Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you all for coming today. We appreciate it.
I want to begin, Mr. Chair, by acknowledging that at the end of our meeting we'll be dealing with my motion to have this committee recommend to the minister that we go to a full public inquiry, that the shortened version, this quickie look, is not going to be sufficient.
I open with that to point out that the reason for that, in part—and I'll get into my arguments later—is to make sure that everybody here has a fair chance at fair representation. We are not a courtroom, and we're now getting to the level of detail at this meeting and subsequent meetings that we will continue to hold until such time as we get a full public inquiry, but this is not the place. I think the evidence is there, just from what we've had so far. So I hope members will keep that in mind when we deal with the motion at the end of this meeting.
My first question will be to point out that we have two main issues in front of us, and we keep going back and forth with the two. It has to be difficult for anybody watching to follow where we are, because part of it is what happened, was there wrongdoing, what are the details of that, and getting around to determining who perhaps conducted themselves in an inappropriate and unacceptable way. The second one is the allegation that there has been an attempted cover-up, an attempt to quash this, to keep it from seeing the light of day. Those are two very different issues. So I have questions on one stream, and then questions down the other stream.
In the first round, I'd like to deal with the issue of the alleged cover-up, and one of the questions that comes to my mind is to Mr. Zaccardelli.
There are at least four people I can identify—maybe more, sir—for whom it looks strangely and questionably coincidental that they were reassigned and taken off the investigation.
The four people I can identify are Denise Revine, whose position was structurally eliminated; Chief Superintendent Fraser Macaulay, who was transferred to the Department of National Defence; Assistant Commissioner David Gork, who was seconded to INTERPOL in France; and Staff Sergeant Mike Frizzell, who was removed from the investigation--and in fact, his removal is part of our discussions here.-
Mr. Zaccardelli, are they coincidences? Is that merely a coincidence? It doesn't look good. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.
The other thing is that your previous deputy commissioner, Barbara George, said when she was in front of us, regarding Staff Superintendent Macaulay's transfer, “It was felt at that time by the then commissioner”—that would be you, sir—“that Chief Superintendent Macaulay would benefit from a secondment. He was actually given a short secondment with the military.”
You know I'm going to ask Mr. Macaulay. So I will ask you to comment on it overall. Is this coincidence? Is that what happened and you'd like us to believe that? Secondly, I'd like the specifics around Chief Superintendent Macaulay.