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.