The iconic force is fraying under the strain of its rural policing model, tragic mistakes, an ugly past and a controversial present. A special report by stphnmaher
Leon Joudrey shuts his phone off before he goes to bed, so when he awoke in his Portapique, N.S., home early on the morning of April 19, he had no idea that 13 of his neighbours, including some of his closest friends, had been murdered while he slept.
They took the killer’s common-law wife away, but still he says nobody told him what had happened. Only when a friend called did Joudrey learn that his closest friends had been murdered. He is haunted by that, and has had to abandon his home and move away to cope with the stress. “I drove around for two or three hours, the most confusing two or three hours of my life, with all my friends dead and I didn’t know it. Now that I know what happened, it was like driving through a graveyard.
Dobson’s father is one of the people who has proposed a class action lawsuit against the RCMP and the province, saying the authorities failed to “protect the safety and security of the public.” The lawsuit alleges that the RCMP returned a vehicle to one family with gun casings and human remains inside, and that the initial RCMP response was hampered by understaffing.
This is the structural problem at the heart of the RCMP, an instantly recognizable symbol of Canada around the world. Its essential work as a federal force is undermined by its obligations as an underfunded rural police force working on contract for provincial and municipal governments. Increasingly, it looks like the Mounties are struggling at both of these competing missions, and are too often a danger to both themselves and the people they are sworn to protect.
Indigenous leaders say this bitter legacy of genocidal colonialism continues now. Since the RCMP polices much of rural Canada, and also is responsible for national security, Mounties are typically called on to clear blockades and to gather intelligence on Indigenous activists that resource companies consider a threat.
The RCMP says the incident started as a routine traffic stop and has referred it to the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team for an independent investigation. “The employees of the Alberta RCMP have built positive relationships with Indigenous and visible minority communities across the province and we continue working to make those relationships better,” says Fraser Logan, Alberta RCMP media relations manager.
Fiddler was disappointed with Lucki’s response. “Her first instinct was deny, deny, deny, then wobbling for a couple of days, ‘Maybe there is systemic racism.’ You know what? As a leader, you know, whenever you’re asked a tough question, your first response, that’s your response.”It has been a tough spring for the RCMP, which followed a tough winter, a tough year, a tough decade.
Officers without the background for the work would try to avoid it, he says. “If you’re writing a wiretap warrant, you get a [person] with a Grade 12 education, they’re probably not equipped to do that level of writing. And so they’re going to try not to do it. They’re just going to do whatever they can to get out of doing it.”
While the Portapique shooting was under way, for example, the RCMP called in officers from Moncton, two hours away, rather than asking for help from the police in Truro, 30 minutes away. The officers did not know the area. Call logs released under access-to-information law by the Truro Police Department show that one RCMP officer had to ask if there was a hospital in Truro.
Taggart was already raising questions about the adequacy of the policing service in his community before the mass shooting. After the shooting, he asked the RCMP to brief him on whether there were six officers on that night, as there are supposed to be, or whether there were four. The RCMP answered the question, but he is not permitted to share the answer with the public because the RCMP will only share with municipal officials on condition that they keep it secret.
“When I said, well, what’s Mountie math? They said, well, Mountie math is the RCMP. They never tell us how many officers they have in any location at any given time. So I say, well, why? They say for security reasons? Bulls–t.” RCMP pay and training, once the envy of other police forces, have lagged for decades. A starting constable makes just $53,000. In Vancouver, where RCMP officers and municipal police regularly cross paths, Vancouver constables out-earned their Mountie counterparts by $14,000 a year in 2019.
“Harassment remains a serious and persistent problem for the RCMP,” said a 2017 report from Ian McPhail, chairperson of the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP. “Despite some efforts, the RCMP has failed to effect the necessary changes in a meaningful or systematic way.” McPhail said the RCMP has a “dysfunctional organizational culture.”
Leuprecht and other experts say it’s time for Ottawa to stop pushing its police on jurisdictions and get the RCMP out of contract policing. And Indigenous leaders want the federal government to properly fund Indigenous police agencies, and encourage more First Nations to police themselves.
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