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Are the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turning into Dudley DoWrong?

You remember, of course, Dudley DoRight. He was the cartoon Mountie with the Mulroney-esque jaw, arch-enemy of the villainous Snidely Whiplash. Snidely made his living tying damsels in distress to railway tracks; Dudley made his by whisking them away just before the onrushing train turned them into Cubist art.

But the Mounties are now giving indications that they no longer work for truth, justice and the Canadian way, as Dudley did, but for the Prime Minister’s Office. Banish the thought, but have they become the Royal Canadian Harper Police?

NDP MP Charlie Angus is raising that question again based on “significant new evidence” arising from the trial of Senator Mike Duffy. As BJ Siekierski of iPolitics reported, Angus recently wrote to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson asking the question that is on everyone’s lips: Why hasn’t Harper’s former chief-of-staff, Nigel Wright, been charged with paying off Duffy’s disputed expenses with a $90,000 personal cheque?

It is the second letter from Angus to Canada’s top cop on the same subject, the first one going out last April. At that time, Paulson assured the MP that the reasons would be made public in due course. Since then, not much has been given to justify this stupefying decision to charge Duffy with taking a bribe, but not Wright for secretly providing the money to pay it.

Based on his own six days of testimony, there is no question that Wright surreptitiously negotiated the payment, possibly lied to the Prime Minister about it, misled the Canadian people, extracted conditions from Duffy in return for the cheque, including his silence. There is significant evidence that Duffy was not keen to accept the plan.

But one thing was apparently missing according to the authorities. Wright had no criminal intent or mens rea.

That is a strange conclusion. The usual test for mens rea is that a person committed the actus reus, or the alleged criminal act at issue. The two together are needed to establish criminal liability. Usually proof of carrying out the guilty act is proof of guilty mind. In other words, the authorities usually assume that people know what they are doing.

In this case, there was certainly premeditation, planning, preparation and provision. Wright and assorted PMO minions spent a lot of time thinking about what to do in order to prevent something that they didn’t want to happen — the Duffy expense and residency matter to become a worse political liability than it already was. So they were willing to interfere in a forensic audit and manipulate the content of a Senate report as part of the deal with Duffy. And oh yes, to pay off the senator too. There is no question that they acted on their premeditation.

But one of the most disturbing elements of this tyrannical capture of every aspect of the machinery of government is the increasingly partisan behaviour of the RCMP. The Force has been used against Harper’s political enemies, often without a shred of real misconduct on the table. But one of the most disturbing elements of this tyrannical capture of every aspect of the machinery of government is the increasingly partisan behaviour of the RCMP. The Force has been used against Harper’s political enemies, often without a shred of real misconduct on the table.

But in Wright’s case, mens rea was not assumed despite the actions he took. Instead, it was treated as a separate element in relation to his stated intentions rather than his documented acts. He did the deed, but he had no criminal intent. Ergo, the authorities dropped the investigation into Wright, and laid no charge. Duffy, meanwhile, was buried under a ton of legal bricks.

It could be suggested, as Angus has, that Wright’s own testimony provides a prima facie violation under Section 16 of the Parliament of Canada Act. That statute makes it an indictable offence to give a senator compensation for a service rendered “in relation to any bill, proceeding contract, claim, controversy, charge, accusation, arrest or other matter before the Senate.”

It is easy to see Angus’s point, even though the Duffy investigation was conducted under the Criminal Code and its higher bar for culpability. As with all things legal, there is room for prosecutorial discretion in anything before the authorities. The question is, was that a police, justice department, or political decision? Who decided that the investigation would not take place under the Parliament of Canada Act?

More to the point, given the landslide of new evidence that Wright’s payment was part of a larger cover up scheme, is there any reason why that course of action couldn’t or shouldn’t be undertaken now?

Commissioner Paulson has not really explained the decision to drop the investigation into Wright and to not charge him with being on the other end of what the Crown determined was a bribe. Now he faces another tough question posed by Charlie Angus. At the very least, will he now re-interview Stephen Harper’s current chief-of-staff, Ray Novak, and other senior PMO staffers, based on the evidence of Benjamin Perrin?

Paulson really has little choice, when you consider that Novak told the RCMP that he had no knowledge of Wright’s $90,000 cheque to Senator Duffy. The sworn evidence of Novak’s former PMO colleague has contradicted that claim in a detailed way.

One of the other differences between the two accounts is that Perrin’s evidence was given under oath, and Novak’s wasn’t. If the Duffy trial is about the search for truth and not a political witch-hunt, the RCMP have to go back to Novak and conduct an interview under caution — just as Angus has asked.

The hallmark of the Harper era has been an attempt by the government to take ownership of all federal human assets in a degrading and political way. Civil servants have been used as props in fake TV news items. The justice department has drafted a string of unconstitutional legislation reflecting the CPC’s ideological agenda. Federal scientists have been muzzled like unruly dogs.

But one of the most disturbing elements of this tyrannical capture of every aspect of the machinery of government is the increasingly partisan behaviour of the RCMP. The Force has been used against Harper’s political enemies, often without a shred of real misconduct on the table.

Helena Guergis was harassed for three months by a seven-member team of Mounties who found absolutely no truth to the criminal (and defamatory) allegations laid out in a letter written for the PM by Novak to the Commissioner of the RCMP.

The Force has never explained why that investigation got off the ground when all of the allegations were not only spurious but originated with highly dubious sources. In fact, Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson directly called the source of the allegations against Guergis and decided on the spot there was no grounds for an investigation.

Bill Casey, the former Conservative MP and now Liberal candidate was thrown out of caucus because he would not agree to changes in the Atlantic Accord made unilaterally by the Harper government. Casey wasn’t just being grumpy. He had consulted with officials in the department of justice and they provided him with written opinions that the agreement had in fact been altered.

In a personally meeting with Casey, Harper dismissed the legal opinions with the view that the words meant what he, the PM, said they meant. Either Casey voted for the budget or he was out. When Casey chose to run as an Independent, he was faced with an RCMP investigation alleging that he had stolen funds from his former Electoral District Association.

As with Guergis, it was an entirely baseless accusation. But neither the government nor the RCMP showed the slightest remorse, even though Casey the victorious Independent MP raised the matter in the House of Commons and demanded an apology. He is still waiting for it.

The RCMP was recently caught shredding documents from the defunct federal gun registry, a potentially illegal act because Canada’s Information Commissioner was conducting an active investigation into what should happen to those records. The Harper government then enacted retroactive legislation (hidden in a budget omnibus bill) to make what the Mounties were doing “legal.” Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault called this a “perilous precedent” that could be used to re-write laws on everything from spending scandals to election frauds.

Even though the RCMP failed to stop gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau from storming Parliament, Harper put the force in charge of overall security on the Hill — a dubious move at best. The RCMP reports to cabinet, not parliament, raising the question of parliament’s independence from the government of the day.

The RCMP also failed to interview the young woman, Kristel Peters, pushing her nine-month old baby in a carriage that was caught on video as she fled to Parliament Hill on the day of the shootings. She was the first person to report the shooting of Corporal Nathan Cirillo to the RCMP — a uniformed officer parked near the East Block.

Peters contradicted statements made by the RCMP in their reports when they claimed she had slowed down their reaction time. She was also surprised that there were no police or security guards at the gates to Parliament Hill that day. Evan Soloman raised that issue on CBC’s Power and Politics but was gone before he could pursue it.

If the RCMP wants to return to the Dudley DoRight days, they are going to have to act as a true arm’s length organization that doesn’t tolerate their boss acting like any other deputy-minister in Harperland.

Acting as Harper’s bouncers at CPC political events certainly won’t do the trick.

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His nine books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, is a number one best-seller.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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