There’s plenty we don’t know about the events leading up to the death of Robert Dziekanski. How it was, for instance, that employees of an airport — an airport with a telephone translation service — found it impossible to find the man a Polish translator for 10 hours while he sat and wandered, confused, looking for his mother in an unfamiliar country. And why customs officials couldn’t be bothered to try to help him connect with his mother, despite her repeated requests.

But there are things we do know, thanks to a video shot by a private citizen released on the internet: four members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police walked into the building and, being informed by an airport security guard that the agitated, confused man (he’d been throwing chairs at one point in apparent frustration) needed a “Russian translator” because he didn’t speak English, they approached him. He was unarmed and appears completely unthreatening, raising his arms in the universal symbol of surrender. The police responded by shooting him with thousands of volts of electricity from a Taser gun. When he responded, as those shot by Tasers will, by falling to the ground in convulsions of agony, they shot him with the gun again and then jumped on him, putting a knee to his throat in an apparent attempt to cease his convulsions while they handcuffed him. Around this point, he died. The officers made no effort to resuscitate him.

Here’s something else we know, thanks to that video. After the event, RCMP spokesperson Sergeant Pierre Lemaitre gave a patently false version of the events, suggesting Dziekanski had been aggressive and throwing things in the presence of officers and had resisted their efforts to subdue him.

So: a situation that could clearly have been diffused without weaponry of any kind — through the use of the Polish language and a bit of simple human consideration — resulted in a man’s death. And the official spokesperson of our storied federal law enforcement agency either outright lied or was himself woefully misled as part of an attempted cover-up by someone or some people within the force.

The government of British Columbia has announced an inquiry into the events. Rightly so. An abysmal failure to communicate - at every stage of the process - killed a man here and threw the RCMP into disgrace. Perhaps the inquiry’s report can communicate some simple steps to prevent this sort of tragedy from ever happening again, and communicate to the RCMP that it is their job to protect people and expose lies, not to kill people and invent cover stories to protect themselves.

Some ’splainin’ to do
Speaking of inquiries, we’re glad to hear that Brian Mulroney welcomes the public inquiry into his dealings with international fugitive Karlheinz Schreiber. Perhaps he’s been waiting for this star-studded venue to explain a few things to the Canadian public. (We’d have thought perhaps his 1,200-page autobiography released just a few months ago might have provided such a venue, but still.)

Questions: what the hell is a former prime minister doing meeting a shady character like Schreiber in a hotel room to receive envelopes containing $300,000 in cash? What did he do for the money? How does the fact that he met Schreiber and accepted the money jibe with his later explanation to the government that he’d had “no dealings” with Schreiber? And when he offered that denial of dealings with him, he was in the midst of negotiating a settlement with the government of over $2 million for the RCMP’s role in besmirching his name by saying he’d had dealings with Schreiber — didn’t he think the info about the cash hand-offs, declared late to Revenue Canada, would be germane to the discussion?

We suspect that as much as Mulroney claims to relish the opportunity provided by the inquiry to clear his name, we relish it more. Start explaining, Brian.

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