Junior officer charged alongside disgraced Winnipeg constable pleads guilty

A junior officer arrested alongside a now-disgraced Winnipeg police constable after the pair stole cash and other items they believed to be evidence during a 2024 "integrity test" has pleaded guilty.

Matthew Kadyniuk, 34, admitted to breach of trust and theft under $5,000 in a Winnipeg courtroom Friday morning, days after court heard sentencing arguments for his co-accused, Elston Bostock, who has pleaded guilty to slew of other offences over a period of years.

"How do you plead?" a court clerk asked Kadyniuk as he stood wearing a suit next to his lawyer, Josh Weinstein.

"Guilty," Kadyniuk said quietly.

The integrity test came as part of an extensive internal investigation into Bostock that started in April 2024.

It followed reports from confidential sources that he'd been associating with people outside the force involved in illicit activity and had been giving them police information, an agreed statement of facts Crown attorney Adam Gingera read in court Friday said.

That investigation led to police getting the go-ahead in September 2024 to set up the officers and surreptitiously record them as they responded to what they believed was a vehicle break-in on the morning of Oct. 17, 2024.

Kadyniuk, who is out of custody, told Court of King's Bench Justice Kenneth Champagne he is currently suspended without pay from the Winnipeg Police Service. The service is in the process of reviewing Kadyniuk's employment status, Winnipeg Police Service spokesperson Const. Stephen Spencer said in an email Friday.

Defence lawyer Weinstein told court prosecutors could ask for a sentence of up to two years less a day to be served in the community. He said he intends to ask for a suspended sentence for Kadyniuk, who will appear for a sentencing hearing at a later date.

"Mr. Kadyniuk, I've heard what you've had to say. I can tell this is a serious moment in your life. When the clerk read out the charges to you, you had a hard time saying 'guilty,'" Justice Champagne said.

"I'm confident you understand that the ultimate sentence is going to be the one that I impose.…You appreciate, this is a very serious matter."

During the staged incident that led to Kadyniuk and Bostock's arrests, an undercover RCMP officer posing as a victim told the officers he'd confronted a person involved in a vehicle break-in and ripped a backpack off him as the person ran away.

The undercover officer handed the backpack over as investigators watched the whole thing from inside a nearby motel, the agreed facts said. Kadyniuk put the bag in the trunk of their police cruiser — which had been equipped with a camera — and got back into the front seat with Bostock, where their conversation was also secretly being recorded.

Video of that interaction was released to the media earlier this week, following Bostock's sentencing. In it, Kadyniuk told Bostock he would like what he would see inside the bag, before the two drove to another area and parked the car to go through the contents in the trunk.