The B.C. RCMP Divisional Headquarters is seen, in Surrey, B.C., on Jan. 11.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Last November, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians published a report that concluded that underfunding, poor training and a shortage of staff in the RCMP’s federal policing branch posed an imminent threat to Canada’s national security.
The RCMP’s federal policing responsibilities are vast – national security, foreign interference, transnational organized crime, cybercrime, financial crime, international fraud, corruption, human trafficking and more.
The NSICOP report found that, in a world growing ever more dangerous, the ability of the RCMP to protect Canada was shrinking. The report was a wakeup call to Ottawa to act, as was the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission’s call in March, 2023, to reorganize the RCMP in the wake of its bungled handling of the 2020 mass shooting that killed 22 people.
Now, as they say in horror films, the calls are coming from inside the house.
The RCMP management advisory board, an independent body that advises the RCMP commissioner on internal matters, has done its own report on the state of federal policing and come to strikingly similar conclusions as NSICOP and the Mass Casualty Commission.
“Federal policing faces exponentially growing governmental and public demands and expectations, which are juxtaposed by deteriorating resources and policies that may not adequately support the needs of its mandate,” the draft report says. “The federal policing program has now reached a critical stage in regards to its sustainability.”
First reported on by the CBC last week, the report urges the RCMP commissioner to push Ottawa to provide more funding for federal policing and to give the Mounties a mandate emphasizing the critical importance of that role.
It also calls on the commissioner to find ways to remove barriers, such as low salaries and outdated training, that prevent the RCMP from hiring the kinds of officers able to combat what the report calls “a constantly evolving criminal threatscape.”
The report’s mandate is limited to making recommendations to the RCMP. But its analysis makes it clear the force can’t fix federal policing itself, and that its failings are also the failings of successive federal governments that haven’t ensured the Mounties are properly funded, equipped and staffed to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Ottawa has instead allowed the RCMP to focus too many of its limited resources on contract policing, under which the Mounties serves as a police-department-for-rent in rural and remote areas of Canada (except in Ontario and Quebec, which have provincial police forces), and in some smaller urban centres.
The NSICOP report and the new management advisory board report both say that too much of the RCMP’s funding and personnel go toward contract policing, at the expense of federal policing. As well, the RCMP’s recruit training focuses far more on the needs of rural policing than it does on the relatively sophisticated requirements of a police force combatting complex international threats.
The RCMP is desperately overstretched. As the new report points out, its federal policing branch has extensive responsibilities that, in the United States, are shared by multiple separate agencies: the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the U.S. Border Patrol and the U.S. Marshalls Service, among others.
The RCMP is overextended, underfunded and under-staffed in a country facing a growing assortment of threats. Just look at the headlines this week: MPs were targeted by Chinese hackers in 2021, and there is new evidence linking India’s foreign intelligence agency to the murder of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
It is all too telling that it was the FBI, not the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), that informed Canadian MPs that they had been hacked by Chinese operatives. The fresh intel about the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar also comes from U.S. sources.
What is self-evident is that the Mounties can’t modernize on their own; that the money and mandate they need to do so must come from Ottawa. The Trudeau government needs to act on the many calls for change from inside and outside the RCMP. Nothing less than the security of Canada and its democratic institutions is at stake.