As a general rule, I hate opinion pieces as I feel that they are a major contributor to our slide towards ‘facts don’t matter’ US style political rhetoric. That said, I thought this was an interesting and fact driven piece that if anything was too easy on the RCMP. Sharing a journalist’s request for information with the union, without permission, definitely struck me as a serious lapse in judgment.
Absolutely too easy on the RCMP as it mainly came down to “We don’t want to.”
One could also parse the longer answer as “We don’t do that at all. Well, not very much. And it’s better when we do. But we can’t prove that.”
Yea, but that’s the slippery line between factual reporting and rhetoric laced opinion. I agree 100% that the RCMP basically saying ‘no’ to direction from their minister is absurd - but that’s my opinion.
I thought the article did a good job of laying out the points but then letting the reader draw their own conclusions.
You are absolutely correct, and my snarky reply leads toward this tendency to call an organization as a monolithic entity that has agendas when the actual issue could be any number of other things, probably all of them, in a quagmire together:
Resistance to change and outside pressure, factionialization within the group that leads to the request being impeded, corruption, organized crime, institutional failure, racism, nationalism, cronyism, outdated training, lack of training in general…
There could be a good number of people trying to comply with the policy and simply failing. We just don’t know the full truth.
But it’s probably all of the above.