The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Saskatchewan are being blamed for the loss of a case against at Agriculture Canada researcher accused of secretly taking money from China.
The court dismissed the charges against Yanti Gai because it took too long too get to trial.
The RCMP said working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic is why it took too long to gather about 900 documents for the defence lawyers to review.
Justice Timothy Keene, of the Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench, rejected the idea that working from home in 2020, when lockdowns were prevalent across the country, was an exceptional circumstance.
He found that the RCMP’s failure to facilitate access to the documents contributed to six weeks of delay.
This was fatal to the case, because even though the Crown had won grace periods for other pandemic-related delays, the disclosure issues stretched the prosecution timeline to two weeks past the 30-month limit.
“I appreciate this is close to the line,” Justice Keene said, but he added that he had no choice.
Records filed in court show that the RCMP’s federal policing wing began pursuing Mr. Gan in 2018, after a financial intelligence agency in Ottawa flagged his bank accounts for suspicious transactions from China and the United States.
He was a long-standing federal employee, and the government had celebrated him for his work on minimizing the environmental impacts of pulse crops, such as lentils.
In 2019, the RCMP raided the Swift Current research centre as Mr. Gan was arrested.
There was never any accusation that he had betrayed Canadian secrets; he was accused of violating his employer’s code of conduct by not disclosing payments from Gansu Agricultural University, in Lanzhou, China, among other entities.
He stopped working at Agriculture Canada that November.
