OTTAWA - If nothing else, the astonishing testimony of the last two weeks at the Air India inquiry proves one thing -- there's always something new to learn, even after 22 years.
But some critics of the Canadian police and intelligence establishments are starting to wonder if those agencies will ever draw the appropriate lessons from their past mistakes, no matter how many times they're paraded in public.
Take the case of the RCMP, which has been under fire before for its shortcomings in the realm of national security.
The Mounties' actions were called into question once again when former diplomat James Bartleman recounted an occasion on which he approached an RCMP officer, just days before the 1985 bombing that took 329 lives, with a top-secret electronic intercept indicating Air India was about to come under terrorist attack.
Bartleman says the officer's response was to tell him he already knew about the threat and didn't need any advice on how to do his job.
It was an example of the mind-set of the national police force, says Peter Russell, a retired University of Toronto academic.
"The RCMP is like a closed, monastic order and they don't like interference,'' says Russell, who was chief researcher to another inquiry that examined the force's security operations in the 1970s and 80s.
"We're suffering the dangers of giving a police force national iconic status. I don't think, in any other country, a police force could get away with being so disdainful of political direction.''
Even more unsettling, perhaps, was the RCMP response to an earlier, more cursory review of the Air India affair by former Ontario premier Bob Rae. The force submitted written material to Rae suggesting a sniffer dog was on duty to screen luggage and sweep the plane at Mirabel Airport the night Air India Flight 182 departed Montreal.
Not so, found the new inquiry under former Supreme Court justice John Major.
Serge Carignan, the Quebec provincial policeman who was summoned to the airport with his dog, found the plane had taken off by the time he arrived -- leaving him to check three harmless suitcases that had been pulled off the flight, while the bomb-laden one remained aboard.
It takes a full-fledged public inquiry, armed with the power to subpoena witnesses and command production of documents, to ferret out that kind of detail, says Russell.
"It takes a lot of time and a lot of money, but it's the only device I know for getting to the bottom of things.''
A similar inquiry, under Justice Dennis O'Connor, cost former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli his job over the Maher Arar affair. That probe found the Mounties had passed erroneous intelligence to U.S. authorities, who used it to deport Arar to Syria, where he was tortured over baseless accusations that he had ties to al-Qaida.
There are currently calls for yet another public inquiry, this time into allegations of fraud, mismanagement and coverup by senior officers involved in the handling of RCMP pension funds.
Borys Wrzesnewskyj, a Liberal member of the Commons public accounts committee which has been holding hearings into that affair, says MPs simply aren't equipped to sift through the details and discover the truth.
"With the RCMP and the culture that seems to exist within it, that's no easy matter,'' says Wrzesnewskyj. "Public accounts does not have the resources to do this.''
Others, however, doubt that one more probe is the answer to the malaise besetting the Mounties.
Wade Deisman, a University of Ottawa expert in policing, security and intelligence, thinks it's time for a broader-based initiative -- perhaps a blue-ribbon task force to recommend reforms to the force.
"There are more bodies buried, and they're going to keep surfacing until a proactive approach is put in place,'' says Deisman.
"The RCMP is in a crisis of public confidence (and) the RCMP is not capable of fixing itself at this point. The government has got to get out ahead of the issue and say a structural reform is necessary.''
