Missing gold worth $15.3 million not stolen says RCMP.

Somehow and somewhere between April and October 2008 more than half a ton of gold physically stockpiled by the Royal Canadian Mint could not be located.

The RCMP has now concluded that gold was not stolen.

Tory minister Rob Merrifield trumpeted in the House of Commons that gold was not stolen.

Since it has not been found by the RCMP however, one may surmise that it is still missing.

This happened while the Harper New™ Government managed the country, including Crown Corporations such as the Mint.

Last June, Merrifield, the junior Transport minister responsible for the Crown corporation, told the Commons that preliminary results of an independent audit failed to determine what happened to the gold. "I've instructed the mint to bring in the RCMP to examine this matter in a fulsome way," he said at that time.

The mint made a written request for a criminal investigation later that day. Merrifield's remarks in June followed a series of Citizen articles detailing how officials at the mint had been quietly hunting for the gold since October 2008, when a routine inventory count could not reconcile tabulations made six months earlier with the physical stockpile.

On June 29, three weeks after the mint called on police, detailed findings of the four-month Deloitte audit ruled out bad bookkeeping and other inventory control errors for 17,514 troy ounces of missing gold and other precious metals. The news generated international headlines and fuelled speculation about what would be Canada's biggest gold heist.

The same day, Merrifield and Transport Minister John Baird issued a joint statement calling the loss "inexcusable" and promising the mint will be "held accountable."

They added: "We have ordered the Mint to call in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ... The RCMP investigation is ongoing." Not so. The RCMP had only been investigating whether to investigate. There was no formal case.

Ah. Merrifield and Baird asked the RCMP to investigate whether to investigate. That sounds very butch.