Public Safety Committee on Dec. 5th, 2006

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Commissioner, I find it unlikely that the Americans, had they been in possession of other information linking Mr. Arar to terrorist networks, would not have shared that information with Canadian authorities. I for one find it unacceptable that a police officer, upon learning that mistakes made by his subordinate officers had resulted in a person's imprisonment, would not do everything in his power to secure that person's release from prison.

I also find it unacceptable that the minister was kept in the dark. That's why I'm asking you to do the honourable thing and resign.

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

Mr. Chairman, I have repeated several times today.... I've tried to be as precise and as correct as I possibly can. I've admitted that I made a mistake and may have misstated certain things that were not as accurate.... I did not have any information about the mistakes or the errors that were committed by members of the RCMP, nor did any of my senior officers, until these came out in the report in 2006. Justice O'Connor clearly stated that. I quoted Justice O'Connor today. So to say I had that information at the time Mr. Arar was in New York or was in Syria is inaccurate.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Yet, you knew full well that this is what we understood when you gave your initial testimony. Yet, you didn't set us straight then. Could it be that in the interim, you have come to understand the serious nature of the information not contained in the O'Connor report, but that you have since shared with us?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

Mr. Chairman, I've come here to try to correct the record and to be as forthright as I possibly can. I don't think I'm the first person who's ever come before a committee to clarify some issue that may not have been presented in the most appropriate way; I probably won't be the last. I've made mistakes in the past, and I probably will make them in the future, but I'm here to correct the record as best I can and to assist the committee in arriving at its conclusions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Is there a final question?

Go ahead.

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

You told Mr. Cotler that upon learning of Mr. Arar's detention in Syria, you asked to see his file and realized that mistakes had been made and corrected. Therefore, you had all the facts you needed to understand that if the Americans weren't telling you anything more, it was as a direct result of these errors that Mr. Arar had been jailed and that consequently, an innocent person was in jail in Syria and that more than likely, the erroneous information found on file was likely the catalyst for the ensuing chain of events.

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

Again, Mr. Chairman, I did not learn of the errors and the mistakes and the mislabelling until the report came out. If I said anything that was inaccurate about what knowledge I had in 2002, I've tried to explain that I was absorbed by the report, and I probably made the mistake of transferring some of the knowledge I acquired in 2006 to what I knew in 2002. In 2002 all I knew was that Mr. Arar was a person of interest. He was from the beginning right until the conclusion of the report.

The other thing that I knew was that we could not arrest him. We could not charge him. We could not prevent him from coming back into Canada. That is all I knew. That is what I was told. That is what I briefed to the minister to the best of my ability, and we continued to provide that information to the minister to the best of our ability. That is what all our senior officers knew. Justice O'Connor clearly states that this information was not briefed because the investigators believed that this was not erroneous information. Justice O'Connor, in his exhaustive auditing of the file, brought it all together and came to this conclusion, which we have accepted totally. We have moved very far in implementing his excellent recommendations to try to prevent these types of mistakes from ever occurring again.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you very much.

We'll now go over to Mr. Brown for five minutes.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Commissioner, this really is a tragic episode in the storied history of the RCMP. I'm very disappointed.

Commissioner, you told Mr. Holland that you were not as precise in your answers as you should have been on September 28 when you testified here, and frankly, that really makes no sense. You were very precise. You gave us a timeframe of when you supposedly informed yourself. You described learning of the errors, and you even went so far as to give an excuse of the short response time for the misleading PCO briefing, which we now know to be completely false. Do you dispute this? What is your explanation for your false info about the PCO briefing, which I asked about on September 28?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

Thank you for that question, Mr. Brown.

As to the question of the PCO briefing, as I tried to explain...and again, I was not as accurate as I could have been or should have been because that was the best information I had at the time. I stated that we had to prepare the brief within 24 hours. We actually had, I believe, about nine or fourteen days. The 24 hours comes in when I was actually briefed about the fact that my staff was briefing PCO and preparing the timeline. Twenty-four hours before we actually had to produce the timeline to PCO, my deputy advised me we had to give a brief in 24 hours. So I assumed we had 24 hours to prepare it. I was not aware--and I learned later--that we actually had nine or fourteen days during which we had actually started accumulating that information. Even though we had started nine or fourteen days before, we were not able to gather all the information that was actually out there, which we needed to produce.... That is why we provided the information as best we could, but in an incremental way. So when we did provide the first batch of information, we knew and we explained to PCO that it wasn't all that we had to give them, because we had not been able to physically bring out all that information.

So the 24 hours has to do with the fact that I was told there were 24 hours before it was to be delivered; my deputy told me we had 24 hours to deliver it. I thought, well, how could they give us just 24 hours? But actually we had been working on it for, I believe, nine or fourteen days, and there I'm not sure. Even in that period of time, we had not been able to gather it all, and we advised PCO that this would be coming to them incrementally, as best we could....

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Okay.

You also said that Justice O'Connor found all these facts that somehow eluded you. Now, Commissioner, the information that Justice O'Connor got about the RCMP errors came from RCMP officers. How on earth can it be that the commissioner can't get information from his own organization, even if he weren't misleading this committee and covering up the truth, as you are now claiming? Doesn't this suggest that you really failed in your duties as Commissioner of the RCMP?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

Well, again, that's a good question.

You know, I have 25,000 employees. I have literally tens and tens of thousands of investigations and files that are out there at any given time. We have a system that tries to funnel the most important files, the ones that I need to be briefed on, and at what time and so on. This was a file that, remember, targeted a number of suspected Islamic terrorists. Mr. Arar is a peripheral figure; he's a person of interest that comes into the file. This is not something that I would normally be briefed on. So when he did become of interest, after he was in prison in Syria, I did start to get briefed on the file.

Again, on the false information, as I've stated, and Justice O'Connor states, the members who actually produced the false information or the false labelling were not aware themselves that this was false information. It is only when Justice O'Connor brings it all together in an audited way.... This is normal in a large organization where you have disparate pieces of information all over the place. You don't know what they mean until somebody brings them together when an inquiry or an audit is done.

This is what happened in this case. That's why none of my senior officers was actually aware and that's why they couldn't have briefed me, because the people on the front end were not aware that these were errors or that this was a mislabelling. That's one of the big lessons from O'Connor. That's why we've put into place rigorous training. We've put in rigorous policy in terms of information sharing. That's what O'Connor has done for us, enabled us to really learn from this so that we don't repeat these mistakes again.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Commissioner, this is very important. We had a man sent to Syria who was tortured. We have the taxpayers of Canada now potentially on the hook for up to $400 million.

I want to quote a bit from what you said in your presentation today. We need to get past the notion that you were quoting former Minister McLellan, but we also need to get past the notion that heads must roll to have accountability. Sometimes maybe they should. Do you think maybe they should in this case?

I'm sure I'm running out of time, but the second part is that you referred to changes in the procedures that have to be in place. You talked a little bit about that. What other procedures are you putting in place to ensure that this never happens again?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

As I said, based on Justice O'Connor's report, we now have a very rigid governance structure, which means that no information is shared outside of the RCMP without a series of vetting and review in headquarters. Then, that information is only shared once the most senior officers review it to make sure that all the policies are followed and are complete. That is a very rigorous and centralized governance structure.

We have extensive training now for members to be very sensitive to the fact that when you label someone, especially in a national security area, you can make a serious mistake or it can have serious repercussions if you're not very careful. This is something that we are taking even beyond our national security area. So there is a very rigid learning process.

The exchange of information is very tightly controlled. The training is much better now. We have new MOUs with CSIS. We have a very rigid and very detailed MOU so that we understand what each other is doing. We have actually put in place and are well down the road to incorporating all the lessons that we have learned from Justice O'Connor. That's why, although we can never guarantee, I believe we are a long way down the road to ensuring that this type of mistake never happens again.

But I must also come back to the point that Justice O'Connor made about the investigators. He said they were hard-working, dedicated investigators. They made honest mistakes. They didn't have any mal-intent. They did not do this with any intention to hurt anyone. They were doing the best they could in an environment that was very charged and very difficult. That is why Justice O'Connor, I believe, is very fair in terms of accountability. He takes into consideration the whole context in which they were operating and he gives us lessons learned, and he gives us the proper recommendations so that we don't do this again.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Would you be supportive of a parliamentary oversight committee, a committee of parliamentarians?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

As you know, later this month Justice O'Connor is going to be coming down with a report on oversight, and I will accept whatever recommendations the government agrees with and goes along with. I've stated in my testimony before Justice O'Connor that I will accept any oversight that is imposed or that is put upon us, because I cannot have any diminution of the trust Canadians have in their national police force. I will support any decision by the government relative to oversight, whether that involves the parliamentary committee or other types of committee or oversight.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

We're going to move to the third round here, but before we do, I have an obvious question. Following the meeting on September 28, you must have gone back to your senior staff and asked for some kind of a briefing. Could you describe any of the briefing notes that you would have been given by your staff? Could you also provide to this committee those corrective briefing notes that your staff would have given you? Would you be willing to do that, sir?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

I honestly don't know if there are any briefing notes, Mr. Chair. When I went back after September 28, of course I sat down with my staff and with my advisers, and we reviewed what happened. Of course, then it started to come out about...I was advised that my answers were not as precise as maybe they could have been, and then we started again reviewing what was in the report. We started examining that to make sure, and getting the transcripts and looking at what I said, looking at how that matched against the report and what the actual information was and so on.

As you recall, shortly thereafter I believe members of the committee were talking with former solicitors general, and there were reports that the commissioner didn't brief, and the answer was that, well, no, we didn't get that, and so on. That's when we started calling the clerk and the committee to try to come back before the committee.

So there was a series of discussions in terms of analyzing my testimony, what was in the report, and what actually took place, but I will check, and if there are any notes or anything, Mr. Chair, I will certainly provide you with that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

I'm thinking more that there must have been some kind of an investigation that you would have put in place within your own department to find out what happened. And you're saying there were no briefing notes that you received as a result of this?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

We didn't do an investigation. What we did is we looked at what I had said, what the questions were, what my answers were, what O'Connor said, and what the testimony was in front of Justice O'Connor. That's what we concentrated on. That's what we looked at.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Okay.

Mr. Cotler, are you prepared to begin the next round?

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Commissioner, I have some questions that are really straightforward in terms of requiring just a factual answer. I think the answers may even be known already from the public record.

Is it the case that RCMP officials, under your overall superintending authority, gave false and misleading information to American officials--information that, in Justice O'Connor's words, likely contributed to Mr. Arar's deportation to Syria--and that this false and misleading information was subsequently corrected to American authorities by Canadian officials? You yourself have testified to that effect, I might add.

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

I think I would say, to the best of my ability, yes to the first part, in the sense that yes, we did provide that information, that information that was mislabelled, that was inaccurate. Yes, we did provide that--

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

That's all I wanted to know, Commissioner.

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

--but there was a second part to your question; we never corrected that with the Americans.