The RCMP. The BC Rail Scandal And The FLQ

 The RCMP.  The BC Rail Scandal Basi, Virk, and Basi Case.  The RCMP. The War Measures Act of 1970 and the FLQ. Two stories. A single thread connects them.

36 hours after the War Measures Act was imposed on October 16, 1970, I was at a party a few blocks away from the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.  Many of the people present were NDP – most present were going to the protest demonstration the next day, a Sunday, against the imposition of the War Measures Act (the WMA). 

Organizing had gone on, and Conservative, NDP, Creditiste (Quebec Social Credit) MPs were anxious to be at the protest, as well as many, many others.  The day before, I had been on the phone to Eric Neilson, Conservative MP for the Yukon.  He had trouble hearing me.  “This phone line is terrible”, he said.  “I can hardly hear you. I wonder what’s the matter.”

“I’m afraid it’s quite simple,” I said.  “The RCMP is tapping my phone and yours, too.  That drains the line.”  “They can’t be tapping my phone here in the Parliament Buildings”, he said. 

He was right.  To do so was a violation of Canadian Constitutional practice.  He proved later that the RCMP was tapping his phone. And that was just the beginning….

Eight days after the War Measures Act was imposed, I gave an address at York University in Toronto.  My speech challenged Pierre Trudeau and the WMA and traced its ill effects on reform activities and radical groups across the country.  Unknown to me, the RCMP recorded the address and put it in my RCMP file in Ottawa.  The last time I could get someone “inside” to check, it was still there.

As the party near the Parliament Buildings was winding down, someone turned on the TV – and there was the news that the murdered body of Pierre Laporte (kidnapped Quebec cabinet minister) was found in the trunk of a car near St. Hubert airport. He was the second of two kidnapped – the other being James Cross, British diplomat, later freed. After the imposition of the WMA, (before the death of Laporte) hundreds of Quebecers were arrested, jailed arbitrarily without charges and without reason given … pulled from their homes often in the middle of the night. The whole process looked planned….

Our house party ended.  The next day, Sunday, thousands of shocked and puzzled Canadians flowed to the lawns around the Parliament Buildings, disturbed and unhappy.  NOT, as the Mainstream Press reported, to “support Trudeau and the WMA”.

The planned protest?  No Conservatives, no NDP, no Creditistes appeared.  Only Ottawa’s leading lady activist Charlotte McEwen and about eighteen Marxist Leninists and … me. We had placards. We discussed and conversed with people for hours… with barely a hint of animosity from anyone there.

The death of Pierre Laporte was crucial.  The arranged protest had almost evaporated.  The mood of the country changed … suddenly.  The story has been told … and told (falsely, says Louis Hamelin). 

Now he has just retold it in a 600 page novel in which real characters (barely disguised) abound.  The novel (in French) is the result of eight years of intensive research by author Louis Hamelin.  In it, apparently, he repeats the idea that involved mediator/novelist (at the time) Jacques Ferron argued - that Pierre Laporte didn’t have to die. But was sacrificed believes Hamelin… for the long laid plans of Trudeau and … others.

Louis Hamelin believes that the people in power and the RCMP played the part of puppet-masters in a way that even the principal FLQ actors didn’t know.  Pierre Laporte was manipulated (to his death): “It is my interpretation of the October Crisis: [says Hamelin, ACTUALITE, Oct, 2010] a man was sacrificed, when he could have been saved”.  The felquistes, too, (as they’re called in Quebec) were also the playthings of power, manipulated unknowingly by political power and the RCMP.

We knew already that the RCMP created fake FLQ cells and blew things up – to frighten the population and make it believe the FLQ was stronger than it, in fact, was. FLQ cells were no sooner disbanded or broken up than new ones formed.  That wasn’t difficult when the RCMP was forming them.

We know the RCMP lawlessly raided offices and stole parti Quebecois membership lists.  We know it burned down a barn in the countryside, intending to blame the FLQ for the fire.  We know those things – and others - created the most expensive Royal Commission (to that time) in Canadian history: the McDonald Commission.  One of the causes of the Commission [take note] was that the RCMP had conducted 400 break-ins without warrant, mostly in B.C. All of those things, and more, brought forth the McDonald Report.  Its title showed its farcical nature – “An Inquiry into certain activities of the RCMP”. 

People don’t know that Trudeau went very far from Quebec to find someone totally independent for the Royal Commission– and appointed, by the merest accident, a Liberal flack known as such in Alberta where he lived.  People don’t know that the terms of the Inquiry limited David McDonald and prevented him from looking at RCMP overseas activity where the Force is alleged to have arranged the death of people connected to the FLQ.

Hamelin suggests that even the first kidnap – of James Cross was “perhaps a gigantic police provocation”.  The police had foiled attempts to kidnap the Israeli consul in Montreal and the U.S. consul later.  How come they let the kidnap of James Cross go ahead? Hamelin believes they intended to let it go ahead … and he suggests the CIA had a hand in matters.

The point is made.  The RCMP was up to its armpits in illegal activity in the matter of the FLQ Crisis – even if we don’t go as far as Louis Hamelin does. 

What was the historical result of such concentrated and continuous lawlessness on the part of the RCMP?

David McDonald was appointed in 1977 and he finished his Report in 1981. Very obviously agreements had to be made, and recommendations had to be of such a kind that the RCMP wasn’t embarrassed or rebuilt in any significant way.  The RCMP had high cards to play.  If David McDonald tried to steal RCMP power, or if the Liberal government did, then the RCMP could … talk …  could embarrass government in a huge way. The historical result was that the RCMP couldn’t be reined in.

Louis Hamelin has his theories – which he plays out in his novel, “La constellation du lynx”.  My theory, too, is that the government of Pierre Trudeau enlisted the RCMP (the army, the CIA, British Intelligence, and more) in a gigantic, lawless move to do what it could to destroy the FLQ as well as any and all left and independence movements in Quebec. 

What government didn’t know it had done - was create an RCMP that could move increasingly, at its highest levels, independently of its lawful mandate, into what I insist on calling ‘organized crime’. It could move, now, independently of government, now in support of neo-conservative governments, now in cooperation with governments engaged in breach of trust at the least, and in criminal activity at the worst.

Remember that in the December 2005, in the heart of the federal election the RCMP broke constitutional practice – again – to help the Harperites win the election, by announcing a criminal investigation into Liberal cabinet member Ralph Goodale’s finance department.  Remember, the RCMP – I am convinced – conducted a highly flawed investigation of Glen Clark to assist Gordon Campbell in gaining the premiership of British Columbia.

And remember that the RCMP chief of the investigation in the BC Rail Scandal during 2003-04, Kevin Debruyckere, was brother-in-law of Kelly Reichert, Executive Director of the B.C. Liberal Party.  Defence alleged Debruyckere was informing Reichert who was informing Gordon Campbell all about the investigation. But the trial was brutally aborted before any of that matter could come before the jury.

Remember the RCMP was investigating finance minister Gary Collins on December 12, 2003.  Remember that almost on that same date William Berardino QC was appointed Special Prosecutor in violation of the legislation governing such appointments.  The investigation of Collins stopped without any formal record of its termination.  And the trial was aborted before any of that matter could come before the jury.

Glen Clark was forced to resign as premier in 1999 in B.C. What I call ‘the fraudulent RCMP investigation and trial of Clark” ensued, his political career was ruined by both the accusations begun in Gordon Campbell’s constituency office and by an RCMP investigation headed up by a friend of Campbell who was twice invited to run for office on Campbell’s ticket. The Mainstream Press and Media conducted a vilification campaign against Clark without parallel in B.C.

Proof for me that the RCMP investigation was fraudulent came to me when I asked for a Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP review of the investigation.  The RCMP shut it down.  I persisted.  Finally, a full three years later, the Public Complaints Commission sent me its Report – finding that two experienced RCMP officers “wrongfully” terminated the investigation! And then, of course, Glen Clark had spent 136 days in trial – his lawyer insisting more than once that the “evidence” against him was valueless. When the trial ended, Clark was absolved of all charges. But by this time – as planned, I believe – Gordon Campbell was premier of British Columbia. (And his relation with the RCMP was solid.)

Louis Hamelin believes that in Quebec “the fix was in”.  The October Crisis was fabricated.  The outcome was drafted before it began. Many in B.C. believe that before BC Rail went up for sale “the fix was in”.  And a part of that “fix” was that the RCMP would do a tailored and thoroughly corrupt investigation.  They never, in fact, undertook to investigate the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR. 

In fact, top government officials talked with the RCMP about the (search warrant) raids to be conducted on the legislature, December 28, 2003, keeping no records. Documents I examined reported Beverly Busson, top RCMP officer in B.C., was present at one of the planning meetings.  When the ‘raids’ were completed Martyn Brown, Gordon Campbell’s Chief of Staff, (by his own testimony) spoke on the phone to Gary Bass, soon to become the new top RCMP officer in B.C. 

Gary Bass, incidentally, refuses to investigate the major people involved in the corrupt transfer of B.C. Rail to the CNR.

Louis Hamelin believes the FLQ members involved in the kidnaps were “set up” by the RCMP and were the Media Front Men for a process intended to do something they never planned.  Yes, they were criminals. But they were used brilliantly by others. And all the other crimes involved in the October Crisis have never been touched.  Many of them committed by the RCMP.

Many, many people in B.C. believe Basi, Virk, and Basi were set up by the RCMP and were Media Front Men to disguise a criminal process undertaken by others.  Yes, two of the accused men admitted guilt.  But they were used brilliantly by others. And all the other crimes involved in the BC Rail Scandal have never been touched. Many of them committed by the RCMP.

The difference between the two historic events is that the felquistes had almost nothing on the RCMP or the governments of Quebec or Canada. Basi, Virk, and Basi had been in close with the government operatives managing the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR.  And so they could “deal”, even though they were cornered.

In both cases the RCMP (so far) got away Scot free.  The power of the RCMP grows.  It tightens its relation with unsavoury governments.

It moved from its role in the October Crisis  - in which, I believe, it was asked to act lawlessly – to the BC Rail Scandal where it repeated its role, I believe, as a facilitator of criminal activity.

When the Pubic Inquiry into the BC Rail Scandal is set up, a major portion of its work must be the investigation of the role played by the RCMP.