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Written by Citizen staff
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Friday, 19 June 2009 |
Just when it appeared the Braidwood inquiry was mercifully winding down its months-long indictment of Tasers and the conduct of the RCMP officers who zapped Robert Dziekanski to death, it gets weirder and more damning.
And it casts a further pall over the RCMP.
According to an e-mail that magically appeared just as closing arguments were to begin Friday, the Mounties who encountered the dazed, agitated Dziekanski formulated a plan to use the Taser on the Polish immigrant before they even arrived at the Vancouver airport.
The e-mail, disclosed at the inquiry by tearful federal government lawyer Helen Roberts, was exchanged between two high-ranking Mounties - Chief Supt. Dick Bent and Assistant Commissioner Al McIntyre.
Roberts told the inquiry the federal government was in possession of the e-mail since early this year.
The four officers who attended the scene testified they did not discuss using a Taser before they arrived, but Friday's explosive disclosure blows holes in those assertions. Lawyers for the four continue to deny their clients hatched a plan to jolt Dziekanski.
Inquiry commissioner Thomas Braidwood, a retired B.C. judge, said he was "appalled" at the 11th-hour revelation of the e-mail and ordered the inquiry to reconvene for new testimony on Sept. 22.
Predictably, lawyers for the government and RCMP officials termed the contents of the e-mail "a misunderstanding."
What else would Canadians expect? The RCMP as an organization has been in virtually permanent damage control over any number of incidents for the past few years.
Unfortunately it reflects on the thousands of men and women in the force who perform their duties in an exemplary manner, but it shouldn't.
The blame rests at the very top of this otherwise proud institution.
Suspicions of fabrication have long dogged police forces and this allegation only reinforces them.
We've said it before but it bears repeating: the RCMP needs to clean house at the highest echelons to remove the rot that has seeped through the organization.
Only then will any form of confidence in the RCMP's leadership, and the force as a whole, be restored among Canadians.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 19 June 2009 )
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Will the police, under the proposed new internet surveillance legistlation, soon be reading e-mails like this to identify their enemies -- those opposed to their possessing a license to operate free of democratic restraint.