In the elevators of my clients’ office building, there are video displays with short news items, stock market performance, weather, and (of course) ads. The short form of this story was something like:
Top RCMP officers claim boss is verbally abusive, close-minded, arrogant and insulting
My immediate reaction was “so he’s acting like a cop dealing with a group of citizens?”
This National Post editorial summarizes the report on the bombing of Air India flight 182 twenty-five years ago:
Yesterday, former Supreme Court justice John Major delivered his report into the attack, and the bungled investigation that followed. It is a damning indictment of the performance of the police and the government which does not mince words in portraying officials as slow, disorganzied and curiously detached from the enormity of the attack, which killed all 329 passengers, most of them Canadians. The government was simply not prepared to deal with terrorism, he said, and the two major investigating forces — the RCMP and CSIS — became bogged down in turf wars, bureaucratic battles and alarming displays of investigative ineptitude.
It has long been argued that Canadians’ seeming indifference to the bombing derived from the fact most of the dead were of Indian background, a suspicion Mr. Major addressed directly. “I stress this is a Canadian atrocity,” he said. “For too long the greatest loss of Canadian lives at the hands of terrorists has somehow been relegated outside the Canadian consciousness.”
Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with relatives of some of the victims, calling the report a “damning indictment” and pledging to respond to Mr. Major’s call for compensation and an apology to the victims’ families.
Though it has been apparent for years that the police response to the tragedy was riddled with errors, the extent of the blundering as detailed in Mr. Major’s report is no less startling. While victims’ families clamoured for information and some form of justice against the killers, CSIS and the RCMP lost themselves in bureaucratic battles, treating one another more as rivals than as co-operative forces engaged in the same search for answers. Between them, he noted, there was ample intelligence to signal that Flight 182 was at high risk of being bombed by Sikh terrorists. Yet taken together, their performance at gathering, analysing and communicating information was “wholly deficient.
As I mentioned the other day, the RCMP has largely squandered their once sterling reputation, and Mr. Major’s report makes it clear that the rot has been long-established and festering. It’s up to the federal government to make some serious changes to save that organization — or to disband it and start over fresh. For historical reasons, I hope reform is possible, but I’m not betting on it.
The point that most Canadians didn’t see this atrocity clearly because the vast majority of the victims were of Indian origin is well made: Canadians, for all of our vaunted “multicultural values”, didn’t see all those innocent people as part of our nation. Racism isn’t pretty, especially for a country that pretends to be beyond such historical problems.
Matt Gurney looks at the explicitly non-apologetic “apology” offered by the RCMP to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, and points out that the RCMP is its own worst enemy:
So, let’s get this straight. Four Mounties jump a confused, helpless man, who could have almost certainly been dealt with by a Polish-speaking translator and a few kind words, and they Taser him repeatedly, and he dies screaming and kicking. Then they confiscate the tape of the event, and an inquiry into the incident reveals appalling attempts by officers to provide false statements and generally whitewash the whole debacle. And the best the RCMP can muster up is to say, “Gee, that’s a shame. But we’re not really sorry.”
As soon as the tape of four Mounties repeatedly shocking a defenceless man became public, the Mounties should have realized they’d dug themselves an enormous hole and swiftly apologized for this tragedy. Instead, they circled the wagons and did their best to deny what was blindingly obvious — that their officers acted too fast, too violently and then refused to allow the medics who arrived soon after to properly treat a man who was dying before their eyes. It was callous and horrible and has badly shaken the faith millions of Canadians have in their police force, a force now known for corruption and institutional arrogance as much as they are for their iconic red uniforms.
That a high-ranked official such as Deputy Commissioner Bass would sit before a press conference and mouth words of sympathy and apology to the mother of a dead man whilst simultaneously assuring his colleagues that he doesn’t mean a word of it is disgusting and will only add to the calls for a total overhaul of the RCMP. It is a bitter irony that his make-believe apology was given, of all days, on April Fool’s Day. What will the next revelation in this unfolding farce be? Were his fingers crossed, too?
Update, 18 June: The report on this incident has been released, and while it stops short of calling the RCMP officers murderers, it does call the Tasering “unjustified”.
Kelly McParland notes that even though the RCMP have a lot of tough-guy things on their list of “will do”, there’s one thing Toronto Police will do that the RCMP won’t:
The RCMP will Taser an old lady at the drop of a hat.
They’ll Taser a guy in an airport because he’s holding a stapler and looks upset.
They’ll Taser the disabled.
They’ll Taser a 15-year-old girl in handcuffs.
They’ll Taser an 82-year-old heart patient in a hospital bed.
They’ll Taser someone who’s been hog-tied, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed and manacled.
They’ll Taser just about anything that can be Tasered. But they won’t use “sound cannons” in the middle of a city. Too risky.
Toronto police are buying four of the ear blasters for the G20 summit.
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