Prime Minister Stephen Harper has expressed “concern” over RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli's conflicting testimony before a Commons committee over what information had been shared with U.S. authorities in the case of Maher Arar.
Mr. Harper said he wants the matter investigated.
Mr. Zaccardelli admitted that he had made a “mistake” in leading a Commons committee to believe he knew as early as 2002 that the RCMP had shared with U.S. authorities inaccurate information linking Mr. Arar to al-Qaeda.
He said on Tuesday that it wasn't until Justice Dennis O'Connor released his report into the matter just two months ago that the RCMP's upper ranks became aware of the erroneous reports being shared with U.S. officials.
“It is important to reiterate that no senior staff, including myself, were told of the inaccuracies in the information provided to the Americans,” Mr. Zaccardelli testified Tuesday.
Under questioning in the Commons, Mr. Harper said he was surprised by Mr. Zaccardelli's comments and the government will study the testimony he delivered Tuesday before a Common committee.
The prime minister is promising an “objective, professional and dispassionate” investigation that “will be done with full regard to due process.”
A Liberal MP accused the RCMP commissioner of perjuring himself in delivering the different accounts of who knew what, and when.
Vice-chair of the committee and Liberal MP Mark Holland pointed to eight separate references in Mr. Zaccardelli's previous testimony where he had indicated that the RCMP had tried to correct “inaccurate” information about Mr. Arar with U.S. officials as early as 2002.
“We've now got Mr. Zaccardelli in my opinion perjuring himself before a parliamentary committee,” Mr. Holland told reporters in Ottawa Tuesday.
Mr. Zaccardelli resisted calls for his resignation, saying that he recognized it was a “cardinal sin” for a government official to willfully withhold or misrepresent the facts of a case to a minister.
“If I had been guilty of such actions, no one would have to ask for my resignation,” he said Tuesday, adding that all the information about what went wrong with Mr. Arar's case had no been put together until the O'Connor report was released.
“We were unaware of some important information until the completion of Justice O'Connor's inquiry this year. My colleagues and I deeply regret that mistakes were made. But it is important to recognize that at all times we acted in good faith.”
Mr. Zaccardelli's testimony dominated Question Period Tuesday, where Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion wasted no time in asking the government if it intended to fire the RCMP commissioner.
“This is no longer simply an issue about showing the confidence,” Mr. Dion said.
The committee took the unusual step Tuesday of asking the RCMP chief to swear on the bible before his testimony, something he was not asked to do at his first appearance before the committee.
Mr. Zaccardelli said he had recognized the discrepancies himself in reviewing his previous testimony and that he had come before the committee again to “set the record straight.”
“I recognized that I made a mistake in inferring or leaving an impression that I knew information about those mistakes in 2002 when, in fact, I couldn't have known,” Mr. Zaccardelli said Tuesday. “I knew it in 2006.”
Mr. Zaccardelli said that the last time he came before the committee he was too focused on the recommendations contained in the Arar report and did not have time to accurately bring himself up to speed on who knew what and when.
He told the committee at that time that he found out investigators were speaking with U.S. officials while Mr. Arar was in detention in New York prior to his deportation to Syria in 2002.
“I learned that, in that process, they tried to correct what was labelled as false and misleading information. That is my first point of knowledge,” Mr. Zaccardelli told the committee in September.
