The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Is It Time To Remake The RCMP

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Last week the Commissioner of the RCMP said she would not seek a reappointment to the Mountie's top job, so the question becomes should a new Commissioner begin rebuilding the force?  One person who thinks so is the sometimes controversial author Paul Palango who wrote the highly successful book, 22 Murders, claiming how the Mounties botched the investigation into the brutal killings of 22 people in Nova Scotia in 2020. Paul is our guest today.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Is it time to remake the RCMP? That's coming up. And hello there, welcome to Tuesday, welcome to Shorten Week. Hope you enjoyed the Family Day weekend in parts of the country where the Family Day weekend was celebrated yesterday. It's not the same in every province, but that's okay, it was the same here. And it was nice to get a weekend, a long weekend. Well, I know what some of you are saying. You're saying, Mansbridge, it's Tuesday. You're talking about the RCMP, but it's Tuesday.

Tuesday's Ukraine Day. Tuesday is Brian Stewart Day. Well, you're right on both those counts. It has been for, I guess, most of the last year. But this is different this week. Why is it different? Well, last week, Brian was in to talk about one year of the war in Ukraine. This week, he's on a beach somewhere.

He's taking the week off, and you can't deny him that. Good for him. Wish I was with him. I've had the sniffles for three days. Just the sniffles. I mean, I took the test. I'm negative. But I sure had the sniffles.

It's been no fun. Now, yesterday was quite the day in Ukraine. I'm going to get around to the RCMP in a minute. But yesterday was quite the day, and I'm sure Brian, well, I know Brian, and Brian missed it because he's written me almost every day that he's been away with his latest take on the way things are going. And yesterday, even though he was on the beach, he did see and read about Joe Biden in Kiev. It was quite a sight.

And it's been interesting watching how people have reacted to it. Obviously, they loved it in Ukraine. They loved it in most Western countries. But I see there were some Americans, some on the Republican side. Not all of them. Mitch McConnell was out there 100% in front with Joe Biden. So was Lindsey Graham. But some of the others, some of the kind of mega Republicans,

they don't like this. They're isolationists, and they don't want American money and arms and et cetera, et cetera used in Ukraine, including the, what's that guy, Josh Hawley? Remember him? He's the guy with the big fist, brave guy, big toughy. January 6th, there he was the guy with the big fist. Brave guy. Big toughy. January 6th. There he was in the morning, big fist up, supporting the riders.

Then a couple of hours later, he was running like a scared rabbit through the halls of Congress, desperately trying to get out of their grasp. Anyway, he was attacking Biden yesterday. I'm sure Biden would have not liked it, would have not liked it any other way. Probably enjoyed that. Anyway, it was quite a moment. And then today's moment is Vladimir Putin speaking in Moscow to all his, kind of like their State of the Union, although everybody looked like they were strapped to their seat. Right? Smiling and politely clapping. Oh yeah.

It's quite a story. Quite a story. Alright, but it is not the story we're talking about today. Brian will be back next week. And I'm sure there will be lots to catch up on with the ukraine story but today we're going to talk about something that i've been looking for the opportunity in the last while and a number of you have written to me suggesting we talk about this issue of the rcmp and we've got a good opportunity to now because the rcMP is basically rudderless. Some would have said it's been rudderless for a while, but it's definitely about to be rudderless now because the commissioner is stepping down, Brenda Luckey.

And therefore, a new commissioner has to be appointed by the Prime Minister. And it's an opportunity, while some say, many say, the RCMP needs to be, I don't know, reimagined, reorganized, resomethinged. And will that happen now? Well, this is on the heels of a couple of stories where the RCMP looked like they kind of botched some of their operations on the convoy, for one, especially the commissioner, and two, you know, the deadliest killing spree in Canadian history. Nova Scotia, April 2020.

22 people killed. And the more you read about it, the more you question how the RCMP operated during a couple of days in trying to end that killing spree. Now, there's been a number of people involved in the reporting on that story, but one of the ones who grabs a lot of attention when it comes to RCMP stories

and has done for the last 35 years is Paul Polango. I've known Paul, not close, but I've known Paul since those earliest days when he was working for the Globe and Mail. And he's always been one who's not accepted the kind of common take on a story, but has wanted to dig deeper to find out if there's more to that story. Well, he's certainly done that on this case. He's written four books on the RCMP and on national policing.

His most recent one, called 22 Murders, about the Nova Scotia story, was a number one national bestseller. And he's raised a lot of questions. The Mounties try to argue against some of the things he says and has reported, but Paul stands fast. So I tracked him down, said, Paul, we got to talk. I want to talk about this story,

and I want to talk about the RCMP. So we're going to have that conversation, but first of all, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll be talking to Paul Polango. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform.

It's Tuesday. Tomorrow, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth will be here, and that's also available on our YouTube channel. All right. As promised, let's have our discussion with what can we call Paul? Well, he's definitely a well-respected, at times controversial, writer on national policing affairs. He certainly had both those adjectives used to describe his work on covering the RCMP. And that is the case again today. The author of the number one bestseller, 22 Murders,

tracked Paul down in Nova Scotia, of all all places where he lives these days. So let's have that conversation with Paul Polango. So Paul, the way I want to start this is basically referring to a number of letters I've received over the last, well over the last year and especially so over the last six months or so, where people said, you got to get Polango on your show. You know, why haven't you focused on this, on the story that happened in Nova Scotia in 2020? Why haven't you done more on the 22 murders?

Now, and then sort of accusing me of central Canadian bias, which is, as you know, is something that many canadians feel strongly about now i don't share totally that belief because i do think that there was some some good work done on this story from uh from central canada but clearly not as much as it would have been if it had happened in central Canada. So before we get into the story, how do you feel about that kind of accusation or that claim that it was kind of ignored outside of the Maritimes? Well, Peter, one of the things that drew me into the story was when it happened, I happened to be in Nova Scotia. I've written three books by then on the RCMP.

And so I was well placed with a lot of knowledge. And I thought I'd just help other journalists tell the story and give them some background and context. But it became evident quite early on that nobody wanted to hear what I had to say, mainly because the RCMP had described me as a conspiracy theorist and, uh, you know, the thing that they do to anyone who is a critic. Um,

so I wrote the story to encapsulate a lot of the ideas that were going on in the 22 murders story. And I think the people who are complaining to you are responding to the fact that I did an unusual book and it rose on its own momentum even to the surprise of Random House who thought it would be a regional book and it became a national bestseller and it was on I understand I didn't read this but I was away at the time that it was on, I understand I didn't read this, but I was away at the time, that it was on a number of bestseller lists for the year. But ironically, the story was, the book was totally, almost absolutely ignored

by the mainstream media. I don't think it was reviewed. It may have been. I didn't see it. I didn't hear about it. CBC, for example, totally ignored me. I'm blacklisted on the CBC. I didn't see anyone even hear about it. CBC, for example, totally ignored me. I'm like blacklisted on the CBC. I didn't see anyone even talk about it.

So I think that, yeah, I raised a number of issues there, including the performance of the media itself, because I covered the media and what it was doing and thinking while I was doing the story. So it was an unusual approach. And Craig Payette, my editor at Random House, said, you know, they're never going to review you because you're, you know, you're airing their dirty laundry. And I said, too bad. I'm telling the truth. You know, I've followed you for a long time, Paul, as you know. But, you know, part of your concern about the media is that it accepts the argument from the authoritarian side too easily.

And in this case, it's, you know, the National Police Force and the RCMP. Is that the crux of your concern about the media? Yeah, it's pretty well, it's like press release journalism. If it's not written down, they don't report it. I mean, I point out an instance in the story. You know, I use it as an example of a story where Leon Jodry, the neighbor of Gabrielriel wertman um says uh wertman was the gabriel was the shooter yeah who killed the 22 people his girlfriend

goes to leon wertman's house or leon jodry's house at 6 30 in the morning and leon says it didn't look to him like she'd been in the woods all night. He didn't believe her story. He told that to anyone who would listen. But when Global, for example, Global News did a podcast on a 13-part podcast, they edited out all of that about Leon Jodry, that he didn't believe the story. And there was good reasons for why he didn't believe it.

And when confronted by it, the director at Global News says, well, that's not what the police said. And therefore, we have to go with the police version of events. And that theme sort of goes through the whole story. And I was able to show time and time again that the police version of events wasn't what happened and but that was totally ignored by the mainstream media because they said well that's not what the police are saying and so we're not going to we don't believe you and so that's why i wrote the book and i put

all of those things in the book what happens when you're writing that book and you call the RCMP for reaction on any particular issue? I mean, did they take your call? Did they give you a... I basically gave up dealing with them. And I took the position that the RCMP's version of events is what happened at that time and what they said and did at that time. And I'm responding to what they did and said and showing the counterpoint of it. To allow them another crack at the can before I get my part out defeats the story. And that's largely what happens in media.

When I was at the Globe and Mail, I used to have this argument all the time. They'd say, well, we've got to go back to the bad guys and get them to explain their part of the story. I said, well, they just did what they did, and we're addressing them. Tomorrow, we can get them to tell their side of the story. But let's get our side of the story out unblemished based on what the witnesses say, credible witnesses say, and what the the the witnesses say credible witnesses say and what the reporter is finding so you know it's a it's a little different approach to journalism but i'm

not giving the the the the other side uh another chance to shape the story because that's what the government and the rcmp will do they'll deflect away and try to mute the story and i wasn't giving them that opportunity so part of the the issue on on doing a story like this is you've got to determine the credibility of the witness you're talking to right you've got to determine that especially if you're not going to believe the rcmp in this case so what do you go through to determine the credibility of a particular witness i look at various witnesses you you you combine it with the evidence that's out there and you use your own investigative skills i've been doing this for 35 40 years you know in the shooting of gabriel wortman for example where the police shot him and told this

heroic story about how the policeman recognized him at a gas station and they did this dance and and and eventually confronted him and shot him I didn't believe the story I didn't accept the story and then on our podcast and on talk show radio in Halifax, I said, there's gotta be video of what happened. Can somebody find me the video? And lo and behold, somebody found the video that told a completely different story. And as we told the story,

it showed that none of what they said happened the way they said it happened. And then, you know, the late great Frank magazine, we made an application to get all the video to show what happened. And you know what happened that day?

And this is a good example. The day that that came out, last June, we fought for months alone. Then we were joined by some media. The day it was coming out, the Monday it was coming out, Andrew Douglas and I, Andrew Douglas, the editor of Frank, were laughing. What are they going to do to deflect away from this?

Because this video is going to clearly show that they executed Wartman and that nothing of what they said happened. And the morning it came out, what else came out? Brenda Luckey interfered in the police investigation by asking about the guns. So all the media scurried away and covered Brenda Luckey and this supposed interference in the police investigation and ignored the video and what had happened in the video. Okay, just to clarify a couple of things. Brenda Luckey is the commissioner of the RCMP. She just announced in the last week or so that she's resigning

or not going for a reappointment. But at that time, she was the commissioner, and you're right. That was set off a controversy of its own, a classic kind of deflection away perhaps from the uh the story that you were working on since you um basically the other thing i should say with the frank magazine you're talking about is the halifax based one right yes um which no longer exists exactly uh which is very different than the ottawa based frank magazine which some of us know all too well um but let me get back to the the point on what happened at the gas station uh when uh the killer the shooter was shot by the rcmp have they conceded

in any way the points the rcmp have they conceded the points that you made at the time based on the video or are they still going with their original the video or are they still going with their original story not only are they still going with their original story the serious investigate a serious sensitive response team the police watchdog uh is going with that story even though we showed that there were two instances where wertmanman stopped at gas stations. At the first instance in Elmsdale, a Mountie was at the next pump, and the whole thing they described as leading up to the shooting appears to have taken place at that pump. And then 10 minutes later, Wirtman went down the road and was killed at Enfield,

and the serious incident response team said, didn't even report the Elmsdale thing until we found the video. And then even at that said, well, they didn't recognize him at, at Elmsdale. And they just happened upon him at Enfield at the Irving big stop. And it's quite clear that couldn't have happened because the video that was finally released showed that the rcmp vehicle came in drove directly to pump six workman is on the other side of pump five uh from the time that the truck stops to the first bullet being fired was

under six seconds probably five point something seconds so none of what they said happened, but they're sticking to their story. Where are we on this story? Where is the official investigation or is it all done? Well, they've done the mass casualty commission sat for most of 2022, a very peculiar public examination of what happened, where certain people were protected from testifying or being asked, being cross-examined. Others were allowed to testify basically with service dogs or service people around them because they were too traumatized.

So it was very difficult to find out what the people who should have been asked tough questions were never asked tough questions and were allowed to spin a narrative which defied logic. For example, Lisa Banfield, who was Gabriel Wertman's girlfriend, said she escaped from him, then hid for 10 and a half hours in the woods before finding her way to Leon Jodry's house. She had no shoes, no socks, no jacket. She had yoga pants and a spandex top. It was zero degrees. It snowed that night in Halifax, and she didn't have hypothermia. So where was she that night?

She said she was in a tree hollow. But Leon Jodry said she wasn't dirty she didn't smell of gasoline which she had used to burn down a number of places and she said she was right there um none of her stories seemed to make sense but he wasn't allowed nobody was allowed to cross-examine her on this so where does it go now i mean is it just all waiting for your your next book on the subject or are there other forms of investigation? The Mass Casualty Commission is supposed to make its report on March 30th. And essentially what we've seen in watching it is that they've just been shaping a narrative.

That this is a crazy man who caught the RCMP in a bad moment and disorganized as the RCMP was, it saved the day and captured the killer. It might have been accidental, but they did the right thing at the end. And they never asked questions about Wortman before, his criminal activities, which were enormous,

and how the RCMP missed him in the 10 years, 15 years previous. He was smuggling things across the border. It seems incomprehensible. They didn't know about him. Their story about what they did that night doesn't seem comprehensible. I mean, one of the anomalies in the story that the MCC just glossed over was that one of the victims, Corey Ellison, was killed at 1040 p.m. that night. The police arrived at 1026. At 1028, 1028, roughly, no, 1026, a neighbor was shot by Wurman, escaped and went to the police positions, which are a couple hundred meters up the road.

And the police said that 14 minutes after that shooting and a couple hundred meters the other way, Wirtman killed this guy, Corey Ellison. Well, it doesn't seem to make sense. And there is the suggestion that Ellison, who was a bystander coming to see one of the fires, might have accidentally been killed by the RCMP. And they've covered this up.

So it sounds like conspiracy theory, but the RCMP story doesn't make sense. Where was Werman for those 14 minutes? They said he was escaped from there, you know, around that time. The forensic evidence that the MCC doesn't get into can't match is the only, the only case where they can't match the ballistics

from the shell casings to Wertmann's gun. They just pass it off and say, oh, it was a Glock. So we couldn't do that. So there are serious questions they don't want to ask that are extremely controversial. Isn't one of the questions too, I think they've tried to respond to it, but a lingering question is whether or not the shooter was in fact an RCMP informant and had been one for some time.

Yeah, I came to that sort of asking that question because RCMP behavior cannot be explained, why they did the things they did. After the shooting, we found out that an RCMP officer, Greg Wiley, visited Wertman 17 times up until 2017, kept no notes, was never asked about why he had no notes. Oh, he was just a friend and he would tell me a little bit about this and that going on in the neighborhood, which sounds like an informant. And that all of that changed in 2017 and Wiley stopped dealing with him. Well, we know Wertman was smuggling guns and ammunition and drugs and other things across the border.

And we know that he had associations with, vicariously or directly, with 1% biker clubs. First of all, in Dartmouth, but two of his buddies had associations with the Hells Angels. And they were excluded from testimony, public testimony. In fact, one of them was rescued by the RCMP. His name was Peter Griffin, and he'd served time in Alberta for drug smuggling and being associated with MS-13 and La Familia, the Mexican drug cartel. He was working on Bortman's property that day. He was rescued that night on April 18th, 2020 by the RCMP

before four children hiding in a basement whose parents had been killed were rescued. They were there for three hours. And the RCMP never went down that road really for three hours. So what was going on? Like, you know, none of that is ever answered by the MCC. Hopefully it is answered, but we, I don't see that coming. I want to get to the main crux of why I wanted to talk to you. I have one last question on this.

How do you respond when people say, you know, Paul, you know, you're a great journalist, you've got a history and, you know, you've been very successful, but man, you sound like a conspiracy nut on this one. You got all these questions, you don't have the answers or the answers you've got, people argue with about. So like, what is your response to that when you get that kind of reaction? It's just a conspiracy guy. Well, it's one of the things that I've found over the years that the more you try to pin down the RCMP, the more you hear you're a conspiracy theorist.

And I thought, you know, like I just put up with it. I said, you know, I deal in facts and I deal in investigation and look at, you know, if I have a theory about something, I try to disprove the theory. And if I disprove it, fine, it's gone. But then I look at others who've gone through this sort of thing and it's rampant. I mean, if you take on the RCMP, you are going to be called a nutcase, a conspiracy theorist. You look at what's happened in B.C. in recent years. In Surrey, the Surrey elected a mayor to get rid of the RCMP as its municipal police force. What happens after that happens? He's charged with a criminal offense. to get rid of the RCMP as its municipal police force.

What happens after that happens? He's charged with a criminal offense. After he loses the next election last year, what happened? Oh, the charges went away, but he'd already lost office. Oh, is that the only time that's happened? No. What happened to Glenn Clark, the premier of BC, when he tried to consider moving the RCMP into provincial policing, charged. What happened to the charges? Disappeared.

Cash Heed, who was the police chief in Vancouver, moved on to become the solicitor general in BC. Wanted to move the RCMP out. Had things tabled, what happened? Charged with a defense. What happened to the charge after he was out of office? Disappeared. You look at Stevie Cameron. Stevie Cameron was doing work on Airbus and Brian Mulroney. Everyone says she was a nutcase and conspiracy theorist and everything. Eventually, Stevie Cameron is said to be a confidential informant to the RCMP, as reported in William Kaplan's book.

And what happened to that? After Stevie fights back, they admit, oh, that was an accident. I don't know where that came from. We just made that up. I go, you know, Charlie Gillis and McClain, same thing. And I can go on and on and on. So they can call me all these things. And that's how I fight back because I know that's their tactic. They use the RCMP veterans association as basically a lobbying group to promote

this on public radio talk shows and letter writing. And I just bat them out of the sky. I said, look, I'm dealing in facts. Show me where I'm wrong and I'll admit it. But I'm not backing down. Have you ever had a senior RCMP official as a source? One of my best sources right now is a former deputy commissioner. And that former deputy commissioner says he, when I started doing this book,

when I was just first getting involved in this, he called me up and says, Paul, I've hated you for 25 years. I've read everything you've written. And I want to tell you right now, I apologize. I want to tell you that you're absolutely right.

The RCMP must be taken down. He says the force as it stands is it doesn't do anything right except for national labs and the musical right. He says otherwise, there's not one positive thing the force is doing. And this was a very senior person and well-regarded in policing. And I have others like him and some of hers who are involved. And they helped me all the way along. They guide me. Well, that leads me to my uh the question i really wanted

to ask you today and it's it's kind of where uh we're going to end this conversation but it may take a couple questions at it what has to happen to the rcmp now because if there was ever an opportunity for something to happen it is now lucky as we just said earlier as is not being um seeking reappointment um as if she was even going to get it because there were there are enough issues surrounding both this story and the uh convoy story from last year involving her that have left it unlikely that she was going to get reappointed anyway but somebody's going to get appointed as the next commissioner of the RCMP. And one assumes this is an opportunity, as it always is on a new appointment, to do something about the force.

So what would it be like when your friend, the deputy commissioner, the retired one, says the RCMP has got to be taken down? I assume he means it's got to be reorganized in some fashion. What needs to happen to the National Police Force in your view? Well, there's really no short answer to this. The problem with the RCMP goes down to, A, it's doing too many things. It shouldn't be in contract policing. Contract policing, where it rents out its services to the provinces outside of Ontario and Quebec, is the tail wagging the dog. It should be a federal police force.

Its mandate was basically established in 1873. How many businesses from 1873 are operating in both basically the same mandate or expanded mandate? Even the Hudson's Bay isn't doing what it started out doing. The other problem is politicization. Effective politicization of the RCMP began after the McDonald Commission report into the Quebec barn burnings, which people remember back in the day, this horrendous story of the RCMP burning down barns in Quebec to stop Quebec separatists.

Broken by our friend Brian Stewart. Yeah, broken by your friend Brian Stewart. But what has been lost, and I pointed this out in my first book, when I had other really good top RCMP sources, that what was lost was that those acts were committed by a counterintelligence wing of the RCMP, the security service. After much furor in the public about the RCMP doing this, a royal commission was held, the McDonald Royal commission.

And they went into the barn burnings and looked at it and examined the RCMP. And at the end of this, if you read the conclusions of the McDonald commission, what the McDonald commission found was the security service was out of control, but the security service were not police. They operated on the other side of a Chinese wall, much like FBI counterintelligence operates outside the policing operations.

They did not have the powers of arrest. They weren't police officers. So to clarify that, they said we should create CSIS as a counterintelligence agency. That happened, but the further recommendation and finding of the McDonald Commission that was totally lost was the RCMP police did nothing wrong. Nevertheless, they recommend there should be political control of the RCMP.

After the McDonald Commission, it was recommended that the commissioner of the RCMP be made a deputy minister in the government. And rather than being appointed by an independent panel, sort of bipartisan with some civilians who would monitor the operations of the RCMP, the commissioner would be appointed by the prime minister and would serve at the pleasure of the prime minister, like some of the better banana republics, basically. And so since then, we've had the prime minister appointing the commissioner.

And the commissioner is a deputy minister in the government. This is a bad thing. I pointed this out in 1994 and people said, well, it's only been going on for 10 years, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, you look what has happened. Christiane appointed Zacardelli because he wanted, you know, Giuliano Zacardelli as commissioner because he wanted somebody from Quebec. That went horribly wrong. So then Stephen Harper comes along and says, I'm going to appoint a civilian.

A civilian can fix this for us. So he points William Elliott, who is really a civilian in name only, who has all kinds of counterintelligence sort of ties and stuff like that. But Elliott comes in and cleans house, but destroys the infrastructure of the RCMP upper management. The next guy comes along, Paul Martin. Who does he appoint? We're going to bring a soldier in.

Bring discipline. So, you know, Polson comes in. He does more to destroy the upper layers and move his people in. And he becomes entirely focused, for example, on the Hells Angels. We're going to get the bikers. That didn't work out so well. And then Justin Trudeau comes in and says, we're for diversity and Aboriginal rights and restorative justice. And so he goes through all the candidates and he picks what many believe is one of the weakest candidates that could have been picked at that time. She wasn't even the top woman in the list and Brenda Lucky, but Brenda Lucky said,

I will give you diversity and Aboriginal rights. And I'm going to pound that into the forest. A lot of that has nothing to do with the everyday mountain policing in the contract areas. Cause a lot of them don't even deal with Aboriginals, but they're still trained that way. And Lucky comes in. She has no operational experience,

no policy experience. As my deputy commissioner friend said, I don't think she'd even been to Ottawa. So they brought her in. But what was the advantage of having someone like her? The prime minister could control her. Because she served at the pleasure of the prime minister. And this was the biggest job she was ever going to get in her life. So who's going to replace her?

No one person can fix the RCMP because the problems are so great. And the prime minister now has put himself in a box. So what does he do now? If he's into diversity and whatever, you want to be sort of snidely sarcastic saying, okay, well, who's going to be next? An aboriginal uh east asian who's it going to be or is it going to be someone who's worked their way up through the system or

who understands policing or someone with the balls to say the rcmp has to be taken out of contract policing made a national natural a federal police force and do the, and be reorganized to deal with modern problems. Canada has no ability whatsoever to deal with cybercrime or white-collar fraud, white-collar crime. The RCMP has not been in that game for years. And so the whole idea of policing should be rethought along the way. So one person is not going to fix it, but to fix it, the things you do, Peter, get Kevin Lynch on. Kevin Lynch did a piece a couple of weeks ago, and he's what, the former head of the Privy Council?

Right, former clerk of the Privy Council. Top senior civil servant in Canada. And he wrote a piece the other day that I read in the Halifax Chronicle Herald saying that all these reasons, it's like I said, geez, Kevin, I guess you read all four of my books. Being a conspiracy theorist, I was quite proud of that because he adopted many of the ideas I've expounded in the last four books over the last 30 years. At the end of the day, what are you saying?

Because I assume you can find a, you know, if you're looking for a diverse candidate, you can find a diverse candidate who believes in the need to do all the things you were suggesting. But should it be a candidate from inside or outside the force? It doesn't matter because the force is so screwed up now. It's incapable of doing the right thing. It's so thin. Demographics have changed. It can't recruit.

I mean, the government's own reports say the RCMP is unsustainable in its present form. But rather than deal with that, the prime minister is going to try to sort of bang a square peg into a round hole and get another four years out of it. And the problem is more fundamental than appointing a person. It's restructuring policing. Not defunding, but restructuring and making it smarter and more responsive to Canadian needs.

So I don't care who they put in there. It's not going to matter. The problem is the very structure of policing, and this applies right down to local policing. You know, the local policing, you've got unions basically saying, we need more money, and the RCMP union saying, we need more money. But all that money is being used to perpetuate a system that doesn't work. But can one, as you say, no one candidate can fix this.

So what are we saying? We need another McDonald Commission. We need another Royal Commission on policing in Canada. It'll take two, three, four years to come up with the answers and then quite possibly may sit on the shelf like parts of the McDonald Commission did. Well, it may well be forced because right now most contract policing, where, you know, 60 to 70% of Mounties are assigned, most contract policing contracts come up in 2032,

nine years down the road. Those are 20-year contracts. And already in Alberta and BC, there's rumblings about getting rid of the RCMP there. So the fundamental change may begin that way, where provinces and municipalities finally say, we're going to set up our own police forces, which they should be doing, like they do in Ontario and Quebec. That may force the issue right there. But the government doesn't want to take

that issue because in certain quarters, the RCMP, as I've already shown, has a, you know, I call them SMURFs, hidden resources across the community that will argue and fight and shout and scream about the RCMP without looking at the fundamentals of the operation. And if they look at it objectively, they'd realize it doesn't work. But they say, no, we've been to the musical ride, and we have profound memories of the musical ride, and we've got to keep the Mounties. Well, you know, as my deputy commissioner friend says, the musical ride should be part of Heritage Canada.

And that's where it should be. You shouldn't have serving Mounties, and they're gaining seniority, and then going back on the street like Heidi Stevenson did, spent 13 1⁄2 years on the musical ride, went into other sort of soft operations that ended up being sent out on the street that Sunday morning and met up with Gabriel Wortman and ended up dead because she was not battle ready for being on the street. And that's a good example of what's wrong with the RCMP right there. You have people being cross-promoted through structures that have nothing to do with policing, ending up on the street, and at a loss of what to do when they get there. Wow. Well, we're going to leave it at that for now, Paul. It was a fascinating discussion, and I'm so glad that we finally had it,

and we'll probably be in touch in a couple of months after the final report or at least the next report from the commission looking into all this. Thanks for doing this. Good luck with the continued writing. I know you, I think you moved out there to retire and what was it, do your hobby on making glass, but you ended up going right back at it and still are today. And I think we're all better for it. Thanks, Paul.

Thank you. Hey, it's not a hobby. It's a business. Okay, we'll keep that in mind. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Paul Blanco talking to us from Nova Scotia about his passion,

which has become writing books about the RCMP and his most recent book, 22 Murders, the story of the April 2020 terrible situation in Nova Scotia. It was a number one national bestseller. You can still get it, obviously. If you want to know more about that story and Paul's take on it, you'll find it in that book.

Okay, we're going to wrap it up for this day. Thanks so much for listening and once again, next week Brian will be back and we'll pick up the Ukraine story which you know, it never fails us. There's something almost every day on this story,

and it will be next week when Brian gets back. Tomorrow at Smoke Mirrors and the Truth, Bruce will be by, and we'll, I'm sure, have something fascinating to talk about. It will also be on our YouTube channel, so you can see that by going to the link that's on my Twitter or Instagram account. Get your letters in. If you have something you want to say about today's interview with Paul Polango, don't be shy. Send it along. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at

gmail.com. Friday, of course, Good Talk with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Andersonerson we'll see you then that's it for now i'm peter mansbridge thanks for listening on this day we'll talk to you again in 24 hours