Arar case raises ghost of past RCMP follies on security front

Arar case raises ghost of past RCMP follies on security front

Jim Brown | The Canadian Press | September 19, 2006

OTTAWA -- Never has there been stronger proof that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

More than two decades after a royal commission found the RCMP had committed theft and arson in the name of combatting Quebec separatism, the Mounties are under fire again, this time for inadvertently abetting the arrest and torture of a Canadian citizen.

“It’s shocking to me that this type of sloppy, incompetent, dishonest investigation is still taking place,” former Liberal solicitor general Warren Allmand declared when the report of the Maher Arar inquiry was made public.

“What does this say about the attitudes of some of the officers in the force and the training they receive?”

Shirley Heafey, former head of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission was less surprised.

“A lot of investigations I carried out really worried me,” said Heafey, who frequently complained during her term that she lacked the power to really hold the police to account.

“They do a lot of things well, but they do a lot of things that would be regarded by Canadians as not very good. And a lot of energy is spent camouflaging and hiding this.”

The comments were prompted by the findings of Justice Dennis O’Connor, who discovered the RCMP had passed inaccurate and misleading information about Arar to the United States as part of an anti-terrorism investigation.

The judge concluded the material “very likely” led the Americans to arrest Arar and ship him to Syria, where he was tortured into false confessions of links to al-Qaida.

There was a haunting sense of deja vu for those who recalled the inquiry headed by Justice David McDonald, who reported in 1981 the Mounties had repeatedly broken the law in the ostensible defence of national security.

McDonald’s solution, eventually adopted by the government of Pierre Trudeau, was to abolish the old RCMP security service and replace it with the current Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

The idea was to let the Mounties do what they did best while transferring to CSIS the broader power to monitor security threats that fell short of criminal acts.

It turned out to be easier to draw that line in theory than in practice, a point driven home by the 1985 Air India bombing that took more than 300 lives.

The subsequent investigation of the worst terrorist act in Canadian history was hampered by persistent turf wars between the Mounties and CISS, a tale that will be probed belatedly by yet another public inquiry that opens next week under former Supreme Court justice John Major.

The pendulum swung to the other extreme following the 9-11 attacks five years ago, when CSIS handed over its files on Islamic militants in Canada holus-bolus to the RCMP.

The theory this time was that the police were better placed to deter any imminent terrorist attacks than was CSIS, which could keep people under surveillance but had no legal power to arrest them or lay charges.

“The RCMP didn’t simply thrust itself back into the world of intelligence investigations, the government demanded it,” says Wesley Wark, a University of Toronto expert in security issues.

“What happened is that the RCMP was unready and unable to perform the function.”

O’Connor recommended better training of front-line officers and better co-ordination by their superiors. He will also lay out, in a second report later this fall, a model for a new oversight body to monitor RCMP security work and guard against abuses.

Wark notes that the British are able to work comfortably under a system in which their civilian security service MI-5 collaborates closely with Scotland Yard and other police forces.

There’s no reason the same system can’t be made to work in Canada. But the British have a key ingredient that’s lacking here: a long tradition of top-down political direction of security work from the cabinet level.

The jury is still out on whether Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will provide that kind of leadership.

“This is a government that came to power with virtually no experience of the intricacies of national security work,” says Wark. “To be honest, I think they still don’t know where they’re going with it.”

© The Canadian Press