Mounties blasted for ‘outrageous’ conduct

Senior RCMP officials serially harassed a decorated investigator over a period of years, derailing his career and causing him severe emotional distress, an Ontario judge ruled Tuesday.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Mary Vallee awarded Sgt. Peter Merrifield, who is still with the force, a total of $141,000 in general and special damages in the case. She called the RCMP’s conduct toward him “outrageous” and “beyond all standards of what is right and decent.”

“Not only did Mr. Merrifield suffer from significant mental-health issues as a result of the actions taken by the RCMP,” she wrote, “those actions also stained his reputation.”

Tuesday’s decision brought an end to a sometimes sordid case that stretched on for 10 years, featured secret witnesses and saw a senior Mountie admit, on the stand, that he once tried to solicit a prostitute in London, Ont.

Merrifield sued the force in 2007, alleging a years-long pattern of retaliation. He claimed his once-promising career was sidelined starting in 2005, after he ran for a Conservative Party nomination for the 2006 federal election.

Merrifield has always maintained he didn’t want to win that nomination. He sold no memberships and didn’t campaign. His only goal was to appear at the meeting so he could speak out against the tactics employed by the eventual winner, then Barrie city councillor Patrick Brown. (Brown is now the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party.)

Regardless, in the aftermath of that meeting, he claimed his career was unduly and illegally stymied. He was pulled off an elite protection force that investigated threats against politicians and other dignitaries. He was subject to repeated internal investigations, none of which found any significant wrongdoing. He ended up sidelined for months with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. At one point, while on mental-health leave, he even turned in his service pistol.

The architect of much of that harassment, Merrifield long believed, was RCMP Supt. Marc Proulx. Proulx, who has since retired, aggressively questioned Merrifield about the nomination meeting, grilling him “on his political platform and his campaign materials,” Vallee wrote, conduct she called “outrageous” and “beyond all standards of what is right and decent.”

Afterward, Proulx had Merrifield transferred out of his elite investigative unit, a move Vallee called “unjustified and punitive.

In the end, Vallee awarded Merrifield $41,000 for lost wages and $100,000 in compensation for the harassment he suffered.