RCMP Const. Rick O’Brien was shot and killed and two officers were injured, while executing a search warrant in Coquitlam, about 30 kilometres east of Vancouver, on Friday morning.
O’Brien, 51, was a decorated constable from the Ridge Meadows detachment and he just recently celebrated seven years of service. He leaves behind a wife and children.
RCMP boosts contract scrutiny following review of dealings with China-linked firm
OTTAWA – The RCMP says it is updating its procurement practices after an internal review of dealings with a company that has ties to China.
A standing offer with Sinclair Technologies to provide the RCMP with radio-frequency filtering equipment was suspended in December after media coverage focusing on national security implications.
Sinclair’s parent company, Norsat International, has been owned by Chinese telecommunications firm Hytera since 2017, and the Chinese government has a 10 per cent stake in Hytera through an investment fund.
A recruitment ‘crisis’ threatens the RCMP’s future — the new boss has plans to turn it around
… The Management Advisory Board, an outside panel of experts set up to give impartial advice to the RCMP commissioner, recently reported that the force’s recruitment problem can be described accurately as a “crisis” — one that could threaten its ability to serve as Canada’s national police force.
“If these [regular members] are not replaced by new cadets from diverse backgrounds and with capacity to serve, the RCMP will be even more challenged to meet its service delivery commitments under the provincial, territorial and municipal police service agreements, and to maintain federal policing capacity,” the board said in a report released in May.
Agency’s future unclear as provinces consider replacing it and Ottawa reviews its role
On July 8, 2021, at about 9 a.m., the RCMP boxed in Jared Lowndes at the Tim Hortons drive-thru just off South Island Highway in Campbell River.
A police dog was sent in. Lowndes, 38, killed the dog with a knife. Shots were fired by police and Lowndes died.
Campbell River Mounties said they tried to stop Lowndes because he had an outstanding arrest warrant.
VICTORIA — B.C.’s Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth tried hard to create the impression Wednesday that the long-running debate over policing services in Surrey had reached the end of the line.
“This decision is the final decision,” he told reporters in Victoria.
He had given Surrey two chances to make the case for going back to the RCMP.
Both times the city “failed” to persuade him.
Once upon a time bell-bottoms, mullets, and “Gestalt” theory were trendy. Until someone realized two fashion blunders didn’t cancel out and people had always seen patterns. Like this one where the RCMP is desperately understaffed.
As the National Post reported, “The force provides police to provinces across the country, but it is missing [recruiting] targets in every region, with vacancy rates up to 17%.” You might say it’s not a pattern, even with the Armed Forces also officially short some 16,000 members, probably far more. It’s just as ugly as the purple jumpsuit Burt Reynolds wore on the “Tonight Show” in 1973 that the state cannot protect us from internal or external threats, its most basic duty.
A second former senior Mountie is allegedly caught up in an investigation into Chinese interference operations in Canada.
Kenneth Ingram Marsh, a B.C.-based private investigator and former commander of an RCMP international organized crime unit, has been named as a co-conspirator in the allegations along with former Mountie William “Bill” Majcher.
As an RCMP officer, William Majcher, 60, used fake identities to infiltrate organized crime groups to investigate money laundering. He even went undercover to help the FBI to build a case against a Colombian drug cartel, knowing that if he was outed, a bounty would be put on his head.
After leaving the national police force in 2007, Majcher moved to Hong Kong, where he helped create a firm called Evaluate Monitor Investigate Deter Recover (EMIDR) in 2016. The company’s raison d’etre was to help China and its corporations recover assets it alleged were stolen, Majcher said in previous interviews.
OTTAWA – The RCMP is falling well short of staffing levels in multiple jurisdictions across Canada where it has provincial policing contracts, with as many as one in six positions unfilled, leaving communities with fewer officers and detachments short-staffed.
In 2014, as Beijing was ramping up Operation Fox Hunt, a sprawling campaign to go after corrupt politicians and economic criminals hiding overseas, a representative of the Chinese government approached William Majcher.
A retired former undercover officer with the RCMP, Mr. Majcher had been living in Hong Kong for seven years, working as a corporate investigator and advising banks on money laundering. According to Mr. Majcher, he was invited to meet someone “very close to senior state security,” who asked him whether he would be able to help track down money stolen by corrupt officials.
A retired RCMP officer has been charged with foreign interference, the Mounties said in a news release Friday.
William Majcher, 60, “allegedly used his knowledge and his extensive network of contacts in Canada to obtain intelligence or services to benefit the People’s Republic of China,” the RCMP in Montreal said in the news release.
The release alleged that Majcher “contributed to the Chinese government’s efforts to identify and intimidate an individual outside the scope of Canadian law.”
The province has ordered the City of Surrey to continue its transition to the Surrey Police Service (SPS), despite the new council’s plan to revert to the RCMP.
Solicitor General Mike Farnworth said in a release Wednesday that the move to the RCMP could have caused a “crisis in policing” as the city failed to prevent an exodus of SPS officers.
Farnworth also said the city failed to demonstrate they could staff the Surrey RCMP without pulling RCMP officers from other communities, noting the organization is already experiencing a critical staffing shortage across the province and the country.
What is going on at the RCMP?
RCMP now says it's not investigating allegations of political interference in federal handling of criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin after its recent response to a public interest group’s FOI request suggested it washttps://t.co/8VNiE9ooqd https://t.co/dtghfGkmcS— Lorrie Goldstein (@sunlorrie) June 19, 2023
OTTAWA — As the RCMP marks its 150th anniversary, a familiar, nagging question about the storied national police force is resurfacing: Should the Mounties withdraw from small communities across Canada to fully concentrate on big-ticket federal files such as cybercrime, fraud and human trafficking?
Lucki and Junior decisided to politicize the RCMP. It will be difficult to reverse public opinion.
Senior RCMP officials were hoping to bring their national intelligence program to “the next level” when they put Cameron Ortis in charge, according to an independent review conducted following his arrest.
Hoping to boost their reputation with international partners like the FBI, the RCMP made Ortis director-general of the National Intelligence Coordination Centre and told him to begin an overhaul.
They also wanted Ortis, a civilian with a PhD, to begin using highly classified information to improve the quality of RCMP intelligence, the review found.
No wonder Canada is an international pariah.
