OTTAWA - The scandal-plagued RCMP stands at a critical point in its history, newly minted Commissioner William Elliott told his troubled ranks Friday.

Dressed in a business suit rather than the traditional red serge, the career bureaucrat used a public change-of-command ceremony to urge the Mounties to help him meet the challenges ahead.

"We must build on our strengths, recognize and address our weaknesses, and live up to the highest standards that we set for ourselves and that Canadians rightly expect of us," he said.

The Mounties' first commissioner appointed without police or even military experience, Elliott has been given a mandate by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to clean up an administration beset by a pension and insurance fund scandal that reached into the very office he now holds.

He must also shore up support among the rank-and-file while implementing changes necessary to avoid the mistakes made in the case of Maher Arar, an Ottawa engineer who was wrongly branded a terrorist by the RCMP and sent to Syria where he was tortured.

That information was passed by the Mounties to U.S. authorities, who used the intelligence to arrest Arar in 2002 and deport him to Syria, where he was tortured into false confessions of links to al Qaeda.

Ottawa has since agreed to pay Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian birth, more than $10 million in compensation for his ordeal.

Elliott confronted the difficult past Friday, invoking the words of former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, who resigned in part over the RCMP's role in the Arar case.

"I know I do not take on this responsibility without the successes and failures of the past," he said, quoting Zaccardelli's own swearing-in speech.

Although Elliott was sworn in as the RCMP's 22nd commissioner last month, Friday's unexpected ceremony was billed as an opportunity for the Mounties to welcome the new commissioner and bid farewell to his predecessor Bev Busson, who delivered a tearful goodbye.

Barely four weeks on the job, Elliott is already facing some tough questions. The RCMP was recently dealt another blow when newly released documents showed officers relied on intelligence obtained from an unnamed country with a questionable human-rights record to support search and wiretap warrant applications for an anti-terrorist investigation.

The Mounties failed to mention that to the judge who issued the warrants, and didn't conduct their own analysis to determine whether the information had been obtained under torture, according to a previously censored section of the Arar inquiry report released Thursday.

Elliott acknowledged Friday that he was involved in the process leading up to the decision to try to censor a small part of the Arar report, passages which were made public after a court battle with the federal government.

But the RCMP has learned from its mistakes and put measures in place to ensure that what happened to Arar doesn't happen again, Elliott said after the ceremony.

"I believe the force has far more strengths than weaknesses. Clearly, there is room for improvement," he said.

"A number of improvements have already been put in place, but there is more work to be done."