Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is covered by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally, on July 13, in Butler, Pa.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
The RCMP has been struggling for years to fulfill demands from the federal government that it bolster the ranks of officers who protect politicians, yet that unit has remained significantly short-staffed, records show.
The records, which were filed publicly as part of a labour board dispute, illustrate the challenges the RCMP will face during the scheduled 2025 federal election, when politicians across Canada will be campaigning amid a polarizing political climate.
“The protective policing program currently operates with a very high vacancy rate,” reads a 2023 RCMP internal policy memo. Although that memo did not state the precise shortfall, a 2022 internal memo stated that the police force urgently needed to fill at least 235 close-protection officer positions.
The failed assassination of former U.S. president Donald Trump on Saturday underscores how urgently this problem needs to be fixed, one former federal cabinet minister says.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail on Monday, former Liberal environment minister Catherine McKenna said the lack of resources for the RCMP hindered their ability to protect leaders in Ottawa. “When I was getting threats, as were my cabinet colleagues, it was clear that the RCMP did not have sufficient capacity – nor do I think they were taking the threats seriously.”
Ms. McKenna said if the RCMP cannot improve its capacity to protect politicians, then Canada should consider an agency akin to the U.S. Secret Service – a standalone entity that provides security to the president, vice-president, former presidents, their families, and visiting international heads of state.
Such an entity in Canada would be unencumbered by the Mounties’ bureaucratic bottlenecks and chronic staffing challenges, she said. “Obviously, the RCMP has many different mandates,” Ms. McKenna said. She added that “maybe it’s not the RCMP which should be doing this.”
Speaking to reporters in Grande-Digue, N.B., on Monday, Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he has spoken to RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme since Saturday’s assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. He said the Mountie boss and other federal security officials have assured him they are increasing vigilance. “I have every confidence that the RCMP take all the steps necessary to protect Canadian politicians,” Mr. LeBlanc said.
In May, Patrick McDonnell, Parliament’s Sergeant-at-Arms, told a legislative committee that threats directed at MPs have skyrocketed in the past five years. And in 2022, CBC reported that the RCMP’s close-protection units were running at 24-per-cent vacancy levels in Ottawa, and that similar units were in comparable staffing straits across the country.
In a statement Monday, the police force said that it could not immediately speak to those vacancies – but said it takes all threats against public officials seriously. “In addition to the Prime Minister and Governor-General, the RCMP is mandated to protect Ministers of the Crown and those designated by the Minister of Public Safety to receive protection on a case-by-case basis,” said RCMP spokeswoman Marie-Eve Breton.
But the records filed at the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations and Employment Board, which detail the shortfall, show the federal Liberal government has requested beefed up security for its ministers, other politicians and high-ranking government officials. In a June, 2023, RCMP human-resources document, the Mounties asserted that the “federal government is seeking enhanced protective policing for Parliamentarians that will require new resources in the Protective Policing program.”
Yet the biggest proposed RCMP fix has failed to get off the ground because of pushback from the union that represents nearly 20,000 Mounties.
Since 2017 the RCMP leadership has been talking about instituting what has been called a direct-entry program. This initiative would mean some recruits start off their careers working in close protection of politicians in Ottawa, after being fast-tracked through a slimmed-down RCMP training curriculum.
In 2023, the National Police Federation, the RCMP union, opposed that proposal at the labour board, saying it was tantamount to an unfair labour practice. The union argued that at least 400 existing police officers within the force have requested transfers to such jobs and did not want to be leapfrogged. The challenge at the labour board by the union was successful.
That has meant the vacancies have not been filled in the protective unit. The RCMP hasn’t been able to accommodate those transfer requests because of its obligations to provide police officers in the rural areas that contract the force for day-to-day law enforcement.
It is unclear how or when the fast-tracking initiative may be relaunched. In an interview Monday, RCMP police-union president Brian Sauvé said that there are no longer any impediments to the management relaunching a version of the direct entry program. But he said the police union would like to see a rollout that would not create two tiers of police recruits.
The police union boss says he does not think the labour-relations dispute will hamper government efforts to have more Mounties safeguarding federal politicians in coming years. “I mean, we’ve been through [elections in] 2019, 2021, and now we’re going into ‘25,” Mr. Sauvé said. “And there’s been no issues up until now.”