Robert Dziekanski died 15 years ago — investigations into the RCMP role continue

There is no doubt where Robert Dziekanski's mother would be today, if she were alive. 

Zofia Cisowski would have made the four-hour drive from her home in Kamloops, B.C., to arrive at the Vancouver International Airport. She would have stood on the very spot in the arrivals lounge where her son drew his last breath after being Tasered by an RCMP officer in the early morning hours of Oct. 14, 2007.

Cisowski made this pilgrimage on each anniversary of her son's death, years after most people stopped thinking about the event.

Cisowski died in 2019, but not before saying on more than one occasion she believed her son had been "murdered" by the four RCMP officers who were the last to see him alive. 

Her conviction about the officers' guilt was fed by an unfathomable grief few can appreciate. But even the late Thomas Braidwood, who led the public inquiry into what happened to Dziekanski, opined that the officers who subdued him using a Taser did not intend to cause his death. 

Fifteen years after Dziekanski's death, however, an ongoing criminal investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police is asking whether bias and misconduct by senior leaders of the RCMP tainted the processes aimed at the four Mounties who confronted the Polish immigrant. 

The investigation is called Project Eastbourne, a name chosen randomly from a list of cities and villages in England that the OPP uses to label major case files. And this is a major one. The criminal files that were opened specifically reference a number of people, including former RCMP commissioner Bill Elliott and the force's current top officer Brenda Lucki. 

The investigation began more than two years ago after an RCMP assistant commissioner was presented with a series of complaints alleging obstruction of justice. Former Mountie Monty Robinson, who was in charge the night Dziekanski died, is one of the complainants. 

"You know I can't get back the last 15 years of my life," Robinson told CBC in a recent interview while he waits for Project Eastbourne to finish its work. "But I'm damn well going to expose all those people — all the people that broke the law or didn't do any action and address it."

Robinson's list of grievances is long. After Braidwood condemned all four officers as "self-serving" and "patently unbelievable" for having "desperately attempted" to mislead him, a special prosecutor levelled perjury charges against each of them. 

What's often been lost in reporting about those charges is that they had nothing to do with anything the police did the night Dziekanski died, or during the subsequent homicide investigation. 

Instead, Robinson and the others were accused of lying at the inquiry, primarily for testifying that the mistakes they made in recollecting what happened were the result of having experienced a fast-paced, traumatic incident in which a man died. When Robinson went on trial in 2014 the judge didn't buy it. 

Appeals went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which upheld a conviction, and in 2017 Robinson began serving a sentence of two years less a day in a B.C. jail. 

Up until the Braidwood Inquiry, the RCMP had quietly supported the four. Elliott had even called each of them personally. But as the tide of public sentiment against them swelled to outrage, internal support at the RCMP's senior levels evaporated. Robinson had felt it.

Robinson pushed for external investigation

Once out of jail, he used access to information laws to dredge up every scrap of paper the Mounties had on the case. Eventually it produced material and reports he'd never seen before that supported the claim they'd all acted within their training. It's unclear how much of it was ever turned over to the inquiry or disclosed to his lawyer. 

Robinson pushed the RCMP's professional responsibility unit to investigate. When it failed to act, he took his findings to an assistant commissioner, who opened criminal files and outsourced the investigation to the OPP. 

Among the allegations being pursued by the OPP's Project Eastbourne is that material was deliberately withheld by the RCMP. Robinson is hopeful the investigation will lead to a recognition that he was handicapped at the inquiry and at his trial. 

"How can they not pardon me when the convictions were never backed by the facts?" he asked. 

The special prosecutor decided to try each of the Mounties separately, in front of four separate judges, even though his theory was that they had colluded to get their stories straight.

Robinson and Kwesi Millington were found guilty, and Millington was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

But officers Gerry Rundel and Bill Bentley were acquitted. 

'A tremendous miscarriage of justice'

"It really comes down to the luck of the draw — in other words, the judge you draw," said lawyer Ravi Hira, who represented Millington at the inquiry and at his criminal trial. Hira says the result isn't explainable outside of a courtroom, compounded by the Supreme Court of Canada which endorsed it.

"In my opinion, respectfully of course, I consider what happened here to be a tremendous miscarriage of justice."

Robinson has asked Project Eastbourne to examine how the trials were conducted. It's not clear if the OPP can do that. 

But Hira says when OPP detectives reached out to him, they raised the question of "prosecutorial misconduct." Hira says he adamantly told investigators he didn't see that as possible. As to whether senior leaders in the RCMP played any role in the outcome, Hira welcomes the OPP's examination. 

"If there are reasonable grounds to investigate whether or not material has been withheld, then there should be an investigation. It's as simple as that."

Gerry Rundel is also a complainant on the criminal files. While he was acquitted of perjury at trial, he was nevertheless implicated in a conspiracy for which the judge who acquitted him found no evidence. 

"I still think about Robert Dziekanski," Rundel said from his home in Nanaimo, B.C. "It's 15 years later and I still have nightmares and dreams about it." 

But Rundel, who today works for the RCMP's Federal Serious and Organized Crime section, says his waking hours have been a living nightmare. 

"Life …" Rundel said haltingly, "just kind of stopped or changed from that day forward."

He says that the events on the night Dziekanski died led to him being called a murderer, a liar and treated like a pariah. He says it devastated his family and his kids in particular. 

"We weren't able, mentally able, to be the parents they needed."

After Brenda Lucki was appointed as RCMP commissioner in 2018, Rundel wrote to her arguing that the force had discounted reports and investigations which concluded that whatever mistakes the four officers had made, they had followed their training. Rundel asked the newly minted commissioner to conduct a criminal investigation into why the RCMP had thrown them under the bus. 

"Given there remains ongoing civil litigation regarding events related to this matter, it would not be appropriate for me to launch any investigations," Lucki wrote in response. 

RCMP faced numerous lawsuits

The RCMP indeed faced a number of lawsuits stemming from the events that occurred 15 years ago.

It settled with Zofia Cisowski. Department of Justice lawyers negotiated a suit brought by the widow of Pierre Lemaitre, the officer in charge of RCMP media relations at the time of Dziekanski's death, who died by suicide. Lemaitre had been sidelined by superiors, ridiculed and denied permission to correct errors he gave to the public in the early days of the homicide investigation. 

Each of the four officers sued the RCMP, variously claiming they'd suffered from being left to twist in the wind after essentially doing what they'd been trained to do. Bill Bentley reached a settlement after his acquittal. So did Kwesi Millington, despite his conviction and resignation from the force.

But the RCMP hasn't resolved the claims brought by Robinson and Rundel, the two people responsible for kick-starting Project Eastbourne. As Rundel waits for the conclusion of a criminal investigation that's focused on whether senior RCMP leaders committed obstruction, he says he's trying to be realistic. 

"I don't think any one particular record would have made a difference to either the Braidwood Inquiry or the prosecutors," Rundel said. "They had their minds made up and were ignoring any records that supported the officers."

But he says that if the investigation does find something was withheld, those responsible should be held accountable.

Inquiry embedded in RCMP training

What Rundel really hopes may come from it all is a criticism of Braidwood's findings, if not a full-blown repudiation.

After former commissioner Bill Elliott endorsed Braidwood's report, it was embedded in the RCMP's de-escalation training, something that galls Rundel to this day. 

"To have that removed from the RCMP training program will be one big victory, that is undeniable."

For Don Rosenbloom, the lawyer who represented the government of Poland at the inquiry, Braidwood's findings remain rock solid and remain a blatant example of why an inquiry was called. 

Rosenbloom was a fierce advocate for Poland's interests and his blunt cross-examinations of the officers left little doubt that he believed they weren't being honest. Poland's president awarded Rosenbloom the country's Order of Merit for the work he did representing the Polish government at the inquiry.

"The Dziekanski matter," Rosenbloom wrote in response to questions, "resulted in meaningful change to policing." 

Rosenbloom cites the changes to the RCMP's use of Tasers, and the effect the inquiry had in giving notice to police forces that their conduct "may be independently reviewed leading to judicial recommendations."

OPP investigation continues

It's not clear whether anything about the Braidwood Inquiry, its findings or how they were reached will be seriously examined by Project Eastbourne. Not surprisingly, the OPP isn't entertaining questions about the work it's been doing for over two years. 

"This remains an ongoing, active investigation," the OPP's assistant manager of media relations said in an email. "In order to protect the integrity of that investigation, there is no additional information that can be shared at this time." 

A request to the RCMP for comment about the implications of what appears to be the first ever criminal investigation into allegations against its senior leaders produced an email response from RCMP media relations directing questions to the OPP. 

Millington, now a motivational speaker and life coach living in Ontario says he has intentionally avoided the OPP investigation and is putting everything that happened behind him. 

Bentley, now an RCMP corporal assigned to anti-terrorism work in Ontario, would only say the investigation is triggering.

"After losing 10 years of my life, I have managed to close this chapter of my life and have some semblance of normalcy."

By Robinson's count, OPP investigators have now been to B.C. half a dozen times in two years and they've accumulated at least 60 statements — and they're still not done. That strongly suggests investigators are not simply ticking boxes to clear a complaint.

Whether they ultimately produce a report that clears up anything else that's happened in the past 15 years is an open question.