Conduct Case MPCC‑2014‑018 Summary

This complaint relates to the conduct of a Military Police (MP) investigation into allegations, formulated by the complainant, that one of his superiors had deliberately entered false information about him into his Change of Circumstance report (a document that can have an influence on a member’s security clearance). More specifically, the complainant claims that the report contained a false statement that he had been issued a restraining order preventing him from seeing his child. He maintained that he had never been subject to a measure of this kind and had never said any such thing to the senior officer in question.

In his conduct complaint, the complainant disputed the contents of the MP investigation report (which he obtained at that time by means of an Access to Information request and a Privacy request) which stated that the Change of Circumstance report was part of an administrative process and had no impact on his right to see his child or his ability to care for that child. The complainant, however, had never argued that the report in itself limited his right to see his child, but rather that it specified, wrongly, that he was subject to such a court order. According to the complainant, this error had undermined his confidence in the ability of the MP to properly manage personal information, and the MP investigation should be reopened.

In its review of the complaint, the Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) determined that although this statement in the investigation report was poorly worded and could have better reflected the investigation as a whole, the investigation file, overall, showed that the subject MP member had in fact correctly understood the complainant’s allegations and had conducted the investigation properly. For this reason, there was no need to reopen the investigation.

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