The opposition wants an emergency study of the national police’s destruction of gun registry records. Canada’s information commissioner Suzanne Legault told the justice minister in March that there were grounds to charge the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) for withholding information that it should have provided under the Access to Information law.
Instead of addressing the alleged crime, the government passed legislation that retroactively changed the law so that the RCMP could not be charged.
‘All parliamentarians should be alarmed’
All parliamentarians should be alarmed about the precedent of a government changing the law to protect a government agency or department which has illegally shred documents, says Charlie Angus, a Member of Parliament with the opposition New Democratic Party.
He urges Parliament’s standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics to investigate and give the information commissioner’s report a full airing.
‘Government using its power…to rewrite history’
What’s at stake he adds, is government using its power to essentially neuter independent watchdogs and to rewrite history to invalidate criminal charges. Legault herself signalled her alarm at the government’s law saying it set “a perilous precedent.”
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