Dismounted

RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli has hung up his red serge and will be taking his musical ride into the sunset, all because he couldn't keep his dates straight about when he heard that the Mounties hadn't gotten their man:

Robert Fife, CTV News' Ottawa bureau chief, told Newsnet that it's clear Zaccardelli has lost the confidence of all political leaders in the House of Commons.

Zaccardelli told Parliament's public safety committee on Tuesday that what he had told them in late September about the Maher Arar case was wrong.

In late September, Zaccardelli told the committee that he found out in 2002 that the RCMP had branded Arar an Islamic extremist.

They passed that information on to the U.S. authorities, who used it to deport Arar to his native Syria. Authorities there interrogated and tortured Arar.

Now Zaccardelli said he couldn't have known that in 2002. He claims he only found out two months ago, when the report of an inquiry into the scandal got released.

"I did not learn about the mislabelling or the mistakes until after the conclusion of Justice O'Connor's report. Therefore I could not have known that when he was detained in the U.S. or when he was detained in Syria."

Which was it? It doesn't matter much now. Either way, Zaccardelli would have had to prove himself incompetent or complicit in the Arar mess.

Under his watch, the RCMP suffered a serious loss of credibility as it acted increasingly like the law enforcement arm of the Liberal Party and PMO: witness the shameful treatment of Francois Beaudoin and Juliet O'Neill.

Zaccardelli's days as commissioner were numbered, even without the Maher Arar embarrassment: with them, they were done.

Source: CTV