Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is flanked by Brenda Lucki, commanding officer of Depot Division, left, and cadet Stephanie Steiner as they chat over breakfast at the RCMP depot in Regina on Jan. 26, 2017.Michael Bell/The Canadian Press
Bill Elliott says he had to have sharp elbows while serving as Canada’s top police officer. “When I was exercising my independence, someone might ask me, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’” he says. “My answer would be, ‘I’m the commissioner of the RCMP.’ ”
Mr. Elliott, who led the force from 2007 to 2011, was the first civil servant to hold the position usually assumed by career police officers. He waged several public battles with senior RCMP commanders who viewed him as an outsider.
Today, Mr. Elliott says pushing back was just part of the job and that he challenged cabinet ministers, too. “Politicians were pretty aware of the fundamental notion of the independence of police,” he said, although “sometimes I had situations where ministers didn’t know quite where the line was. But they knew there was a line. So they were tip-toeing and were easily turned off or redirected.”
That line is at the centre of a controversy involving current Commissioner Brenda Lucki after the release in June of a Mountie’s handwritten notes that say she insisted that her subordinates release details about the weapons used in a 2020 mass shooting.
The correspondence was made public by an inquiry into the Nova Scotia shootings, which left 22 people dead. In it, provincial RCMP Superintendent Darren Campbell wrote that Commissioner Lucki pressed him to release the investigative details during a conference call 10 days after the massacre.
Supt. Campbell said Nova Scotia Mounties would not release the information because they were still investigating how some of the firearms got across the Canada-U.S. border. But Ottawa-based Commissioner Lucki berated him, his notes say, because she had “promised the minister of public safety and the Prime Minister’s Office that the RCMP (we) would release this information” to the media ahead of Liberal gun-control legislation.
A committee of MPs has called Commissioner Lucki to testify. The inquiry wants federal lawyers to explain why they initially withheld the handwritten notes and other documents when they turned over requested material.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former public safety minister Bill Blair deny putting undue pressure on Commissioner Lucki. Although she has expressed regret for the tenor of her “tense discussion” in 2020, she said she never jeopardized an investigation. “I take the principle of police independence extremely seriously,” she said in a statement.
Whether the Mounties are independent enough is a question that has surrounded the force for decades. With 20,000 officers across Canada, the RCMP is managed by scores of mayors, eight provincial solicitors-general and premiers, the federal public safety minister and the prime minister.
These politicians direct funds to the police force. They help it set strategic priorities. But they are never allowed to interfere in investigations. The Mounties’ commissioner plays a central role in upholding the independence of policing from politics, even though the position has a foot in both worlds.
Under the RCMP Act, the commissioner is a political appointee hired and fired at the pleasure of the federal cabinet and, “under the direction of the [public safety] minister, has the control and management of the force.”
This law explicitly invites political input into the RCMP. That happens frequently, including earlier this year when Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino wrote a mandate letter that said the government expects Commissioner Lucki to perform many managerial functions – including supporting the government’s “implementation of measures to counter the smuggling of handguns.”
But Canada’s top court issued a 1999 ruling affirming that operational directives are off limits. “The commissioner is not to be considered a servant or agent of the government while engaged in a criminal investigation,” it says. “The commissioner is not subject to political direction.”
The RCMP commissioner’s relationship with federal politicians is often at issue. In 1959, Newfoundland asked Ottawa for a loan of 50 RMCP officers to respond to a loggers’ labour dispute. Federal justice minister Davie Fulton and the commissioner approved these reinforcements. But when Mr. Fulton reneged after a cabinet meeting, commissioner Leonard Nicholson quit.
Earlier this year, The Globe reported that prime minister Lester Pearson and RCMP commissioner George McClellan covered up a potential Cold War controversy.
In 1964, Canadian diplomat John Watkins died of a heart attack during his interrogation by Mounties probing whether he had been compromised by the Russian KGB. Details about his death were not made public, even though Mr. McClellan had been briefing Mr. Pearson for months – including a phone call a day after the diplomat’s death. “It was a situation where the RCMP was in cahoots in the prime minister’s office,” says investigative journalist Dean Beeby.
RCMP reform would prevent political interference, criminologists say
In the 1970s, the RCMP Security Service was under scrutiny for its clandestine campaigns against Quebec separatists, including an infamous barn burning, break-ins and wiretaps.
Public safety ministers and top Mounties were called to testify at an inquiry led by justice David McDonald. Yet that commission’s 1981 report failed to settle who had authorized unlawful intelligence operations. “The commission was, frankly, a bit evasive, on the issue of the Liberal government’s role,” says Reg Whitaker, a University of Victoria professor.
But its findings highlighted the push-and-push-back dynamics that can exist between public safety ministers and RCMP commissioners – especially over the potential release of investigative information.
“The minister should have the right to be, and should insist on being, informed of any operational matter, even one involving an individual case, if it raises an important question of public policy,” the report said. “In such cases he may give guidance to the commissioner and express to the commissioner the government’s view of the matter, but he should have no power to give direction to the commissioner.”
After the inquiry, Pierre Trudeau’s government carved the Canadian Security Intelligence Service out of the RCMP. One hope behind the creation of CSIS in 1984 was to distance the RCMP from Ottawa officials, given how national-security investigations can involve a closer degree of political influence than criminal probes.
In standard police work, “the political masters can certainly have every right to set the parameters of what they expect police to be doing in broad terms,” Mr. Whitaker said, “but should not interfere in operational matters.”
In 1998, Liberal public safety minister Andy Scott resigned after he was overheard saying a Mountie commander might have to take the fall for a controversy.
The previous year, RCMP officers had pepper sprayed protesters at an international summit in Vancouver. A report on the incident by retired justice Ted Hughes documented how a PMO official directed police to expand the security perimeters used to keep protesters far from presidents and prime ministers.
Mr. Hughes wrote that Parliament had failed to clarify the RCMP’s independence from politics, suggesting new laws be created upholding that Mounties “should brook no intrusion or interference.“
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