all orchestrated to me.”

In a 2005 article citing unnamed CIA sources, the Washington Post reported that of 39 people who were sent to jails overseas through a process known as rendition, about 10 were later found to be innocent. Palango said that they all shared similar stories, which increased his suspicions about the true nature of the Arar case. As well, he claimed, all later got involved in left-wing politics. Arar’s wife, Monia Mazigh, the sister of Mourad Mazigh, ran for the federal NDP in the 2004 election. “So where does the FBI or CIA or U.S. intelligence want to be?” Palango said. “Where do they want information? It’s from the left wing.”

The Straight left a message for Arar through his publicist; Arar did not return the call by deadline.

http://www.straight.com/article-168992/was-maher-arar-linked-fbi

How to fix the RCMP

Neither Justice O'Connor's recommendations nor hiring a new commissioner will keep this unwieldy force from shooting itself in the foot again

Paul Palango
Ottawa Citizen

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Below is an opinion piece written by author Paul Palango titled "How to fix the RCMP," published Dec. 13, 2006, in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. Mr. Palango appears on the Thursday, March 29 edition of Global National for a chat with anchor Kevin Newman on his thoughts of the RCMP pension scandal.

At the news conference last week where he commented on his resignation as commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Giuliano Zaccardelli said he fell on his sword to protect the reputation and great traditions of the force. In his feisty performance he was anything but contrite: "The RCMP is the greatest police force in the world."

Is it? Was it ever?

The RCMP today runs itself like a business. It employs 25,000 and has a budget of $3 billion, but that's offset by the fact that it generates for the government at least $1.5 billion or so in revenues from the provinces for contract policing and other services.

The force does everything from hand out speeding tickets in Saskatchewan to investigating organized crime to counterterrorism probes. There is no police force like it in the world, and maybe there is a reason for that. No democratic country -- or totalitarian one, for that matter -- would envision having such a monolithic beast controlling its law enforcement structure. It doesn't make sense, doesn't serve the public interest and is destined to stumble from one disaster to the next, unless Canadians wake up and come to the realization that the myth of the RCMP is precisely that, a myth.

The Mounties rarely get their man, to the point where today other Canadian police forces find it difficult to work with the RCMP. Because of police loyalties, they won't say that on the record, but get any police officer with experience with the Mounties, and he will tell you the same thing. As one put it to me recently: "The only thing the Mounties bring to the table is federal money and toys, but they are secretive, inexperienced and charge-averse. They don't know how to build cases on their own."

The problem lies with the sheer size and cumbersome structure of the force, spread coast to coast and operating at every level of policing. The force is overly politicized and answers to far too many masters in one sense and not enough in another.

For Justice Dennis O'Connor to recommend, as he did yesterday in his second report on the Maher Arar fiasco, that "all RCMP activities" be monitored and reviewed misses the point entirely. The RCMP is like a wrecked car with no brakes, and Justice O'Connor is recommending additional seatbelts and more headlights. He showed no fundamental appreciation for the poor state in which the Mounties find themselves today, and what such a recommendation would mean in practice -- tying up the federal government with complaints about the force from across the country. To fully understand the problems, one must first appreciate how the force got itself into such a terrible state of affairs.

Most people don't realize that until the bloody Winnipeg general strike in 1919, which was aggravated by then-popular private police forces, the Mounties were a rather obscure force patrolling parts of the West, mainly controlling the native population.

In the wake of the strike, the federal government decided to invest in public policing at the national level. The RCMP was amalgamated with the Dominion Police, the forerunner of what would become the RCMP's former Security Service. The Dominion Police were responsible for protecting Ottawa and ports on the East and West coasts.

During the Depression, the provinces outside Ontario and Quebec were bankrupted and found themselves unable to pay for their policing. The federal government stepped in and provided it on a contract basis.

Over time, as the size and scope of government grew, the RCMP at the federal level became responsible for policing all federal laws and statutes, providing security and counterintelligence, as well as running the country's forensic and investigative facilities, such as wiretapping programs.

During the late '60s and '70s, the RCMP Security Service, whose members were not operating as police officers but as counterintelligence agents, became embroiled in the Quebec separation movement controversies. This led to the setting up of five federal and provincial commissions to investigate the force. None found any wrongdoing, but nevertheless, a decision was made to separate the security service from the RCMP to create CSIS, a Canadian spy agency. In an attempt to bring the RCMP under its direct supervision, the government in 1984 made the commissioner of the RCMP a deputy minister. This meant that the commissioner was appointed by and served at the pleasure of the prime minister.

Since then, the RCMP has been a police force that has undeniably struggled to do its job properly at every level across the country. Overburdened by never-ending policies driven by politicians at every level, the force has become paralysed. Morale is abysmal.

The current culture of the force at every level, except headquarters in Ottawa, can be described as inexperienced, undersupervised and, with the vivid exception of the plight of Mr. Zaccardelli, largely unaccountable. Virtually every major mistake the RCMP has made over the past 20 years, from the wonky Airbus investigation to the sponsorship scandal to the deaths of the four officers in Mayerthorpe, Alta., last year can be attributed to that combination of attributes. In the Maher Arar affair, which Mr. Zaccardelli blamed on a mere "institutional error," inexperienced officers, who were unsupervised, helped railroad Mr. Arar, via the United States, into a Syrian torture chamber. Then the officers were promoted.

In some ways, the RCMP operates like the Catholic Church sometimes has. Problem employees are transferred to another jurisdiction or promoted out of reach of controversy. In other ways it is like a cult whose mantra is: "We are the best and the brightest, and everyone else is wrong."

The RCMP Code of Conduct forbids Mounties from speaking out critically about the force. Wayward Mounties who violate that rule are quickly and effectively disciplined, and usually find their careers ended or even subverted by the force. Former commissioners -- with the notable exception of Robert Simmonds, who was quoted by the Globe and Mail criticizing the force last week -- toe the party line. That being the case, current and most former Mounties have little credibility when it comes to objective solutions to the RCMP conundrum.

As the government now moves forward searching for a new commissioner, I believe it would be wise to appoint an interim commissioner to sign the paycheques, while the country has time to reflect upon what the RCMP should be. There is a wonderful opportunity to fix what ails the force.

Here are some recommendations that I believe the government should consider:

(1) Contract policing is the tail that wags the RCMP dog. Even Mr. Zaccardelli, a brilliant man, came to the job with the intention of repairing the RCMP's federal policing capabilities, but he failed because he couldn't secure enough staffing. As the auditor general pointed out last year, 25 per cent of federal policing positions went unfilled.

The federal government should hand back provincial policing responsibilities to the provinces, which can re-establish their own forces. One way to sweeten the pot would be to turn over the entire newly constructed RCMP infrastructure across the country to the provinces.

Contract policing was created as a desperate measure in desperate times, but today Canada is one of the world's wealthiest countries and is no longer desperate. Tiered policing at the municipal, provincial and federal levels would provide better policing and more checks and balances. The RCMP would no longer be allowed to investigate itself, and provincial politicians, not the federal government, would be held accountable for the actions of their own forces.

(2) The RCMP should be converted into a highly skilled FBI-type force with a clear mandate and focus, which would include a counterintelligence capability.

(3) A separate Protective and Preventive Service along the lines of the U.S. Secret Service should be created to guard Parliament Hill, diplomats and government entities, freeing up highly trained investigators to go about their business.

(4) Consideration should be given to giving full policing powers to other agencies, including fisheries and wildlife officers, as well as Canada Customs, a process that has already begun with the planned arming of guards at the border.

(5) Most important, the RCMP must be disconnected from the political process. The commissioner should not be a deputy minister, and the government should not be directing RCMP policies. This creates a sense of deference to politicians within the force that is unseemly in a democratic country. Supervision of the force should be the responsibility of a non-partisan oversight group much like a police commission.

Appointing another bright light to the commissioner's post will only serve as a Band-Aid, because the force is largely uncontrollable in its present form. It would behoove the government and opposition parties to take a breath and contemplate the situation. I'm confident they would all be pleasantly surprised by how much goodwill would be generated across the country if they moved in this direction.

© Global National
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The Mounties give up
The RCMP is walking away from serious investigations, and failing to snag fraudsters, drug traffickers and white collar criminals
CHARLIE GILLIS | Feb 01, 2006

On the day of his graduation from the RCMP, red twill blazing and "high-browns" burnished to a lustre, Const. Keith Johnston, 27, is charting a dream career in law enforcement. From here at the Mounties' training academy in Regina, he's off to Didsbury, Alta., a quiet prairie town where he can learn the ropes of day-to-day policing. Then, with a few years under his belt, the native of Campbellford, Ont., plans to return to his home province, where elite RCMP units run many of their operations against the country's most elusive villains: terrorists, international mobsters, white collar criminals. To Johnston, these complex, high-stakes investigations are the stuff that sets the RCMP apart from other police services -- "that something," as he puts it, "that drew me to the Mounties."

Swearing-in day at Depot, as the training facility here is known, is a time for such blue-sky optimism -- a moment for grads to reflect with pride on joining the world's most iconic police force. But reality quickly intrudes. No sooner have Johnston and 27 fellow graduates scattered to postings across the country than the federal auditor general releases a report revealing that many of those positions he covets aren't actually getting filled. Newly released numbers show the Mounties have fallen some 600 officers, or 25 per cent, below normal strength in federal enforcement areas like drug interdiction and organized crime.

Their performance shows it. On drug offences, for example, clearance rates have fallen from nearly 80 per cent in 1995 to 61 per cent in 2004, according to numbers obtained from Statistics Canada(clearance rates are the proportion of incidents effectively solved through charges or other forms of resolution; they are a key measure of a police force's success). The Mounties' rate for other federal investigations -- from immigration fraud to stock market scams to smuggling schemes -- has been even worse, tumbling from highs near 80 per cent in the mid-1990s to 49 per cent in 2004.

And when Johnston speaks to some of his senior colleagues, the picture may seem even bleaker. In interviews with Maclean's over the past few weeks, officers from across the country have depicted a force losing effectiveness even as it receives more money and legal powers from the federal government. Detectives in federal units say they're being forced to ignore intelligence of criminal wrongdoing because they simply can't muster the manpower to investigate. The problem, they say, is that the force is preoccupied with fulfilling its contracts to communities where it supplies street-level policing. Yet patrol constables say they're overburdened, too. In increasingly serious cases, they say, officers routinely try to persuade crime victims not to press charges so they can close files more quickly. "If the public knew," says one officer based in British Columbia, "I think there would be a scandal."

Here lies the dilemma at the heart of the RCMP's ever-expanding mission. Can it answer the need for a nimble, well-staffed federal police agency while simultaneously patrolling the streets of The Pas, Man., or Burnaby, B.C.? Or by trying to do two things at once, are they doing neither well?

The issue seems all the more timely as high-stakes crime reclaims its place at the centre of the national conversation. Finance ministers in both Ottawa and Queen's Park have been drawn into market enforcement investigations over the past year, while the Gomery inquiry exhumed a network of political operatives defrauding the public with apparent impunity. Last fall, Bank of Canada governor David Dodge warned in a speech to RCMP brass that Canada risks becoming "a safe haven for opportunistic criminals who deal in white collar crime." These are matters the Mounties are specifically mandated to handle. Dodge for one is urging them to get busy.

Paul Palango, who has written two influential books on the RCMP, takes the argument one step further. The Mounties, he says, have been falling behind transnational and white collar criminals since the mid-1990s, and the single, galvanizing event since then -- the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- have failed to prompt any wholesale reassessment, he says. "Nothing has changed. The RCMP's whole point has been to maintain the status quo." In the meantime, he notes, the Mounties have been defined by a well-publicized series of mishaps and investigative failures -- incidents reinforcing perceptions of disarray. The acquittal of suspects in the Air India bombing; the damaging allegations surrounding Maher Arar's deportation to Syria; the fruitless investigation of Brian Mulroney and the Airbus contracts -- all have called into question the Mounties' ability to handle big-time international cases.

On the patrol side, the fatal shooting in November of a teenager in Houston, B.C., and the drowning last summer of an officer wearing his body armour in Lake Okanagan gave rise to accusations of poor judgment or ill-preparedness. So too did the deaths of four officers near Mayerthorpe, Alta., at the hands of a well-known troublemaker. So even as all the major political parties line up to promise money and officers on the 17,000-member force, the troubling question lingers: are the Mounties up to the job?

The RCMP takes these perceptions seriously -- enough to fly a senior officer from Ottawa to Regina to show a reporter what it's doing to replenish its ranks and meet the myriad demand for its services. Courtly and soft-spoken, Insp. Glen Siegersma is the kind of Sam Steele figure the RCMP has purveyed publicly since its inception 132 years ago, and that polls suggest many Canadians still revere. At Depot's monument to fallen officers, Siegersma unfailingly pauses to salute. When cadets snap to attention upon seeing his officers' insignia, he thanks them for their fealty.

These qualities, along with his basic candour, make Siegersma the perfect officer to head the RCMP's recruiting "renewal initiative," the closest the force has ever come to a nationally coordinated recruiting campaign. In each of the next two years, the organization hopes to turn out some 1,600-plus new officers, fully 60 per cent more than the 2005 output. On one level, this response reflects the crisis every government agency faces due to retiring baby boomers. According to the auditor general, vacancies across the RCMP could reach 3,500 by 2010. "I think we'd be foolish not to look into the future, at the demographic trends, and not prepare ourselves," says Siegersma. It's also a way to show they're addressing policing problems slowly coming to public attention. Whatever role the RCMP fills in the future, the need for experienced officers will be a constant.

It won't be easy. Last summer, reports surfaced indicating the RCMP had received 28 per cent fewer applications from Ontario and Quebec than the previous year(Siegersma says that number has rebounded), and the long-term trends are worrying. Whereas 10,000 people typically wrote the RCMP entry exam each year in the mid-'90s, that number has fallen to about 8,000 recently, for about 1,000 positions. That's still plenty to choose from, but viewed as a poll, it's hardly a vote of confidence. Then there's the problem of keeping the good ones. "For many of those who joined in the past, it was the only choice they had, and they tended to stay," said RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli in an interview. "In today's society, young men and women have different options, different alternatives. So if we don't make this profession attractive to them, they'll go somewhere else."

So while Siegersma denies the force is in crisis, he and his recruiters are nevertheless ramping up their sales pitch, touting the job security, 25-year retirement clause and relatively generous pay that has historically drawn a surfeit of hopefuls to the RCMP. In some cases, they've adopted a curiously down-market message. In Manitoba, for example, the organization commissioned advertising spots on radio stations and in campus newspapers emphasizing that applicants don't need a university degree or the ability to speak French to join up. Siegersma dismisses suggestions the force is dumbing down to reach its targets. "I have neither of those qualifications," he says, smiling. "I think I've done okay."

It's been a long time since the Mounties tried this hard to be liked, and if the charm offensive is really about drawing more recruits, the next, obvious question is: where are they going to put these people? That's where the difficulties truly begin. The 20-year agreement under which the force currently supplies policing services to cities, towns and rural communities across the country expires in 2012, with a general review due to begin next year. The Mounties are almost certain to face pressure to bump up their presence in those places where they provide community policing. Numbers tabled last November by the Conservatives in the House of Commons show a net shortage of 358 officers in provincial and municipal contracts. And in the force's recent "client satisfaction" surveys, it scored poorly on the issue of effective deployment of resources. "If the RCMP can't supply the bodies for their contracts, they're going to lose them," says Ronald Stansfield, head of the justice studies program at the University of Guelph. "The municipalities will go out and create their own police agencies."

More troubling still is the word of officers on the street, who say the staffing crisis is already putting public safety at risk. One constable posted in B.C.'s Lower Mainland says he attends between 20 and 40 calls on an average Friday or Saturday night, each of which requires him to write up an investigative file. "Of those, you might get three or four that really need to be investigated," says the officer, and with such a heavy workload, officers spend their days off buried under paperwork. Worse, he says, they begin to cut corners. "Instead of investigating a case, they're looking for ways out. They want to kill that file as soon as possible."

Their means of pinching off investigations are varied. Sometimes officers stop investigating if witnesses can't provide a slam-dunk identification of a perpetrator, the constable says. Or they might try to discourage victims -- implicitly or not so implicitly -- from pressing charges. "Let's say two people who are drunk have beaten each other up fairly badly -- broken noses, bleeding," he explains. "You find witnesses who say, yup, that guy started it by taking a beer bottle and smashing it over that guy's head.

"Well, how many times have I seen a police officer go up to the victim and say, 'You know what? I realize your head hurts and you have a black eye, but this guy is an acquaintance of yours, right? This isn't going to court until about nine months from now, and by then you're going to forget all about this. You'll have to take a day off work, maybe two. Your boss isn't going to be happy and you're going to miss the money. So are you sure you want me to charge him with this?'

"When the guy finally says, 'Nah, forget it,' you just write off the file. 'Victim knows assailant. Victim did not wish to make a statement and did not wish to press charges. Concluded here.' That kind of stuff happens all the time."

Like several members who related their experiences for this story, the officer requested anonymity, noting the RCMP has zealously enforced provisions of its code of conduct forbidding officers from "criticizing, ridiculing or complaining about the RCMP's administration, operations, objectives or policies." But several other members working in urban detachments have corroborated his account to Maclean's. And while some consider it "good policing," British Columbians saw the potential result of this practice in September 2004, when a rookie constable, Mike Pfeifer, admitted during a coroner's inquest that he failed to properly investigate a spousal violence complaint in Burnaby. Rather than arresting the accused man, Bryan Heron, as per the force's investigative procedures in domestic violence cases, Pfeifer said he hurriedly closed the file. One week later, Heron walked into his estranged wife's hospital room and shot both her and her 68-year-old mother to death.

Such chilling outcomes are rarer in the world of federal policing. There, RCMP investigations tend to be lengthy affairs aimed at more savvy suspects. Yet officers in federal enforcement are no less vocal, no less urgent than street-level patrolmen about the deterioration of their units. One is Staff Sgt. Gaetan Delisle, a 30-year veteran based in Montreal who has run afoul of his superiors in the past for speaking his mind about problems on the force. Apparently unfazed, he points to Montreal's drug enforcement section when asked about the state of federal policing, saying the unit has fallen from its normal complement of about 75 officers to 20 or 25 as the brass siphons off bodies to fill contracts in Western Canada. Increasingly, he says, members of the Montreal section have watched large-scale violations go by, even when they had solid intelligence of wrongdoing. "They've even been forced to tell international partners wanting them to do investigations, 'Look, we can't. We barely have the manpower to do the bare bones of our duties because all of our personnel have been taken away.' "

Delisle's colleagues in other parts of the country tell similar stories. "Contract's the priority," grumbles one veteran officer in a federal policing unit in southern Ontario. "We have to have the people in uniform to cover our contracts and the attitude is that we'll get people when we can." And while no one's denying that the life-and-death stakes of patrol-level policing demand urgent response, analysts warn the RCMP has little hope of solving cases such as the alleged income-trust leak from Finance Minister Ralph Goodale's office unless it takes its role as a national agency more seriously. "They just don't have the resources to develop the centralized expertise they should be developing," says Ronald Melchers, a criminologist at the University of Ottawa. "Canada has always resisted the FBI model, where the federal agency is really a resource pool for policing, developing innovative technologies, approaches, methods and training. There's a lot to be said for that. Maybe it's something we should look at more closely."

As things are, the RCMP has a great enough challenge funding its meagre federal operations. The force has never recovered from federal budget cuts in the 1990s, and it's true that money troubles continue to plague the force. Much of the extra $1 billion Ottawa has added to the force's annual budget since 1998 has been siphoned away by national security demands brought on by Sept. 11. At the same time, the RCMP is grappling with soaring investigative costs related to technology and legal requirements. Court decisions compelling police to store and process practically every detail of their investigations -- notebook entries, tips, minutes of the officers' own meetings -- have doubled the cost of a single federal policing position from what it was 15 years ago, says Deputy Commissioner Tim Killam. One study released earlier this year by the University College of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C., found that the number of procedural steps required to execute a simple drug trafficking investigation has risen seven-fold since the mid-1970s.

The force also cautions against reading too much into its clearance rates. Its drug enforcement data, for example, include cases investigated by a variety of personnel across the country, not just dedicated federal enforcement units, notes Staff Sgt. Paul Marsh, a spokesman in Ottawa. Factors that could influence clearance data included changes to reporting methods, legislative amendments and court decisions. "A detailed analysis would have to be conducted to determine what factors contributed to the change," he says.

The debate over resources, and the uncertainty over performance, merely highlights contradictory forces at the heart of the Mounties' mandate. They are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the result, say critics, is inadequacy on both sides of their operation. While the auditor general notes the enormous shortage of officers in federal policing, the Fraser Valley College study notes that RCMP-policed cities have fewer officers per capita than neighbouring cities patrolled by city or regional services. "There's not one detachment that's running with the proper resources," concludes Rob Creasser, vice-president of the B.C. Mounted Police Association and a constable based in Kamloops. "Our risk management model appears to be based on God's grace." Which raises the question of the RCMP's options. Should the Mounties be focusing their resources on areas more worthy of a national police force? Could they abandon patrol functions altogether, becoming a federal law enforcement agency like the FBI? Or might the RCMP evolve into some hybrid, providing both federal enforcement and general policing to small communities, while leaving the taxing job of patrolling expanding urban areas to other forces?

For now, the likelihood of the RCMP shedding any of its contracts seems remote, not least because it would mean conceding a significant part of its raison d'être. "If they're sending their bodies, of which they have too few to do the job, to contract policing, that tells you something about their values and priorities," says Stansfield of the University of Guelph. "It shows where they really think their bread and butter is." Indeed, the RCMP's leadership bridles at the suggestion that patrol detachments are a burden. "Our American colleagues envy us for having the levels of policing we do," says Killam from RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. "Contract policing is where most of us in this organization gain our experience to be good police officers, good investigators. Without it, we'd be hamstrung for expertise."

Moreover, provinces using RCMP services have little incentive to create their own police forces, notes Chris Murphy, a law enforcement expert at Dalhousie University who has studied the RCMP. Under current arrangements, Ottawa picks up 30 per cent of the policing tab for provinces that use the Mounties, and 10 per cent for municipalities. Even if the feds managed to reduce their share after 2012, any province, region or city that starts up its own force would likely save little money. "The RCMP," he says, "are one of the most efficient deployment models out there."

He may not know it yet, but this is all bad news for ambitious young constables like Keith Johnston. Back in Regina, his spirits are running high as the graduation drill display ends, and about 150 or so family and friends of the new Mounties begin filing from the hall. It will be another 20 hours before the auditor general releases her bleak report, and for now Johnston's dreams are full. Commissioner Zaccardelli has made a surprise appearance at the ceremony, welcoming the grads to "the great legacy" of the horsemen. "My grandparents and parents couldn't be more proud," says Johnston, glancing at a clutch of relatives who have come to see him sworn in. "The RCMP is a symbol of Canada."

Perhaps. But the Mounties are also supposed to uphold something a lot more prosaic than the spirit of a nation. They're supposed to represent excellence in law enforcement, an identity impossible to maintain if their efforts increasingly end in confusion and failure. Preserving the status quo, therefore, may be no favour to officers like Johnston. If the voices of dissent are right, it's both a betrayal of their trust and -- by extension -- a shabby way to treat a national icon.

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