Alberta Justice Minister Tyler Shandro is calling on the federal government to fire RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki, saying her continued tenure is damaging to the national police force.
In a statement Wednesday, Shandro calls on Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to immediately rescind Lucki’s appointment.
“Alberta has lost confidence” in Lucki, Shandro said in the statement.
“The commissioner of the RCMP must be held to the highest of standards. So far, Minister Mendicino has stood idly by while Commissioner Lucki has failed to meet even the most meagre of standards for the past two years.
“This is an abrogation of the minister’s core responsibility to Canadians and must be rectified before the RCMP’s reputation as Canada’s federal police service is further damaged.”
In a scrum in Ottawa Tuesday, Mendicino said he will not remove Lucki.
“I have confidence, and the government has confidence in Commissioner Lucki, and obviously as her term, her first term comes up, there will be a process around that.”
Mendicino said the appointment process that named Lucki commissioner in April 2018 has “integrity” and that there will be a discussion when her tenure comes to its “natural conclusion.”
CBC has asked Lucki for her response to Shandro’s calls for her removal but has yet to receive a response.
In his statement Wednesday, Shandro said Lucki has “failed to deal with the RCMP’s history of systemic racism in a forthright and public manner” and risked the integrity of an investigation into a mass shooting.
“Further, as revealed last week, she failed to inform the federal cabinet of all law enforcement options available prior to the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.”
Shandro said Lucki has dodged accountability during two major public inquiries and failed to make changes to ensure maintain public confidence in the RCMP.
Shandro is expected to speak to reporters about his demand for Lucki’s removal at 1 p.m. MT.
Lucki was appointed in 2018. She has been involved in several controversies during her tenure and has faced previous calls for her resignation.
Most recently, she has faced questions about her role of in the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act to quell the protests that gridlocked parts of downtown Ottawa for weeks.
She was called to testify last month at the public inquiry into the use of the legislation.
Lucki has repeatedly stated her support for invoking the Emergencies Act. But the inquiry heard that the night before the federal government invoked the act, she told a senior public safety official that she felt police had not yet exhausted “all available tools.”
During his testimony Tuesday, Mendicino said Lucki shared with him sensitive police information the day before the government decided to invoke the act — and warned him that some protesters in Alberta were willing “to go down with the cause.”
The minister said he spoke with Lucki on Feb. 13 and that she updated him on plans to execute a police operation at the blockade near Coutts, on the Alberta-Montana border.
Mendicino said he told Lucki he couldn’t keep the information about the potential for loss of life in Coutts to himself. He said he shared it with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Katie Telford, Trudeau’s chief of staff.
Mendicino was also questioned about the Feb. 13 email Lucki sent to his chief of staff, previously entered into evidence.
The minister said Lucki was expressing a different view in his conversations with her.
“It also spoke volumes to me about the commissioner’s state of mind, which was that we were potentially seeing an escalation of serious violence with the situation in Coutts,” he said.
The blockade and protest at the Coutts border ended after a Feb. 14 pre-dawn operation that executed warrants on trailers and property. That operation resulted in RCMP seizing more than a dozen firearms, as well as ammunition and body armour.
Later that day in Ottawa, Trudeau announced that the government would be taking the unprecedented step of triggering emergency powers.
Lucki was also embroiled in a controversy related to the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia, and allegations she interfered in the police investigation.
Lucki testified at a public safety and national security committee on allegations Bill Blair, then the minister of public safety, pressured her to release details on the guns used in the shooting,
Lucki and Blair appeared before the committee this summer. Both denied meddling in the RCMP’s investigation.
At the time, Lucki said a miscommunication between her subordinates and herself resulted in her giving incorrect information to Blair’s office.
Lucki has also faced repeated calls for her handling of systemic racism in policing. In 2020, Lucki said systemic racism exists in the police force — after telling several media outlets that she was “struggling” to define the term.
Under the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act, and direction of the Minister of Public Safety, Lucki controls and manages the RCMP. This includes overseeing the delivery of front-line policing services in most provinces and all territories.