RCMP members march on Parliament Hill in September.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Kevin Lynch is a former clerk, and Jim Mitchell a former senior executive, of the Privy Council Office. They are co-authors of A New Blueprint for Government: Reshaping Power, the PMO and the Public Service.
Iconic institutions are notoriously difficult to modernize. Despite the revolution of electronic mail, new and sophisticated parcel-delivery competitors, and increasing consumer choice, Canada Post and its unions have clung to their old business model, losing customers by the millions and costing taxpayers in the billions. To its credit, the Carney government has said enough is enough, instituting a long overdue restructuring.
Another, much more iconic, organization is in serious need of modernization – the RCMP. Here, too, the impetus is a radically changing environment – transnational criminal gangs, international terrorist networks, foreign interference, cyber threats to critical infrastructure, money laundering and border security, including drug smuggling. Common features of these new threats are their national and global reach, advanced technologies and sophistication.
Yet the RCMP’s operations, training and organizational culture are still very much the product of its history. Activities such as contract policing for many smaller communities and most provinces (except Ontario and Quebec), patrolling rural highways, and providing police services to Indigenous communities consume the majority of the RCMP’s manpower, management and financial resources. Federal policing – which only the RCMP can do – is the smallest of the RCMP’s functions, dwarfed by the resources that go into contract policing.
Today’s RCMP is like an overextended conglomerate that needs to refocus on its core business to be effective. Despite numerous reports calling for a shift in the RCMP’s efforts and attention to its federal mandate, little has been done. The government of Justin Trudeau, just four days before its mandate ended, issued a white paper calling for the RCMP to become a modern, technologically enabled police service staffed by officers with new skills, and focused on new threats to public safety for which the federal government carries ultimate responsibility. In short, the RCMP should focus on federal policing.
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While the timing was inexplicable, the analysis and directions for reform are spot on. And the need for RCMP reform did not go away with the change in prime minister. Now the challenges of modernizing federal policing confront Mark Carney. And Mr. Carney has displayed a decisive willingness to shake up core government functions with the Major Projects Office, designed to cut through needless government processes and red tape, and a new Defence Investment Agency meant to reinvent a failed military procurement system.
The Carney government is rightly preoccupied with Canada-U.S. relations and threats to our economy and security in a dangerous world. But with Canada’s security a present danger, we cannot afford to ignore the weaknesses in our federal policing for long.
RCMP reform will not be easy. It will take political leadership and time. It will require consultations with provinces and Indigenous communities in pursuit of new policing models for them. It will need additional funding for new purposes. And it will attract many naysayers, including among the RCMP leadership and the RCMP union, who will argue for the current model with more resources, as if funding and not structure was the real problem.
What can be done?
First, there is a concrete timeline to facilitate reform, as the current RCMP provincial-policing contract ends in 2032. Two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, have advanced the idea of creating a provincial police service to replace the RCMP. The federal government should build on this direction. It should begin discussions with the other provinces and territories on new models to replace the current model of RCMP contract policing. And there is every reason to work with Indigenous communities in creating their own, locally driven police services.
Second, the government should build on the new border-security legislation to modernize the federal policing function now, with customized training, recruitment of officers with specialized skills, the creation of career streams within the federal policing function and additional resources.
Third, and crucially, the government should begin to make the public case for RCMP modernization. The security threats Canada faces have changed dramatically, and the iconic Mounties need to adapt as well, becoming a leading-edge federal police force to keep us safe.
Safety matters to Canadians. With today’s escalating national and international perils, a restructured RCMP focused on federal policing and emerging threats is needed to deliver that safety – just as it has in the past, but for very different times.