OPINION: TORIES TURN RCMP INTO POLITICAL PAWN
Playing politics: The RCMP is not a vote-getting machine, and the Tories must learn that
In the House on Wednesday, Robert Sopuck, the Conservative MP for Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette, lobbed a softball question to Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq about the winter headgear worn by members of the Royal Conservative, I mean Canadian, Mounted Police.
The Mounties had announced that, after years of taking complaints from animal rights groups, they were going to ditch muskrat hats and provide Mounties with wool tuques.
Sopuck, the chairman of the Conservative hunting and angling caucus, asked Aglukkaq “what the government intends to do about this egregious antifur decision by the RCMP.”
Aglukkaq was pleased to inform him that “the RCMP decision, which is causing much glee among anti-fur activists, is being fully overturned. Our government will always stand up for Canada’s hunters and trappers.”
The Conservatives do stand up for hunters and trappers, whenever they can, often to the point of absurdity, and good for them. The Conservative Party of Canada is a vote- getting machine, like the Liberals and the NDP. Hunters and trappers should know that the Tories are on their side, just as unionized public servants can count on the NDP and immigration lawyers have got the Liberals in their corner.
But the RCMP should not be a vote-getting machine, and the Conservatives should stop using it as one.
Canadians of every political stripe need to think of the Mounties as beyond politics. We give police the power to lock people up. It is important that everyone understands that they don’t use their powers to pursue political ends.
It may seem like a stretch to go from muskrat hats to raising the spectre of the Mounties throwing Justin Trudeau in jail on trumped-up pot charges.
We are far from that, but the Conservatives don’t seem to be pushing in the right direction.
There is something deeply creepy about this government’s relationship with the Mounties, going back to the 2006 campaign, when the RCMP announced that they were investigating then-finance minister Ralph Goodale for leaking tax info, something he didn’t do.
Reporters later discovered that then-RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli personally made the call to include Goodale’s name in the release. Zaccardelli was appointed by Jean Chrétien, who was ill-disposed to then-prime minister Paul Martin.
After taking office, Stephen Harper put William Elliott in charge of the force — the first civilian to hold the job, which is creepy in itself because he was a former Conservative staffer.
When Elliott left, Harper arranged for him to work at Interpol’s United Nations office, where Canadian taxpayers are paying his salary and expenses, including his $8,000-a-month rent.
While Elliott was leaving, and Bob Paulson was getting ready to take the job, the government brought in a new communications protocol requiring the Mounties to send notifications to the minister of public safety whenever they do anything that might garner attention.
This has allowed political staff, likely acting on instructions from the Prime Minister’s Office, to boss the Mounties around.
This spring, when the RCMP moved to ban a kind of semiautomatic rifle that can be easily converted to full automatic, Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney angrily denounced the Mounties as “unelected bureaucrats,” and reversed the decision.
It sure looks like Blaney waited until the Mounties acted so he could play the hero to the gun enthusiasts who are so important to the Conservatives.
On Tuesday, Postmedia’s Douglas Quan reported that RCMP headquarters pulled the plug on an event at a Winnipeg mosque where Mounties were going to attend the release of an anti-terrorist booklet being published by the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
At the last minute, RCMP bosses in Ottawa told Mounties to stay away, and said the force “could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet.”
It appears as if the Mounties are being used as sock puppets by the government, which dislikes the National Council of Canadian Muslims.
The group is suing Jason MacDonald, the prime minister’s director of communications, over remarks he made linking them to Hamas, which they say is untrue.
The RCMP should be above suspicion.
If the Mounties had charged Nigel Wright in connection with the Mike Duffy affair, it might have brought down the Harper government. They didn’t do so, likely for good reason.
But it’s in Harper’s power to send Paulson on a two-year allexpenses-paid trip to the Upper East Side. It would be better if we could have more confidence in the independence of the force.
Like other police forces, the RCMP should be run by an arm’s-length body — a police services board — and not by vote-seeking politicians.
When we get to the next election campaign, I hope that the parties seeking our votes will propose that kind of reform, although we should be skeptical of any such promises, and skeptical of any RCMP announcements during that campaign.