The Toronto Star, amongst others, reported on the phenomenon of the RCMP having routinely filed falsified flight reports, committing various transgressions against the general rules of flying. The report was touched off by reports from a whistleblower and was the subject of an inquiry by the Federal Integrity Commission whose leader, Mario Dion, has a rather tart comment on the RCMP failing to uphold laws it was designed to uphold. And, in typical fashion, the federal government didn’t want this material to get out to the public.
The investigation began in November 2013. The report remains under a legal challenge from the federal government, which wanted to quash the findings before they could be made public.
According to a report on The National, the rationale for burying the report was that material such as this would lead to a loss of confidence in the force. Wait, do we want to place confidence where it isn’t warranted?
Again, it’s a mistake to violate Transport Canada’s regulations about the operation of an aircraft, but the nature of the falsifications seems to point to a willingness to play somewhat fast and loose with the laws of physics, and specifically those relating to gravity, lift, thrust, mass and proximity to terra firma, laws against which there is no right of appeal. As Georges Brasssens stated so eloquently:
La loi de la gravité est dur, mais c’est la loi.
Less inevitable is the question of whose law the RCMP upholds, as we have seen when the force becomes the Pinkerton squad for energy companies, international banking schemes, bogus conferences and the like, such as we witnessed in recent confrontations on Burnaby Mountain where the force upheld the wishes of Kinder Morgan when the Law, in all its wisdom, issued an injunction against the City and citizens of Burnaby should they have had a notion to impede KM’s desire to do exploratory work leading to the expansion of a pipeline going under said Burnaby Mountain. In the old days, KM would have paid for the Pinkertons, but the RCMP enforcement came from the policing budget of Burnaby, meaning that taxpayers are paying to KM to forge ahead with its profit-driven scheme, a project that has dire consequences as part of the Carbon Crime of The Century (Millennium, All Human History). No worries about loss of confidence in the force there, but that would imply that the confidence was there in the first place.
Worth noting: I have known members of the RCMP, all of whom have been responsible caring people, solicitous of their place in the community and the well-being of the people they are tasked with protecting. I hear, as we mostly likely have, people complain about police personnel, about civil servants, teacher, doctors, lawyers, dentists, politicians…there are quacks, cranks and crooks in all walks of life, and it is not my intention to tar broad swathes of any group of people with the sticky brush of shame. It is plain that many of our institutions need to be revisited.