Maher Arar, "Four Nuns On Yonge Street", And Deep, Embedded Corruptio

The two Globe stories, I suggest, are not unrelated. The argument I will make is disturbing, and it should be disturbing. One. Some top levels of the RCMP are corrupt. RCMP police-on-the-street are often honest, admirable, responsible men and women. But not all. The corruption at top levels is slowly infecting the quality of police officers at the lower levels (infecting quality in all police forces, for oversight of police activity in Canada is generally close to a sham). Canadians have been so “smoked” on the honesty of the police forces they think one police force investigating another is not farce but serious business. A spin-off from that condition may be seen in “ordinary” police statistics. In B.C. alone between 2000 and 2004 there were 111 in-custody or police-related deaths. That is too many. Such figures are disguised because every time a police-responsible death happens, answers are delayed and often don’t come at all. Investigations are a sham. Little or no discipline is exerted. But when a police officer is killed, huge media stories are produced, funerals fit for a Pope are held, accompanied by exhortations to honour the police. The contrast is too blatant to be ignored. Two. The RCMP has become a “Palace Army”. That means it has become a tool of the government, above the law, unexaminable from day to day, and – at some top levels – corrupt. Its corruption, so far, does not involve drug running and such things (as far as we can tell). It involves gathering of power to itself, serving government illegally, and working with reactionary political forces across North America. (Could that be why Stephen Harper has promised the force an additional one thousand officers?) Three. That condition creates a situation in which the government overlooks what are, in fact, crimes committed by the RCMP in a trade-off that requires the RCMP to answer government demands upon it, however illegal. (The APEC RCMP criminality is an example, as is, probably, police action at the Quebec Summit of the Americas. RCMP and Army assault on Natives at Gustafsen Lake,B.C. was certainly of that kind.) We may expect every kind of stalling by the Harper government on the Justice O’Connor Reports and no action whatever taken to discipline RCMP Commissioneer Zaccardelli, any other RCMP officer, or to reconstruct the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP. Four. As the Maher Arar evidence reveals the RCMP considers itself a North American force, an adjunct to U.S. police, security, and investigative operations. It works, in effect, against Canadian interests to further U.S. interests in Canada. Stephen Harper does so as well. As a result the future does not look bright for a clean, honest, upright RCMP serving the Canadian people. Those strong assertions are backed up by history. The RCMP has spent a long time getting into lousy company and “going wrong”. The story is a fascinating one. It may be said to have begun when – in the FLQ crisis – Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was asked at the door of Parliament how far he would go to contain the FLQ. “Just watch me” was Trudeau’s famous reply. We know, now, more about just how far he was willing to go. As Louis Fournier in his book FLQ states, the RCMP created many fake FLQ cells which detonated explosives in public places and – if I remember – even killed one person. Headlines were devoted to the RCMP raid on the Parti Quebecois headquarters by the RCMP and the theft by officers of the party’s membership lists. As well, the RCMP barn burning (faked as an FLQ act) received wide public attention. So egregious were RCMP crimes (apparently the result of Trudeau’s bravado) that a Royal Commission was struck – called a Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was very expensive. It took a long time to reach its 1981 Report. It was, substantially, a whitewash. Not one RCMP officer was charged with a single misdeed. But Trudeau, it seemed – to his credit – went far from Quebec to get an impartial Commissioner, David McDonald, in Edmonton, Alberta. It just happens, however, that David McDonald was a very loyal Liberal, an academic who had been raised to the bench. When earlier, Prime Minister Lester Pearson and his wife had visited Edmonton, David McDonald’s tiny daughter greeted Mrs. Pearson with a bouquet of flowers at the airport. David McDonald’s Commission was seriously and purposefully restricted – which is why it was strangely named the Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If investigation were allowed to get too close, it might well have shown members of the federal cabinet and Trudeau himself implicated in criminal acts. One of the activities named out-of-bounds to the McDonald Commission (offshore activities of the RCMP) so concerned author Michael McLoughlin that he did five years' research in order to produce his book, Last Stop, Paris, (Toronto, Penguin, 1998). In a nutshell, McLoughlin traced the story of a young, potential leader of the FLQ who was murdered in Paris. McLoughlin argues – with much compelling evidence – that the murder of Francois Mario Bachand was connected to cabinet members whom McLoughlin names and carried out by murderers whom McLoughlin also names and describes in detail – and even gives there whereabouts in Quebec. His book was ridiculed by its few reviewers and fell into an abyss. None of the people named as murderers or accessories to the murder made a move to correct the record or to confront McLoughlin in the courts or the press. The McDonald Report was an overall whitewash, but it is still quoted as creating “a root-and-branch upheaval … that brought about the birth of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service”. (Wesley Wark, Globe and Mail, Sept 20 06 A19) Indeed it did. But that political turf war was used to prevent the real story getting out and to prevent a strong, significant, fully empowered police oversight body from being created in the country. It didn’t have a “root-and-branch” upheaval effect on the oversight, review, and discipline process concerning the RCMP – for very good reasons. The Trudeau government was (obviously) dangerously close to the RCMP crimes. That government, therefore, could be coerced – and I believe it was. For the drive to fashion a clean, effective, independent RCMP review organization with power to set in motion corrective and/or disciplinary measures was totally frustrated. What resulted was a buffoon organization the destructiveness of which is probably worse than no organization at all. The Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP is the only RCMP oversight body in Canada and it is useless. Its creation is proof that the RCMP won the fight against an effective and just Complaints Commission. As a result the RCMP is a wholly uncontained, largely secret, paramilitary force, unaccountable in any serious way to the Canadian people. The staggering irresponsibility of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP is demonstrated daily. Read the book, Pepper In Our Eyes: The APEC Affair. (UBC Press, 2000) There we learn the longtime head of the Commission interfered so persistently (on behalf, we gather, of the Prime Minister’s Office) that the three person investigative panel resigned. Shirley Heafey then replaced them with a comfortable hack, ex-judge Ted Hughes, who wrote a report of more than 500 pages completely whitewashing the RCMP and covering up or side-stepping major wrong-doing. What he covered up was a very dirty relation between the Prime Minister’s Office and the RCMP – bringing the two together yet again in public wrong-doing. The investigation I asked for in relation to the RCMP involvement in the fraudulent unseating and trial of NDP premier Glen Clark – which paved the way for the corrupt and reactionary Gordon Campbell government in B.C. – became a music hall farce. The Commission took over three years to anwer my complaint. When it did, it reported that two experienced officers in the B.C. detachment wrongfully terminated the investigation. In response to that serious breach of conduct the Commission decided it would be up to the RCMP whether or not they would re-open the investigation, and it recommended that the RCMP train its officers better. Meanwhile the extreme right Gordon Campbell group had taken power and had set about destroying the Province. The RCMP raid on B.C. Legislature offices – now more than two years ago – was related to “organized crime” by an officer, until he was shut up. It related to the dirty, secret, and falsified sale of B.C. Rail by the Gordon Campbell government to a foreign owner. It related, it seems, to dirty Party membership bulking, and, of course, there may be other implications hidden from view. A combination of the Campbell government, the press and media, the RCMP and the British Columbia courts are making the whole matter a dangerous farce. Press and media do not report court appearances of Basi, Basi, and Virk. Trial is (obviously) stalled, and stalled, and stalled. As far as I know no one has wasted his or her time filing a complaint with the Complaints Commission. Stories of the shameful behaviour of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, however, fill the country. In B.C. a man with significant evidence about the unsolved murder of the child, Mindy Tran, in Kelowna, was refused the right to file his testimony by RCMP, was later beaten by them - officers in disguise, abandoned repeatedly by lawyers hired to represent him, and left unsupported by any public body. On CBC radio, September 20, (“As It Happens”), former RCMP Commissioner Norman Inkster had the staggering impudence to say police make mistakes just as journalists do, and so why should we be hard on the police? He went on to claim that the “mistakes” in the Maher Arar case give no indication of wrong-doing. Plainly the RCMP inner club members not only stand together, they also lie together. In both the Premier Glen Clark case and that of Maher Arar the RCMP looks very much as if it is willing to work for the extreme right and/or for fascist forces. Indeed, Commissioner Zaccardelli became so arrogant during the last election that the RCMP publicly announced a cocked-up investigation of a Liberal Cabinet minister, Ralph Goodale, in order to assist the Stephen Harper reactionaries gain power. The RCMP action was on the threshold of Banana Republic fascism and may – who knows? – have something to do with Harpers’s promise to Zaccardelli of a thousand new mounties. Canadians should watch with interest the role the RCMP plays on behalf of the Harper forces in the next election. The title of this column is “Maher Arar, ‘Four Nuns on Yonge Street’, and Deep Corruption in the RCMP”. What have “Four Nuns on Yonge Street” got to do with the corruption of the RCMP? I have said to friends and acquaintances that the RCMP is so far outside reasonable democratic behaviour that nothing will check its slide but a huge incident like the shooting by RCMP officers in broad daylight of four nuns on Yonge Street. Then the Canadian people will demand real reform. But I retract that statement. I believe that when the RCMP commits a heinous, visible public act like shooting four nuns on Yonge Street, the press will try to cover-up the crime, the government will stall action, the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP will study the matter for five years, and Guiliano Zaccardelli (or whomever replaces him) will send an internal memo to all of his mounties praising them for their excellent work. I also wrote above that the photo in the Globe and Mail of Stephen Harper, Guiliano Zaccardelli and other RCMP officers striding across an open space brought into my mind similar photos from past years. The photos I am reminded of from past years are from Germany in the 1930s. [Editor's note: Duplicate text removed 2006/09/26 - D'oh!] [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 27, 2006]