Quotulatiousness

February 28, 2024

Accusations aplenty, but still no clear evidence

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michelle Stirling outlines the establishment of the North West Mounted Police (today’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and their role in driving out American whiskey traders and criminal gangs who had invaded the Canadian west, and the initial role of Sir John A. Macdonald in setting up the first residential schools for First Nations children:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

It is clear that the claim of “mass graves” of children allegedly found by Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School is false. The main reason is that there is no list of names of missing persons — over the course of 113 years of Indian Residential Schools, which saw 150,000 students go through the system, some staying for a year, most for an average of 4.5 years, some staying for a decade or more and graduating, and some orphans being taken in to the school as children, then remaining to work as Indigenous staff — these many thousands of children passed through Indian Residential Schools, their parents enrolling and re-enrolling them year after year.

And there is no list of names of missing persons.

There are many claims of missing persons.

Some of these claims are quite fatuous — with one person claiming that in their Band, every family had four or five children who went missing at that school. Another person claimed that their grandfather had ten siblings disappear in that school.

If that were true, the Band would have ceased to exist.

Despite these claims, there are no missing persons records.

And every student who went to that school is documented on the Band’s Treaty rolls, in documents of the Indian Agent, in the enrollment forms at the Department of Indian Affairs, along with the student’s medical certificate for entry, and in the quarterly reports of the department.

In fact, the Indigenous population of Canada grew from about 102,358 in 1871 to now 1.8 million.

It seems that the claim of a “mass grave” on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site was timed to “nudge” the approval of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People through parliament — which it did! The bill had been “stuck” as six provinces had requested delay and clarity on key issues. Once the claim of “mass graves” surfaced — boom!

Less than a month after the “mass graves” news shot round the world, shocking the global community that Canadians — once known as international peacemakers, were actually hideous murderers of Indigenous children — UNDRIP swept through the Canadian Parliament with no objection.

A day later, China accused Canada of genocide, citing the Kamloops “mass graves” find as proof. For those of you following the concerns about China’s alleged interference in elections in Canada, this rather convenient timing might set off some alarm bells.

If anything, the RCMP should be investigating this matter on grounds of false pretences or fraud. But the RCMP appear to have transferred the investigation of the Kamloops “mass grave” to the people who claimed to have found them! Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) can only identify “disturbances” under ground, not bodies or coffins. In fact, based on previous land use records, most likely the GPR found 215 clay tiles of an old septic trench.

February 24, 2024

QotD: Big government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m Canadian and have a romantic fondness for the famous motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the one about the Mounties always getting their man. But the bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the country’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favourite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.

[…]

What should have died on September 11th is the liberal myth that you can regulate the world to your will. The reduction of a free-born citizenry to neutered sheep upon arrival at the airport was the most advanced expression of this delusion. So how’s the FAA reacting to September 11th? With more of the same kind of obtrusive, bullying, useless regulations that give you the comforting illusion that if they’re regulating you they must be regulating all the bad guys as well. We don’t need big government, we need lean government — government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials. If Hillary and Co want to argue for big government, conservatives could at least make the case for what’s really needed — grown-up government.

Mark Steyn, “Big Shift”, National Review, 2001-11-19.

December 29, 2023

Rubaboo – Pemmican Stew of Canadian Mounties

Filed under: Cancon, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Sept 2023
(more…)

April 5, 2023

The fate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after the Mass Casualty Commission report

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In her new Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin considers what should be done with the RCMP in the wake of the Mass Casualty Commision’s report on, among other things, the cultural and structural problems within the force that contributed to the death toll in Portapique:

The first thing the federal government should do is break up the RCMP. It should give local policing contracts to provincial and regional police and focus a new national force solely on national policing.

Former RCMP officer Garry Clement, author of the forthcoming book Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the RCMP, gives a blunt assessment of the situation. In an email to In My Opinion, he stated that “The RCMP has two choices: 1) relinquish contracts and focus on their federal mandates; or 2) maintain contracts but create a ‘Firewall’ between both areas and enable the federal side to have permanent resources in their wheelhouse with their own metrics for salaries.”

Considering how the force is currently structured, a financial firewall won’t be enough to ensure adequate delivery of both mandates. It is unreasonable to expect a national force to deliver community policing at the standards expected in the 21st century. Vice versa, it is also unreasonable for officers who cut their teeth in remote communities to go on to tackle big city, national and international criminal matters.

One of the main recommendations of the Mass Casualty Report is that the federal public safety minister commission an independent review of the RCMP and examine the force’s approach to contract policing. But some believe they should act now, and leave local policing to local police.

Todd Hataley is a professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College and a retired member of the RCMP, where he worked as an investigator in organized crime, national security, cross-border crime and extra-territorial torture. He offered these thoughts on a Teams call the day after the report came out.

    The RCMP is currently structured with a paramilitary, top-down approach, making it difficult to retrain middle management. It is a paramilitary structure that doesn’t work for modern policing, where you need partnerships for mental health, where you need to get ahead of problems.

Local policing needs to be responsive to local demands,” continued Hataley. This is particularly true of indigenous communities. “There’s a good body of research that shows that indigenous officers use less force, about one tenth that of non-indigenous officers. In my experience, service is better when less force is used. There are better relations with the community.”

Some communities have already cut ties due to this lack of community engagement. Last December the town council of Surrey, BC, ended its contract with the RCMP, even though it will cost more to hire local police. It cited the growth of a large South Asian community in the area and the fact that the RCMP’s structure did not facilitate development of an adequate relationship.

Interviewed in the Toronto Star about this issue earlier this year, Curt Griffiths, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in B.C., echoed that assessment. “RCMP officers — and it’s not their fault; it’s the way the system’s set up — they’re just passing through,” he said. “There’s a cost to that in terms of community policing, community engagement, knowledge of the community.”

Similarly, in March of 2023 the Alberta community of Grande Prairie voted to create a municipal police service. Councilor Gladys Blackmore told CTV News that training issues were one of the reasons. “I’m frustrated by the fact that 40 out of our 97 officers have come directly to us from Depot, and that means they are inexperienced, and they still require a significant amount of training, which the RCMP chooses to send them away for.”

March 1, 2023

If the Freedom Convoy “actually was what it has often been portrayed as on social media — a horde of thousands of literal Nazis and Confederates set on violently overthrowing our democratically elected government — then [we’d] be living in the Confederate Republic of Nazi Canada by now”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains how going through Justice Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report in detail leads to some uncomfortable realizations about Canadian goverment and policing — at all three levels — failed to meet minimal expectations of competency and capacity:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The convoy crisis — and I’m mostly speaking here about the events in Ottawa, though the situation at the border crossings fit the same general pattern — forced Canadian police and political leaders to respond quickly to evolving circumstances. And Rouleau’s report is just a relentlessly brutal catalogue of the ways they failed.

Is it really necessary at this point to recap the failure of the Ottawa police? We at The Line have long maintained that the complete failure of the Ottawa police to plan for and control the protest not only allowed the convoy to entrench itself, but also established the psychological paradigm that would define the crisis for weeks: the convoyers held the initiative (not to mention the capital) and the Canadian state was befuddled and adrift. From that, a national crisis was born. Rouleau is just devastating. “The OPS [Ottawa Police Service]’s planning challenges,” he notes on page 56 of the first volume, “were compounded by a general breakdown of command and control.” Super.

He’s even more brutal on page 185 of the second volume: “The influx of Freedom Convoy vehicles and the disruptive behaviour by some protesters threw the OPS operational command at the NCRCC [a command centre] into a state of dysfunction. OPS Inspector Lucas described the atmosphere at the NCRCC as chaotic and explained that he and his team had neither the capacity to process the incoming information nor the resources to respond to the needs it was facing. In the late afternoon of January 29, the OPP’s [Ontario Provincial Police] representative at the NCRCC, Inspector Dawn Ferguson, reported to OPP Superintendent Abrams that OPS members in the NCRCC were panicked and were swearing and yelling orders at each other and at partner agencies.”

Huh.

Moving up a level of government, much has already been written about the cowardice of the Ford government. If any agency performed semi-well, it was the Ontario Provincial Police. The OPP was the force that was generating most of the critical intelligence used (or ignored) during the crisis. It was quick to realize that command-and-control had collapsed in Ottawa (see above), and to begin working with the RCMP on a plan — eventually a series of plans — to restore order. You can’t read POEC and conclude the OPP performed perfectly. Far from it. It was probably the best we had, though, but because Ford took a gander at the mess in Ottawa and decided to mosey on off to the cottage, it couldn’t do much.

Huh.

And that leaves us with the feds. I have maintained since last year that the federal government hasn’t received nearly enough attention in our understanding of what the hell went wrong last year. This has caused a fair degree of pushback, especially from Liberal supporters who read any reference to the “federal government” as “our beloved prime minister”. But no — while I don’t think the prime minister or the federal cabinet did particularly well during the crisis, the real federal failures were in the officials that supported the PM and his ministers.

Among the many other failures, the inability of the various government and police organizations to organize and properly share the information they were handling is perhaps the most disturbing:

If you want to see it yourself, check out pages 38 and 39 of the third volume. For those in a hurry, though, it turns out that even within the government, the flow of information was so bad that the clerk of the privy council, and the prime minister, noted that staff were learning about the convoy not via internal reports, but social media. The federal government had, as Juneau and Rigby have noted, “intelligence gaps” that “hampered the government’s ability to understand, anticipate, and respond to the situation, and to reconcile conflicting information such as contradictory reports about the size of the convoy”. The federal government didn’t have the software to process and analyze online posts, even public ones.

And then there was this (my emphasis added):

    [National Security and Intelligence Advisor] Thomas also described an information-sharing gap between law enforcement and government. Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Security and Intelligence, Michael MacDonald recalled a significant delay in receiving updates from the RCMP, due to the RCMP’s obligation to consult with each intelligence agency that has provided the RCMP with information prior to sharing that information further (known as the “third party rule”). The NSIA’s office did not receive situation reports, project reports, or other forms of information, such as Project Hendon reports, that the RCMP obtained from other law enforcement agencies. Prior to the events of the convoy, the NSIA was not aware of Project Hendon. …

    NSIA Thomas further stated that it was sometimes difficult to know how to interact with law enforcement agencies. She recognized that government must not interfere in operational matters, but thought that there was nonetheless useful information that could have been provided to decision makers without encroaching upon police independence. However, senior officials were uncertain how to obtain that information, and were concerned about “crossing the line” both in requesting information and in discussing solutions.

… huh.

And that doesn’t even cover our now-outgoing national commissioner of the RCMP being so clueless she decided to just not mention germane information during a critical meeting because … well, we never really got a good explanation for that one. Oh well. Enjoy your retirement, Commissioner Lucki!

January 22, 2023

One year later

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last year, the Freedom Convoy 2022 from all parts of Canada began to assemble and move toward Mordor, er, I mean Ottawa. Patrick Carroll remembers:

It’s hard to believe, but the one-year anniversary of the Canadian Freedom Convoy is upon us. It was January 22, 2022 when the convoy began to form across the country. Over the following week, thousands of trucks made their way to Ottawa, and on January 29 they arrived in the nation’s capital, loud and determined as ever.

The following month was one of the most tumultuous times in modern Canadian history. Downtown Ottawa was completely gridlocked, bridges were blocked, and politicians along with the media took every opportunity to smear the protesters.

Four weeks later, it ended quite a bit faster than most people expected. Armed with special powers from the never-before-invoked Emergencies Act, the government successfully dismantled the protest in a matter of days.

In hindsight, the practical effect of the protest on legislation is difficult to detect. Some Covid policies were probably relaxed a few months earlier than they otherwise would have been, but for the Convoy organizers, this was far from a decisive victory.

A debate has been raging in Canada ever since: were the protestors within their rights to do what they did? Those who support the convoy argue that they were, since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly. Those who oppose the convoy largely agree with these freedoms, but argue that such freedoms should be subject to certain reasonable restrictions. Major obstructions to traffic, and especially obstructions to critical infrastructure such as bridges, are simply going too far in their view. Is the government supposed to stand by and let a group of hooligans bring the country to its knees?

That’s certainly the line the governments (city, provincial, and federal) generally chose to take and the media were almost chanting the governments’ line in unison. Of course, the governments were not all that well synchronized, which led to some blatant examples of deliberate misinformation/disinformation/gaslighting from one or another level, as Donna Laframboise points out:

During the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act, witnesses talked about misinformation as if it were a problem confined to contrarians on social media. But the Closing Submission of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly shows that government officials are, themselves, a fertile source of misinformation.

If someone in our federal government had demonstrated genuine leadership by going out and talking to the truckers, the protesters would likely have dispersed after the first weekend. Instead, a government that meets with professional lobbyists on 24,000 occasions a year refused to have a single meeting with working people who’d driven thousands of miles to the nation’s capital. Rather than being a grownup, the Prime Minister called them names. Rather than negotiating with the protesters, he told police to get rid of them.

According to Chief Sloly, the Ottawa force was understaffed at the best of times. Even after cancelling vacations and days off, there still weren’t enough personnel to deal with a significant, extended protest on top of normal duties.

From the beginning, the media failed to behave responsibly. It whipped up hysteria. It smeared and sneered. It sowed suspicion and fear of small town Canada, of those who see the world differently, of people who’d reached their breaking point. Big surprise a portion of the public did, in fact, become hysterical. As the protest dragged on, the pressure became intense. In lieu of pursuing a political resolution to what were clearly political grievances, slimy politicians pointed fingers at the Ottawa police. While simultaneously hamstringing them behind the scenes.

Page 43 of Chief Sloly’s Closing Submission says federal Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino falsely told the world — on February 3rd — that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had provided all the resources the Ottawa police had asked for. Four days later — on February 7th — he insisted 250 RCMP officers had been dispatched to Ottawa.

But the reality was quite different. Until mid-February, say his lawyers, the maximum number of RCMP officers available to the Ottawa force on any given day was 60 — far less than the number required.

It was the same story with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). On February 6th, Ontario’s Solicitor General Sylvia Jones falsely stated in an official document that “more than 1,500” OPP personnel had already been sent to Ottawa. In the words of Chief Sloly’s lawyers, this was “grossly inaccurate” (pages 80, 107).

Government ministers at both the provincial and federal level, they insist, made misleading statements about the degree of assistance Ottawa police had received. Statements that were “clearly incorrect” (page 53).

Which means Cabinet ministers were spreading misinformation. Misinformation that just happened to deflect blame away from themselves. That just happened to make the Ottawa Police Service look incompetent while turning the chief into a scapegoat. Ottawa’s first black police chief, a Jamaican immigrant, got thrown under the bus.

December 28, 2022

The Twitter Files – “How does anyone run a business under these conditions?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the sheer magnitude of government(s) meddling in Twitter’s business (even though, yes, Twitter’s management was totally on-board politically with most or all of this meddling):

[…] Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and the FBI wants a meeting this week and the White House wants a meeting this week and DHS wants a meeting this week and DOD wants a meeting this week even though CENTCOM already has one, and several members of Congress have some concerns they want the senior team to address this week, and …

Now: Twitter is a global platform. I would bet a kidney that there’s a Twitter Files equivalent for the Ottawa Police Department during the Freedom Convoy, and an RCMP file, and a Trudeau government file, and that Chrystia Freeland had some thoughts to share about some tweets she didn’t like. I would bet the other kidney that Twitter has equivalent files, in dozens of languages, from multiple government agencies in Iran and New Zealand and Australia and the Netherlands and the UK and Brazil and on and on an on.

As for my third kidney — just go with it, and we’ll clean up the biological metaphors later — state and local governments also expect Twitter to act on their content concerns and complaints about disinformation, which means fifty governors and attorneys general and state directors of public health and state police commanders picking up the phone, and 3,243 sheriffs and district attorneys and public health directors expecting to be able to reach out to their partners at Twitter, and close to 20,000 mayors and police chiefs, and thousands of state legislators and tens of thousands of city councilmembers, and on and on and on. “You tell this Jack Dorsey that I’m the damn mayor pro tem here in Glendale, and I want my concerns to be dealt with.”

And so, if we accept the premise that governments have special rights to demand content moderation, if the staff director of a legislative committee in the Arkansas state legislature and a sheriff in Maryland and the flag officers at all the MACOMS and Jen Psaki’s deputy assistant and a member of a county board of supervisors in Oregon and the chief of staff to the governor of Rhode Island, being Very Important People, all expect to by God get a direct meeting with Twitter executives because @buttchug623 is saying some things that they do not like at all, and oh by the way the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is holding on line 6 and he’s pissed and when can you pencil in a half-hour with Turkmenistan’s finance minister, then how much does it cost to manage all of those relationships?

The regulatory affairs staffing buries the business — you can’t pay for that much face time with that many self-important officials. We need to schedule the senior management team for a meeting with the White House this week, ’cause they don’t like Alex Berenson. How does anyone run a business under these conditions? “Before you cook that cheeseburger for order number seven, the deputy assistant secretary for sustainable agriculture would like to share some thoughts on the environmental trajectory of industrial protein cultivation. And about that milkshake …”

In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches.

Twitter’s path to bankruptcy runs through the premise that every government official who doesn’t like a tweet deserves a meeting.

October 20, 2022

Canadian firearms law – as deliberately opaque and confusing as the human mind can concoct

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Tim Thurley peels back the covers and provides a glimpse of the inanities, stupidities, and political opportunism that shape Canadian firearms legislation:

A typical arrangement of guns seized by Toronto Police back in 2012. Most of these weapons would be in the “restricted” or “prohibited” categories under the Firearms Act, and pretty much by definition not typically available to the majority of Canadians.

Canadians often assume our government is doing its best. Not the politicians, sure, but there is a broad assumption that at least the bureaucrats tirelessly working behind the scenes to implement political decisions must have a grasp on the facts and exhibit some consistency in decision-making. In few places is there a larger discrepancy between this perception and the grimmer reality than in how the government classifies firearms.

I’ve long had an interest in firearms policy. Those familiar with it will know how onerous the Access to Information process is and wonder why I partake on my own time and dime; I can answer only that a graduate M.Sc. thesis on legislative impacts on firearm homicide and time working in politics and government have made me a glutton for punishment. More seriously, it’s a fascinating field, and I have some insight into political and policy processes. And as any specialist in a hot-button policy area knows, there is nothing more frustrating than seeing bad policy enacted in your field again, and again, and again.

Firearms are classified into three categories under the Firearms Act: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited. All three require a separate level of licence, obtained with escalating difficulty after multiple courses and checks. (Prohibited licences are no longer issued to the regular public, but some Canadians hold them as part of a grandfathering in of prior licence holders.) Each category is primarily determined by firearm design. A simple overview: restricted firearms are some rifles and most pistols, prohibited firearms are shorter-barrelled pistols or fully automatic (or converted to another mechanism therefrom), and non-restricted firearms are anything else meeting the legal definition of a firearm, typically meaning typical hunting rifles and shotguns.

That’s a simplified version, but that’s the system.

In theory.

In practice, as my requested documents confirmed, firearm classification in Canada is an opaque and byzantine nightmare. A messy plethora of firearms which meet the functional criteria for being non-restricted, subject to the least stringent oversight and controls, are prescribed by regulation as either restricted or prohibited, and therefore subject to more controls or outright banned. Since functional differences are accounted for by law and did not apply in these cases, the deviations must have another explanation.

In short, politics.

Take the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks. Despite the unlicensed murderer smuggling his firearms from the United States, the Liberals took the opportunity to issue an executive Order-in-Council that banned a bunch of legally owned Canadian guns mostly because it was an easy wedge for the next election. The facts of the case were irrelevant, as was the fact that the banned firearms were responsible for a minuscule fraction of Canadian homicides. The government did not even bother writing the ban by how the firearms functioned, which while unhelpful from a homicide-reduction perspective, would have at least been a coherent position. The order, among other things, simply identified a few well-known guns by name and banned those.

This is where the concept of “variants” matters. When a firearm is designated by regulation as restricted or prohibited, the designation includes all variants of the firearm, which then receive the same classification. This makes sense. Ridiculous as classifying firearms by name over function already is, it would be yet more ridiculous if a mere renaming by a manufacturer, for instance, was sufficient to evade a legal classification.

Most ridiculous of all is that the public does not and cannot know what constitutes a “variant”. The Firearms Act does not define it. The Canadian government does not define it. Nor do its agencies, even the one responsible for determining variants: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The Mossberg Blaze 47 saga is illustrative of this problem. It is uncontroversial to assume that a precise mechanical copy of an original Russian AK-47 with a different name and slight design changes is still an AK-47. But when Mossberg, the manufacturer, slapped a plastic frame bearing some resemblance to Kalashnikov’s famous design on its Blaze rifle — a cheap, non-restricted, rimfire rifle suitable for, at worst, a particularly aggressive colony of rabbits — that new gun, dubbed the Blaze 47, somehow transformed from an unthreatening small-game rifle to a dangerous AK-47 variant prohibited under Former Prohibited Weapons Order No. 13.

The amazing transformation of a simple .22LR plinker into a facsimile of a dangerous “black fully semi-automatic murder machine”.

These head-scratching decisions have confused firearm owners and manufacturers, who wasted decades trying to understand how the government decides to classify their guns. It all seemed very random.

Surprise! It is!

July 3, 2022

More evidence produced against RCMP Commissioner … how long can she hang on now?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates cut-down edition of The Line‘s weekly dispatch, the editors look at another confirmation that RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki really ought to resign, and soon:

Another document has been released that addresses the controversial teleconference between Lucki and local commanders and officials in Nova Scotia on April 28, 2020. This document is an email (which has been published by the Mass Casualty Commission in full), written by Lia Scanlan, a civilian who was working with the Nova Scotia RCMP as a communications advisor. She was a participant in the teleconference that is the source of the controversy. In an email sent to Lucki in 2021, well after the events in question but well before the recent controversy erupted, Scanlan harshly criticized Lucki’s conduct.

The bulk of Scanlan’s email relates to Lucki’s insensitivity to the officers and civilian staff in Nova Scotia in the aftermath of the shooting. (Lucki, for her part, has already acknowledged that she behaved badly in the meeting and regrets it.) What’s interesting for the purposes of the broader story, however, is that Scanlan’s email repeats the primary allegation contained in the earlier explosive document: that Lucki told the local commanders and officials that she was under political pressure to accelerate the release of information about the crime prior to a forthcoming gun-control announcement by the Trudeau Liberal government.

Specifically, Scanlan wrote: “Eventually, you informed us of the pressures and conversation with Minister Blair, which we clearly understood was related to the upcoming passing of the gun legislation. and there it was. I remember a feeling of disgust as I realized this was the catalyst for the conversation and perhaps a justification for what you were saying about us.”

This is interesting for two big reasons. The first is obvious: it is verification, from a new source also present at the controversial meeting, of the primary allegation that has been made against Lucki, and which she has not explicitly denied, though she has now put out two vague statements denying any intention to interfere. The second interesting thing is that one of the immediate lines of defence that miraculously sprung into being last week — just kidding, these were clearly PMO talking points — was that criticisms of Lucki’s conduct simply reflected the old-guard, all-male club mentality of the RCMP seeing an opportunity to put a hatchet into the uppity lady boss they’ve been saddled with by the Trudeau government.

Your Line editors weren’t born yesterday. We’re sure there’s plenty of good ole boys in the RCMP who do indeed feel exactly that way about Lucki. Scanlan, though, doesn’t reflect that. She’s a young woman, and a civilian. Further, even if the allegations were 100 per cent coming from an old-boys club, that doesn’t mean the allegations aren’t true. There have been many, many examples of pissed-off, agenda-driven people with axes to grind striking back at their rivals and opponents by … telling the truth about them.

As we said last week, Lucki is probably finished. If she doesn’t have the good judgment to resign, she should be fired. We don’t honestly know if this problem goes any higher up the chain of command than her. That’s why we repeat what we said last week: we need an investigation into this.

We will note that the government’s tone has slightly changed this week. It’s hard to read too much into government statements. And we want to be careful to avoid simply projecting our own views onto bland bureaucratese. But it does seem to us that the government’s position has evolved slightly, from “There’s no truth to these allegations and we stand by the commissioner” to something more akin to, “Hey, if she did this, it wasn’t because we asked her to. Don’t blame us!”

Commissioner Lucki? That sound you hear is the big red bus you will soon be thrown under pulling up to the curb you are standing beside. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

June 23, 2022

Lucki will need to be lucky to keep her job as RCMP Commissioner

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Stephen Maher covers the active collusion between the Commissioner of the RCMP, Brenda Lucki, and the Liberals in Ottawa to use the tragedy in Nova Scotia that took so many lives to push for further federal gun control measures:

It is bitterly ironic that the first female commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police may have to resign for pushing the force to be more open, but it is hard to imagine that Brenda Lucki will be able to maintain public confidence after evidence presented Tuesday in the inquiry into the Nova Scotia mass shooting.

On April 28, 2020, 10 days after a killer went on a shooting and arson rampage that left 22 innocent people dead in rural Nova Scotia, Supt. Darren Campbell gave a news conference in which he declined to reveal what kind of firearms the killer used because investigators in Canada and the United States were still trying to find out how the killer came to have them.

After the news conference, Lucki summoned Campbell to a conference call where she chewed him out for holding that information back, as the Halifax Examiner reported.

    “The Commissioner said she had promised the Minister of Public Safety and the Prime Minister’s Office that the RCMP (we) would release this information”, Campbell’s notes say. “I tried to explain there was no intent to disrespect anyone however we could not release this information at this time. The Commissioner then said that we didn’t understand, that this was tied to pending gun control legislation that would make officers and the public safer. She was very upset and at one point Deputy Commissioner (Brian) Brennan tried to get things calmed down but that had little effect. Some in the room were reduced to tears and emotional over this belittling reprimand.”

If this is accurate — and a statement from Lucki late Tuesday did not contradict it, reading in part that “I regret the way I approached the meeting and the impact it had on those in attendance” — then it is hard to see how Lucki can stay in her job. Further, the jobs of then-public safety minister Bill Blair and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are also in jeopardy.

[…]

Trudeau and Blair are in the vote-seeking business, but Lucki is not supposed to be. If Campbell’s notes are accurate, she was confused about that, which is worrying.

We don’t know how much pressure the Liberals were applying. They clearly wanted to make a big splash with their gun announcement, and it would have had more impact if they had been able to say that they were banning the very guns used by the killer.

Pierre Poilievre has called for an emergency committee meeting to look into the matter, and that seems like a good idea. If Lucki was clumsily freelancing, seeking to curry favour with her bosses, she needs to go. If Blair and Trudeau were putting the muscle on her to release politically helpful information even at the risk of damaging an investigation, they need to go. Either way, we need to find out.

March 11, 2022

Donate money to a legal, peaceful protest and be deprived of your rights on a governmental whim. Welcome to Canada!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In First Things, Craig A. Carter recaps the events of February here in Canada after the government suddenly decided to treat non-violent protests as existential threats to the regime:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

Last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet used special powers under the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of Canadian citizens who supported Freedom Convoy protests against vaccine mandates. The government partnered with banks and other businesses to “de-bank” Canadians, circumventing due process and normalizing a dangerous, undemocratic policy. Canada has since revoked the Emergencies Act and instructed banks to unfreeze the targeted bank accounts, but this action set a dangerous precedent.

On February 22, the House of Commons Finance Committee questioned Department of Finance Assistant Deputy Minister Isabelle Jacques about the details of these financial measures. The government revealed that more than 206 accounts were frozen. Exactly how many “more” was not indicated. Trudeau revoked the Emergencies Act on February 23. But we still do not know how many accounts were frozen. No judicial review is permitted of the actions of banks under the Emergencies Act.

The government targeted not only protest participants, but also those who merely donated to the protesters. A reporter asked Jacques if a person who donated to a crowdfunding platform with no further involvement in protests could have their bank account frozen. The answer was “Yes.” Some people were punished without being formally charged with a crime at all.

In some cases, the right to a trial and the presumption of innocence were discarded. The Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP) has stated that they provided the names of Freedom Convoy donors to financial institutions. The RCMP claimed that these individuals were major influencers in the protests or truck drivers who refused to leave the area. This might be the case, but we have no way of knowing for sure. Normally, when the RCMP conducts an investigation, they charge an individual with a specific crime and then give evidence to the Crown prosecutor, who decides if the person should be tried in court. If the person is found guilty after trial, then the judge sentences the person, and the sentence is carried out. However, in this situation, the whole process was reversed. The RCMP determined guilt and imposed a punishment before conducting a proper trial for explicit charges. And because this was done under the Emergencies Act, citizens do not have the ability to sue the bank or the RCMP for mistakes — cases of mistaken identity, for example. There was no incentive against carelessness.

There has also been controversy over whose accounts were frozen. The Globe and Mail reports that the RCMP told the House of Commons Finance Committee on March 7 that a “small number” of additional accounts were frozen under the Emergencies Act based on the banks’ own “risk-based” reviews and were not on a list of names provided by the RCMP.

March 5, 2022

QotD: Bike gangs

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The “Liberal Party of Canada” isn’t the catchiest name for a Quebec biker gang. On the other hand, it’s no more clunkily uncool than, say, the Rock Machine or any of the province’s other biker gangs. The Liberal party is certainly a machine and it’s proving harder to crack than most rocks, and it’s essentially engaged in the same activities as the other biker gangs: the Grits launder money; they enforce a ruthless code of omertà when fainthearted minions threaten to squeal; they threaten to whack their enemies; they keep enough cash on hand in small bills of non-sequential serial numbers to be able to deliver suitcases with a couple hundred grand hither and yon; and they sluice just enough of the folding stuff around law enforcement agencies to be assured of co-operation. The Mounties’ Musical Ride received $3 million from the Adscam funds, but, alas, the RCMP paperwork relating to this generous subsidy has been, in keeping with time-honoured Liberal book-keeping practices, “inadvertently lost.”

Mark Steyn, “Exit strategy”, Western Standard, 2005-06-15

January 11, 2022

Through the North-West Passage 1940-1942

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Vancouver Maritime Museum
Published 21 Aug 2020

in 1942, the St. Roch became the first vessel to complete the west-east traverse of the Northwest Passage. This documentary chronicles the historic journey. This film was prepared in 1942 for the R.C.M.P. by Cst. F.S. Farrar, first mate of St. Roch from 1930-34 and 1938-43.

August 31, 2021

Spy Affair that Started the Cold War

Filed under: Cancon, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cold War
Published 3 Aug 2019

Our series on the history of the Cold War period continues with a documentary on Gouzenko affair — a spy thriller that provoked the beginning of the Cold War.

Consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thecoldwar

August 22, 2021

Mounties’ First Revolver: the NWMP Adams MkIII

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 May 2021

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…​

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com​

The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. Upon their receipt in July of that year, the Mounties were dismayed to find thoroughly worn out Adams Mk I 5-shot conversions from old percussion revolvers. These were found totally unfit for frontier service, and an appeal was sent back to England for something better.

A replacement shipment arrived in October 1875, and this time they received 326 much better Adams MkIII revolvers (330 were shipped, but 4 were stolen in transit). The MkIII pattern was a purpose-made .450 Adams cartridge revolver, holding six shots with a double action trigger and solid frame. These served very well, and the NWMP ordered more in 1880 — for which they instead received Enfield revolvers, which had replaced the Adams in British military service by that time.

The 326 Adams MkIII revolvers issued by the NWMP were marked by a local gunsmith upon their arrival. The right side of the frames are marked “C M.P.” (presumably Canada Mounted Police) and given a police inventory number just below the barrel (in addition to the serial number above the trigger). These issue numbers were defaced when the guns were sold out of service.

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