By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : The scarlet-clad Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which is Canada’s much fabled and enduring symbol around the world, has been chosen as the Newsmakers of the Year by media editors across the country.
Nicknamed the Mounties, the RCMP has earned this distinction for the first time in its 134-year-old history.
For the all-powerful, 25,000-strong federal force, this distinction comes for dubious reasons. The Mounties have been under fire for some time for wrongfully labeling an Ottawa engineer of Syrian origin, Maher Arar, as an Al-Qaeda man and passing this information to the Americans who had held him in the transit. As a result, he was deported to Syria where he was jailed and tortured.
Later, a public inquiry found him innocent, resulting in $10 million in compensation to him. The inquiry ended the career RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli who also drew flak for punishing his lower ranks for exposing the mishandling of the RCMP pension scheme.
The RCMP is under scrutiny at the ongoing Air India public inquiry for mishandling the case from the very beginning. It is under criticism for not taking seriously India’s warnings about the plot before Kanishka Flight 182 was bombed in June 1985 and later botching the investigations, resulting in the acquittal of the two suspects in 2005.
The force is also fire for the death of a Polish man Robert Dziekansky after being lasered (with 50,000 volts) at Vancouver airport in October.
The victim, who had landed in Canada as a new immigrant, never made to the waiting area as he had no knowledge of English. After waiting for 10 hours for his mother, he became agitated. RCMP men delivered two laser shocks to him before subduing him. His death at the spot was captured on video and splashed on TV screens across the world.
To fix its problems, the current government has appointed a first civilian William Elliott as its head in its history.
Set up as North West Mounted Police in 1873 by Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John Macdonald, to assert the nation’s sovereignty (against American whiskey traders) over north-west areas (currently Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan), it was rechristened RCMP in 1920.
Curiously, the RCMP is many things rolled into one. It does routine policing from municipal to provincial to federal levels as many provinces have contracted policing job to it. It is also serves as a paramilitary force to protect the PM, top leaders, diplomats and enforce federal laws on terrorism, counterfeiting, fraud, etc.
Thirdly, the RCMP has the rare distinction of fighting alongside the allied forces in Europe during the first and second world wars. Fourthly, till 1984 when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was created, the RCMP was also solely responsible for all intelligence gathering.