CUSTOMS GOOF SENDS SENIOR HOME WITH POT

Sniffer-Dog Trainers Using Travellers As Unwitting 'Mules'

HALIFAX - Canada Customs has planted illegal drugs and firearms in the
luggage of unsuspecting travellers at Canadian airports since at least 1998
- - in violation of federal policy.

The planted material, intended to help train scent dogs, became such a
problem that the department issued a memo two years ago reminding
dog-handlers that the procedure is strictly forbidden.

"Under no circumstances should members of the travelling public ever be used
to carry hides (planted drugs and firearms) when conducting training
sessions with the detector dog," says the July 28, 1998, warning from a
senior enforcement official.

"This practice is inappropriate and potentially very embarrassing to the
department and it must stop immediately."

But the memo, released under the Access to Information Act, did not end the
practice.

Last March 8, Moncton, N.B., Customs dog-handler Don McGee planted an ounce
of marijuana in a duffle bag owned by a 70-year-old Fredericton woman
returning from a Florida vacation - to help train Jazz, his Labrador
retriever.

A glitch allowed the duffle bag to slip through and Jackie McCormick
unwittingly took the grass home. She discovered it the next day, in a
standard Customs evidence bag, when she unpacked.

She panicked because she thought she had been used as an unwitting drug
courier from Florida. She immediately called the cops, who returned the pot
to Canada Customs.

McCormick - who said she'd never set eyes on marijuana before the incident -
said yesterday she and her husband "were kind of afraid that somebody else
might have put it in, even in St. Petersburg (Fla.)

"And then ... because your name and everything is on the luggage ...somebody
could come looking for it."

Canada Customs has never apologized or for the incident or offered
compensation, she said.

Almost a month after the McCormick episode, the department issued another
memo:

"Once again it has come to our attention that some detector dog-handlers are
using travellers to carry drug hides."

"Under no circumstances shall members of the travelling public be used to
carry drug hides," says the April 4 circular, which had to be signed by each
of Customs' 40 or so dog-handlers.

A Customs official declined to comment yesterday on whether McGee had been
disciplined.

But Collette Gentes-Hawn did claim that her department had apologized to
McCormick.

She added that this was the only occasion on which planted dope had missed
being retrieved.

"We never (before) had a passenger go home with it."