OTTAWA - Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has asked the RCMP watchdog to review Mountie use of Tasers amid a sustained outcry over the police stun guns.
Paul Kennedy is "to review all RCMP protocols on the use of (Tasers) and to assess the compliance of the RCMP with these protocols,'' Day announced late Tuesday. "The government of Canada takes this matter seriously and recognizes that Canadians must continue to have full confidence in their national police force.''
Kennedy, head of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, is to submit an initial report by Dec. 12.
Day's announcement follows a public furor over the videotaped death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver International Airport last month.
The minister's latest request is in addition to his earlier order of an internal RCMP review of Taser procedures, but stops short of the national independent inquiry that opposition parties have demanded.
Liberal public safety critic Ujjal Dosanjh called Day's move too little, too late.
"He's absolutely, miserably failed and abdicated his responsibility to Canadians.''
Dosanjh reiterated his call for a broad national review that would examine the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency, Immigration, Transport Canada and the Vancouver airport authority.
Day's order also follows an analysis of 563 incidents by The Canadian Press that found three in four suspects Tasered by the RCMP between 2002 and 2005 were unarmed.
Many of the reports suggest a pattern of stun-gun use as a handy tool to keep drunk or unruly suspects in line rather than to defuse major threats.
Kennedy's review will include only the RCMP and not other police forces that use the 50,000-volt electronic weapons.
The federal government also plans to release a report Thursday or Friday on events leading up to Dziekanski's death. Day says the report by the Canada Border Services Agency will include recommendations on how to better deal with immigration incidents.
There has been intense speculation over what role border officials may have played. The government has yet to explain why Dziekanski remained in a secure area at the airport for 10 hours on Oct. 14 -- a Sunday -- before becoming so agitated that police were called. But union leaders representing customs and immigration workers say the government's use of students and other inexperienced staff on weekends and during peak periods has been a major issue for years.
"The concern is with the over-reliance on students which, for all intents and purposes, are cheap labour which the employer turns to and has developed a dependency on,'' Ron Moran, national president of the Customs Excise Union, said in an interview.
He stressed that he does not wish to prejudge the results of a pending coroner's inquest and several inquiries, but said chronic staff shortages are "something we should all be concerned about. And we'll just have to wait and see ... whether that was a factor in this.''
RCMP officers responding to reports of an aggressive man destroying property zapped Dziekanski with a stun gun at least twice before pinning him to the floor. He stopped breathing soon after and was pronounced dead.
It all happened within 30 seconds of the officers' arrival and without any hint of the combative attacks on police that the RCMP claimed before videotape of Dziekanski's last moments went public.
A resulting international uproar spurred the B.C. government to announce an inquiry into the incident caught on camera by a civilian witness.
Day noted that the RCMP probe into the case could result in criminal charges. He also highlighted the fact he ordered a review of Taser-use policy a few days after Dziekanski's death.
Asked Tuesday if he would apologize for the border agency's handling of Dziekanski's arrival, Day said he's sorry.
"I'm sorry it happened. I'm sure all Canadians are sorry it happened . . . This is a very serious incident that took place.''
The Canada Border Services Agency has been silent as to how Dziekanski went apparently unnoticed for several hours in the baggage area of the airport.
His mother had told her 40-year-old son, who did not speak fluent English and who had never flown before, to wait for her at the luggage carousel -- forgetting that it's in a secure customs area that she could not enter.
Zofia Cisowski has said she spent more than six hours in the international arrivals lounge trying desperately, sometimes through tears, to persuade airport officials to help her find her son.
She has said that workers in a Canada Border Services Agency office checked a computer but told her there was no sign of him. In fact, he was later processed as a landed immigrant whose paperwork was in order, said Moran.
Cisowski then approached a second airport help kiosk and said she made several more attempts to contact her son. She was eventually told he was not there and she should go home to Kamloops.
Shortly after she started the trip home, Dziekanski finally emerged into the customs exit area where he smashed a computer terminal and threw a small wooden table.
George Scott, national vice-president of the Customs Excise Union, said there was once "an extraordinary number of students'' working at the Vancouver International Airport, but he did not immediately have updated statistics.
In general, customs and immigration staff at the airport "do a tremendous job,'' he said in an interview. "The kind of work they do is very stressful. But any time there's someone in distress they take care of them. It's the second-busiest airport in Canada."
That said, Scott was at a loss to explain how so much could have gone so wrong in Dziekanski's case.
"There's too much unknown about it right now.''
The NDP and Amnesty International have called on police to suspend Taser use for now, citing 17 deaths in Canada and more than 280 in the United States.
For its part, Arizona-based Taser International says of its product: "Specifically in Canada, while previous incidents were widely reported in the media as 'Taser deaths,' the role of the Taser device has been cleared in every case to date.''
