No, and I'm very familiar with that. To answer your question as to whether it's different in other police agencies, I would say it's certainly different in police agencies in municipal departments in British Columbia. They certainly wouldn't tolerate some of the behaviours that have been tolerated in the RCMP. I think some of the police managers in the B.C. municipal level would find it laughable. At the same time they feel hurt by it all, hurt that this is allowed to continue.
It's not like the RCMP is trying to escape something here, and that's told by the number of times they so very quickly are ready to bring people forward on some kind of disciplinary action when they do something wrong. When you look at these cases, the vast majority of them are brought to the attention of the RCMP by the RCMP themselves.
Again, I think the big issue is the matter that once somebody has done something wrong they're so quick to downplay the seriousness of it. I think that comes back to their desire to be remedial, thinking that the person could change. Again it's ironic because they certainly would never tolerate it in considering an applicant. This could be very well corrected by having a mechanism whereby certain kinds of offences are automatically treated as formal. I would say that every single integrity case, as we recommend in our report, and every single violation of the Criminal Code are serious from the get-go. Then perhaps the penalties assigned to those would be at a certain level to begin with. That's not to say it could never be fitting to give somebody a warning or something like that, but I would say in the cases that I've seen, that's not likely.