A Nova Scotia Member of Parliament is accusing the RCMP of deliberately withholding information that says the force’s plans to transfer its operational communications centre from Truro to the Halifax area could jeopardize the emergency-response system in his province.
Bill Casey, the Liberal MP who represents the riding of Cumberland-Colchester, says the Mounties are refusing to provide him with a complete copy of their internal assessment of the move and have instead given him a version in which the sections that advise against the relocation have been redacted.
It is an issue that is being investigated by the office of the federal Information Commissioner, which says the redactions appear to have been improper and the RCMP has not co-operated when asked to fill in the blanks.
“This is about the safety of my constituents and my province and the RCMP just says, ‘We’re not going to let him have [the information],' ” Mr. Casey said in a recent interview. “I just celebrated the 30th anniversary of my first election. And the RCMP just says, ‘He’s irrelevant, he doesn’t count, don’t give him anything.’ ”
Mr. Casey started complaining two years ago when he heard about the RCMP’s plan to close its communications centre in Truro, which fields about 45 per cent of Nova Scotia’s fire, police and ambulance calls, and to relocate the service to its headquarters in Dartmouth, which is part of the Halifax Regional Municipality. The plan was confirmed in a letter to Mr. Casey in November, though no timeline was provided.
The MP’s initial objection was related to the fact that about 55 jobs would be lost in his riding.
But as he began to look into the safety aspects of the relocation, he says he realized the move would place the RCMP call centre just a short distance from the other large call centre in the province, which is run by the municipality of Halifax. If a storm or any other major disaster shut down both call centres at the same time, it would leave most of Nova Scotia without access to 911 operators, he said.
“If somebody in Yarmouth wanted an ambulance, or somebody in Sydney had a fire, the 911 call system would be out,” Mr. Casey said. That is why modern emergency services across North America are required to build redundancy into their systems, he said.
About a year and a half ago, the MP learned that the RCMP had studied the proposal to move the call centre out of Truro and had detailed the findings in a 2004 report. So Mr. Casey asked for a copy of that document. The Mounties provided one, but large sections had been removed.
Some time later, Mr. Casey ran into someone who had the complete report and allowed him to take pictures of the pages that had been redacted.
One of them says: “It is not recommended that the two largest police communications operations in Nova Scotia be placed within the same metropolitan area.” Another talks about the need for redundancy of the call centres in Nova Scotia and says the RCMP call centre should be located outside of Dartmouth “due to the risk of placing 2 largest police communications centres in close proximity to each other.”
In other words, Mr. Casey said, “this is a report that says don’t do what they are planning on doing.”
Mr. Casey has gone back repeatedly to the RCMP to ask for a copy of the complete report. But the force has refused.
So he launched a complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada, which responded in a letter earlier this month saying “we encountered difficulty collaborating with the RCMP in this investigation” but information officers are of the “preliminary view that the exemptions have not been properly replied and that most, if not all, of the withheld information should be released.”
The RCMP did not respond to questions about the matter on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Mr. Casey is angry. “It really bothers me that the RCMP says, ‘We’re going to deny information to a Member of Parliament who’s asking questions about the safety and well-being of his constituents,’ ” he said. “It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not appropriate.”