Evidence of meeting #49 for Public Accounts in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was zaccardelli.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
David Christopherson NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Tell me the words in the office, please. That's what I want to hear.
Staff Sergeant (Retired), Royal Canadian Mounted Police, As an Individual
The words in the office were “Go see Gessie. Get a criminal investigation going.” “Gessie” means Gessie Clément, the CO of A Division, the only person I'm allowed to go to under the act.
Then he said on the other matters, “I will get back to you within one week.” That's why I called him on June 25 that same year and said--no, I sent an e-mail, which I've tabled, and I talked about our conversation in the first paragraph: We had a meeting on the 28th; you told me to do this; you told me you would get back to me within a week; you haven't gotten back to me; please let me know what's going on. It's 25 days later.
He called me the next morning. He said, “I'm going to get John Spice to do the investigation on the internal issues.” In addition, he said, “Oh, by the way, I've stopped the investigation.”
I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe he had stopped the investigation, so I said, “What are you going to do?” He said, “I'm going to do an audit.” Then I said, knowing the audit process, “If you find things that are improper, you'll have to go either internally or criminal.” He said, “Justice will be done.”
On the audit, Mr. Sweet asked a question that he never answered: what was the scope of the audit? The scope of the audit says--and it's in the audit of the RCMP--three years. They stopped after one year because they had enough to stop it and do a report that would invoke a criminal or internal investigation. He never did it. I had to go back in again through, I guess, coercion, threats, whatever you call it, and say that if nothing was done, I was going public, because I'm representing these members.
Nothing was done. He doesn't have a document saying that he ordered anything. I do. I have all the documents, written. He's read them; he's talked to me. He's never said anything, like “Why did you do that?” He had an opportunity on June 26 to say, “Why did you do that? I didn't tell you to do it.” It's right in the memo. It's right in the e-mail. End of story.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy
Thank you, Mr. Lewis.
Thank you, Mr. Christopherson.
That, colleagues and witnesses, concludes the hearing this afternoon.
I want to take this opportunity, on behalf of all the committee members, to thank you very much for being here. It's a very difficult issue. A lot of you have been retired. You've been retired for years. I know you've put a lot of time and effort into trying to reconstruct the thing, so I want to thank you very much again.
The meeting is adjourned.