Bureaucrats in uniform : Politicization and decline of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

The sources include testimony before the Gomery Commission, the first Report of the Gomery Commission, several reports of the Auditor General, the Report of the Hughes Commission, and several other analyses of the federal police. [...] Consider only the following headline-making issues over the past few years: faulty training or procedure resulted in the fatal shooting of four young RCMP officers at an Alberta farm near Mayerthorpe; the breach of RCMP security at 24 Sussex Drive; the inability of the RCMP to cope with terrorism in the post-9/ environment; the bungling of the Bre-X stock fraud case; the failure of the Air India [...] The most worrisome symptoms were the Airbus scan- dal, the behaviour of the RCMP at the 997 APEC meeting in Vancouver, and the entanglement of the RCMP in the Quebec sponsorship scandal. [...] It is our view that a provincial police force in the larger provinces would go a long way toward making the politicization of the federal police impossible—though of course the provinces might repeat the mistakes of the Government of Canada. [...] Fraser Institute Digital Publication April 2006 Bureaucrats in Uniform: The Politicization and Decline of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 10 The glare of Gomery Testimony before the Gomery Commission showed beyond doubt that the RCMP vio- lated the Financial Administration Act and the fundamental principles of the constitu- tion and of Parliamentary government, that monies intended by Parliament