Mounties blasted for ‘outrageous’ conduct
Senior RCMP officials serially harassed a decorated investigator for 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 $141,000 in damages. 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 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.
Merrifield sued the force in 2007, alleging a yearslong pattern of retaliation. He claimed his 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 illegally stymied. He was pulled off an elite force that investigated threats against politicians. He was subject to repeated internal investigations, none of which found any significant wrongdoing.
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.”
In the end, Vallee awarded Merrifield $41,000 for lost wages and $100,000 in compensation for the harassment he suffered.