Ottawa Citizen - February 23, 2010
By Colin Kenny
It would be comforting to say that simple changes in attitude within the RCMP will be enough to both strengthen the service’s policing capabilities and restore its status as a trusted national treasure.
But that would be a big, fat lie. Attitude change is certainly needed to jump start RCMP transformation, and there are at least a few signs that the service’s leadership understands this. Unfortunately, you can preach all you want about attitude, but eventually you have to come up with the people and resources to create a better police force.
The federal government has given the RCMP what sometimes seems like a million jobs to do. Canada needs these jobs done, and the RCMP is the best agency to do them. But it doesn’t have the resources to do all of them right, all the time. The Mounties are stretched way too thin, and that keeps showing up on the front lines. I don’t have to point to the list of distressing incidents the RCMP has been involved in over the past decade. Many of them are etched indelibly in our national psyche.
William Elliott, pulled from the federal bureaucracy with a mandate to right the RCMP ship, says he is attempting to steer the service in a more human, less rigid, direction. That would be all for the good. Top cops need to listen to beat cops, and all cops need to listen to the public.
To police effectively these days, you have to care about people – and show you care. Barking orders and banging heads may always be part of policing, but increasingly it’s becoming the exception rather than the rule.
Which brings us back to resources: you aren’t going to have an intelligent, effective police service if officers are overworked and overstressed much of the time.
The overall shortfall of employees at the RCMP last year was 6 percent. That figure doesn’t come close to reflecting actual vacancies when routine absences for things like sickness, maternity and paternity leave, education upgrades and the like are taken into account. There are huge holes in detachments everywhere, particularly at the federal level and to a lesser extent in contract policing for the provinces and territories.
Hiring more people costs money. Will it be forthcoming? My best guess is that the RCMP reform process that is supposed to well underway right now is about to run into a brick wall that will soon be all the rage on Parliament Hill: federal deficit reduction.
Deficit reduction nearly destroyed the Canadian military when the Liberals took a sword to federal spending in the 1990s. Now the Conservatives will be hacking away at the military, the RCMP and every other federal institution and program financed by non-statutory funding, partially because they’ve spent a lot of money on stimulus spending to promote economic recovery.
There’s another reason the government is running short of money – it cut the GST by 2 percent. Most Canadians treated the tax as little more than a nuisance, but paring it from 7 percent to 5 percent is costing the federal treasury $12 billion a year. Good politics? Probably. Good economics? Terrible.
The current deficit hovers around $56 billion. Twelve billion dollars a year over five years would pay it off. Twelve billion dollars a year over ten years would allow for investments rather than cutbacks. It would keep the Canadian Forces and the RCMP and other vulnerable federal institutions in respectable shape. But unless somebody has the guts to undo the damage, that money won’t be there.
The Harper government loves to talk about law and order. The smartest way to improve law and order is not to stuff our already overstuffed jails with more people – jails are places people go to learn how to be better criminals.
The best way to restore law and order is to provide citizens with the educational and social services they need, and to invest in the kind of national police force Canadians want. How much smarter to prevent crime rather than trying to deal with it after it’s happened.
David McAusland, head of the RCMP Reform Implementation Council, observed in the second of his three reports: “While the reform process is still assessing the costs of reform, it is evident that many of the necessary initiatives cannot be completed within existing resource levels …”
More bluntly, Mr. McAusland told the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence, “ . . . no matter how you slice it and dice it, the force needs more people, and, unfortunately, that means more money. It is undeniable.”
There are no signs that the government is listening to Mr. McAusland. In fact, the committee heard testimony that the RCMP is considering cutting back on what has been a successful recruitment campaign well before vacancies in detachments all across the country are filled, and well before RCMP officers can expect to deal with sane workloads and reduced stress.
Those who have revered the RCMP over many decades have been embarrassed by revelations of its weaknesses in recent years. It would be comforting to say that investments are being made to ensure that those embarrassments are behind us. But that would also be a big, fat lie.