Thank you, Chair.
I'd like to follow along the line of questioning that Mr. Dreeshen was following.
The RCMP is among the departments that have the largest number of complaints. When we drill down into the numbers concerning Mr. Dreeshen's request, it appears that five, two, and three have different categories wherein there are so-called “well-founded” complaints; another nine were resolved in process, but it appears that there may have been legitimate concerns in those nine. So we're up to about 14 out of the 52, which is about 27%, more than one out of every four.
When a department has the largest number, I would arrive at the opposite conclusion: that it's a worrying number, especially when you take into account the types of complaints we may be dealing with. The RCMP does criminal investigations. That sort of information, if not well founded—but it's been well founded that it has been made public or passed on to the wrong parties—can be incredibly damaging, even if it's in one case. It can be incredibly damaging to the future of an individual when shared with foreign governments. We saw what happened with Mr. Arar, yet the RCMP tells us we don't need any controls in place because they take a “principled” approach.
We have found out that they shared information over 3,000 times with foreign governments, other than with Interpol. We know that one of those governments is Sudan's. My goodness, its president has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. We know that information is being passed on to criminal regimes.
The RCMP has the capacity to garner information of a type that no other government department really has, besides perhaps CSIS. As I said earlier, there's genetic information, biometrics, using GPS, real-time video surveillance of which people are not aware—it's not like Street View, but stuff you're not aware of. But they take a “principled” approach. Canadians have paid a terrible cost by not having these regulations in place.
But that's dealing with foreign governments. What about what's happening in-country, in Canada? A book just came out—and this really worried me—by a staff sergeant, a former RCMP officer, in which he quotes one of our former commissioners as saying that approximately 30 parliamentarians were under investigation.
We know that in the fall of last year, one such individual's privacy—Mr. Casey's—was affected when an ATIP request was released with all names removed except his in one particular spot. That can be incredibly damaging to a politician, just the nuance that there may have been a criminal investigation—notwithstanding the fact that in this particular case there was no basis for it. But they tell us we don't need these recommendations to be enacted, because they take a “principled” approach.
Consider Glen Clark, the former premier of British Columbia. The media were called as the RCMP arrived in the middle of the night, and he was caught like a deer in lights. You saw him opening up the door to his house. His career was extinguished at that moment. He's been exonerated, but there is no going back.
What about the RCMP having regulations in place to prevent that sort of situation occurring—or during an election campaign? Would you recommend—