Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Michael Duheme at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa on Aug. 16.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
The commissioner of the RCMP says it will be better able to facilitate the end of contract-policing relationships with communities that want to create their own local forces based on lessons from the move by Surrey, B.C., to replace the Mounties with a new service.
Still, Michael Duheme says he expects his senior officers to make the case for contract policing when communities approach the force to explore the possibility, now also under way in the northwestern Alberta city of Grande Prairie.
He said the example of Surrey has taught the force that the transition to a municipal police force is never easy, but rather a complicated effort to engineer change.
“The lessons learned in Surrey, we’ve been sharing it with the management team in Grande Prairie as well as with the province to ensure that Grande Prairie is much smoother than what we saw in Surrey,” Mr. Duheme said in a Friday interview with The Globe and Mail at his Ottawa office.
In 2018, Doug McCallum was re-elected mayor of British Columbia’s second most populous city on a commitment to replace the RCMP with a new municipal force. He said the latter would be more responsive to local concerns than the former, which has provided service on a contract.
Mr. McCallum’s successor, Mayor Brenda Locke, sought to block transition after winning power in 2022, suggesting the move would be too expensive. But this past June, Ms. Locke announced she was standing down and that the replacement would proceed.
Meanwhile, the city council in Grande Prairie voted in March, 2023 to end its policing contract with the RCMP, after almost nine decades, and phase in a new municipal force over five years in a bid to increase local oversight and reduce policing costs.
At the time, Alberta’s public safety minister said he expected other communities in the province would follow in creating their own police forces. More recently, the UCP government has enacted legislation to provide it with the authority to create a provincial police force.
Mr. Duheme was sanguine about the RCMP departing both communities, noting that policing contracts are managed by the federal public safety department, not the Mounties.
“All we can do is manage the process because the decision is not with us. The decision is really with the municipality or province to keep us or not,” he said.
“We come to the table and provide all the information they want, and then they can make the informed decision, and then I think it’s just professional on our part to ensure that smooth transition as we move out of there.”
Still he said there is a place for the national force to make a counter argument: “There is a sales pitch to be done on why you should stay with the RCMP,” he said.
“My expectation would be for commanding officers to explain to the people the benefits of having the RCMP and the work that providing, but the bottom line is it’s not our decision. It’s a municipal or provincial decision.”
Mr. Duheme said the RCMP offers its clients more than just the officers in a particular location. Comprised of 19,000 regular members across Canada, the national force can be relied on to offer expertise and service as required, he said.
The RCMP provides contract-policing services to eight provinces – excluding Ontario and Quebec, which have their own provincial police – the three territories and 150 Canadian municipalities under agreements that expire on March. 31, 2032.
Federal Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc said in a letter to his provincial and territorial counterparts disclosed earlier this summer that Ottawa is committed to the contract-policing operations even as the RCMP’s federal policing wing is more empowered to focus on major investigations such as foreign interference, money laundering and cybercrime.
The cost-sharing ratio for provinces and territories is 30 per cent for the federal government, and the provinces and territories pay 70 per cent.
For municipalities, the costs vary. Those with a population under 15,000 people pay 70 per cent, while the federal government pays 30 per cent. Municipalities with more than 15,000 people pay 90 per cent, while the federal government covers 10 per cent.