Pubdate: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 Source: StarPhoenix, The (CN SN) Copyright: 2008 The StarPhoenix Contact: http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/letters.html Website: http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/400 Author: Randy Burton, Staff Writer Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites) RCMP'S POLITICAL LEANINGS It would be paranoid to suggest the RCMP officer campaigning for the Conservatives in northern Saskatchewan is part of a larger pattern. The off-duty officer trucking Tory lawn signs around Desnethe-Missinippi-Churchill River must simply have made a mistake. Perhaps he just doesn't read the newspapers. That's the reason he seems to be unaware the RCMP already has a lingering cloud over it from the last election. He likely thought using an RCMP truck to move campaign materials for Conservative candidate Rob Clarke was no big deal. At least, that's the way it appeared to Rob Layman, who witnessed the officer unloading the signs. Layman describes the officer as giving him a "Valley girl" kind of blank look when he questioned the propriety of using RCMP property for partisan purposes. You would wonder if anyone in the RCMP explains to their officers why mixing politics with police work is a bad idea. Given their record, it should be something that is drilled into them from Day 1. Certainly, Liberals would say so, given that memories of the RCMP's intervention in the last federal election are still fresh in their minds. When former RCMP commssioner Giuliano Zaccardelli ordered an investigation into whether the office of then-finance minister Ralph Goodale leaked its decision not to tax income trusts, the Liberals' prospects began to tank. It led to accusations -- probably well-founded -- that the RCMP was out to get Paul Martin. As he puts it in his soon to be released book, Martin said the only other possibility was Zaccardelli was inept -- "and I can't believe anybody is that inept." In short, the RCMP is already having problems with public perception of its neutrality. That an officer could sweep into La Ronge in an RCMP vehicle and start unloading Tory lawn signs is an indication the officer in question is asleep, at a minimum. It would be easy to put this down to simple ignorance, if not for a related news story this week about the controversial safe injection site the Conservatives have been trying to shut down. Vancouver RCMP have now admitted they commissioned studies critical of the place as a means of counteracting other reports that showed the Insite agency to be effective in reducing drug-related deaths. Not only that, but the force used the crudest of tools to manipulate public opinion on the issue. In the first instance, a man named Colin Mangham, director of research for the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, was commissioned to "to research and provide an independent critique" of the Insite program. Then when RCMP officer Chuck Doucette went on a local phone-in show to criticize the agency, he asked Mangham to line up a bunch of callers to back him up. "It would be great if you could be ready to phone in with your comments. You know that the pro-Insite side will have people lined up to support it. Let's try to get more calls in than they do," Doucette wrote. Normally, you would have to be in the midst of a partisan political mud fight to find these kind of tactics, but this is somehow passed off as part of law enforcement. In this case, RCMP officers have clearly been trying to direct the outcome of a public policy debate. They didn't just commission research to produce the answer they wanted, they used low-road political techniques to buttress their case. E-mails released to the Globe and Mail this week under Access to Information legislation show the level of debate among the force on this question. One staffer referred to the so-called Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS as the "Centre for Excrements." What a card. Upon closer examination, it turns out the RCMP spends $1 million every year hiring people to review other research, something it defends as being part of an "effective and impartial" police force. This kind of activity has nothing to do with policing, but everything to do with trying to influence policy, in this case Conservative party policy. If this is impartial policing, then the RCMP should have no difficulty with releasing the rest of the research it has conducted at public expense, so we can all see what policy positions the national police force is taking behind the scenes. And while they're at it, perhaps RCMP commissioner William Elliott can point out just which part of the RCMP Act condones overt political activity. So let's see now. Sandbagging a political party minister in the midst of an election campaign, hiring out research and rigging phone-in shows to produce a political result and now hauling lawn signs around in RCMP vehicles in the midst of a campaign. It would be paranoid to suggest these isolated incidents form a pattern. And surely it's merely coincidence these incidents all happen to favour the Conservatives. It doesn't always go that way. For example, RCMP raided Conservative party offices in search of evidence that the party violated federal election spending rules in the last election. But it's not enough merely to show a defensible batting average. The RCMP has to be able to demonstrate it is structurally impervious to political influence. Just lately, it's failing badly on that score. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin