Is There a Future for the RCMP?

Historian Greg Marquis has yet to hear from any Mounties or police officers he reached out to about the release of his new book on the RCMP.

“It’s not like this stuff didn’t happen,” he says.

“You might disagree as to why it happened or how serious it is, but I think in this period of reconciliation and critical self-evaluation... having an outsider write something that’s a little critical could make you think about a few things.”

A healthy counter to the enduring brand of the force, Canada’s State Police: 150 Years of the RCMP gives a clear-eyed look at various chapters in RCMP history, from its origins as the paramilitary arm of a colonial state to its suppression of labour movements to its approach to Indigenous groups, environmentalists and protests.

The history and issues that Marquis covers in his book will no doubt continue to shape the force.

From recent leadership gaffes to the loss of a municipal contract with the force in Surrey, criticism of its response to the 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia and an inquiry into its handling of abuse allegations, much of the recent media attention on the RCMP has been critical.

Marquis, who has been teaching at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John for 25 years and has written multiple books on policing, asks readers to consider the history of one of Canada’s most recognizable symbols, the issues the RCMP face today and if there is still a path forward for the national police force.

“[RCMP] do a lot of good work, but we also have to realize that they have to be kept accountable to the citizens. And I don’t know if our politicians are always able or willing to do that.”

The Tyee spoke to Marquis about the book. While he’s not entirely sure what the future of the RCMP will look like, he hopes the force — and politicians who support it — will embrace calls to become more transparent and accountable as they modernize. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: When was the RCMP created and what was it created for?

Greg Marquis: Well, we say RCMP, but really you start with the North-West Mounted Police. John A. Macdonald, as part of the expansion of Canada into the West, created this paramilitary constabulary, officially founded in 1873, and it became an important agent for the colonization of the West.

They became not just police enforcing criminal law, but general agents of the state, doing a lot of bureaucratic activities. Other than the Department of Indian Affairs, they were the main point of contact with Indigenous people in the North-Western Territory.

It wasn’t set up to be permanent. With the colonization of the West, the need for a special constabulary controlled from Ottawa was expected to disappear, and that force could stand down. There was no idea that this North-West Mounted Police was going to be around 100 or 150 years later.

But through a series of accidents and unexpected things and short-term crises and being in the right place at the right time, the force continued to live on. After the 1885 resistance led by Louis Riel in Manitoba, it developed a bit of a negative reputation, but came out even stronger and larger.

After, there was a further repression of Indigenous Peoples and more surveillance. The mounted police were certainly part of that, and they increased in size.

The Yukon gold rush and the war in South Africa sort of gave the mounted police a new lease on life. You get the word “royal” added around 1904 by the British government, in recognition of the service of individual volunteers.

The next iteration is the RCMP, and that is the combination of the stresses after the end of the First World War — the rise of labour radicalism, strike activity, ripple effects of the Russian Revolution, the Red Scare in Canada and the United States, suspicion of people on the left, suspicion of different types of immigrants. That mounted police helped crush the famous 1919 strike in Winnipeg.

Founded in 1920 with a more national mandate, the RCMP took over intelligence and security.

But their future is not really assured until they start to get involved in the provincial policing contracts.

There’s this continuous transformation of the RCMP, of its role, of its mandate. Could you talk a little about this more modern, “national security” RCMP? How did they wiggle into that?

C-IRG, the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group, started to deploy at urban protests. Often they’re looking for a new mandate, a new opportunity. Almost like an entrepreneurial thing.

In recent years, there’s been this idea of “criminal intelligence.” What does that mean? There’s a few organizations and academics that have expressed concerns that under the guise of “criminal intelligence,” they’re starting to gather information on citizens and groups that maybe is not part of valid criminal investigation.

It’s not like a crime has been committed. You go gather information to solve the crime, but they’re gathering stuff just in case.

In theory, the Mounties’ role in national security is to arrest someone if they’ve broken a law. And CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, is supposed to keep an eye on different threats.

But it seems that the Mounties got back into that in the late ’90s and they set up these teams working with CSIS and local police and Canadian border security and other federal agencies. They were active after 9/11 as well. And then recently, the C-IRG, that’s almost like an emergency response SWAT-type thing. But they have to have intelligence behind it.

Do you think the RCMP ever looks back critically at their own actions?

They do, but we don’t know how far this percolates down into the rank and file. The RCMP museum, which is not the only museum in the world to have problematic stuff in it, had the rope that hanged Louis Riel and part of Almighty Voice’s skull. But they have issued reconciliation-type statements recently, which is in the spirit of a lot of other museums. But they have a real challenge. How do you have an RCMP museum now in the spirit of reconciliation? It’s tricky.

The leadership is saying the right things. We just don’t know what it means in terms of moving down the ranks, and they’re facing a crisis with recruitment and turnover and burnout. They’re under-strength in many parts of the country. And there used to be such a big lineup to get into the RCMP.

I don’t know if municipal police forces are having the same recruitment issues. In terms of police community relations, accountability, shootings of civilians and things like that, most of that is happening with municipal police forces, because 80 per cent of Canadians are policed by those forces. There are probably a lot of similar issues facing all levels of policing in Canada.

What issues do the RCMP face today, both internally and in relation to society at large? What do you see as the path to resolving these issues?

One of the things I’m a little troubled by is the new union. Not every police union operates the same, but like any union, they’re going to protect their members. There are often unions that put up barriers to more accountability and transparency, and a police union is a different type of animal. They can be barriers to change.

I think the RCMP, in terms of its accountability to the public and its complaints procedure, does have to modernize, but there’s going to be resistance to that.

Some people over the last couple years have said it should be abolished. I don’t think we can do that. I think it’s too heavily embedded into Canadian society, and all the different provincial contracts and things like that. But it’s often hard to change these big institutions. And often it’s resistance from the rank and file.

I basically think a lot of the core things about the RCMP are very antiquated and should be abolished. They would argue that this is essential to esprit de corps and our identity, but maybe it’s time to get rid of some of these older things that are associated with the frontier era, and have a modern police force. Try to modernize training, have a more realistic complaints process.

The Mounties’ thing is that they’re so iconic — they’re like a brand. That maybe amplifies the scrutiny of them.

What would you say to people who would accuse you of being anti-police or anti-RCMP?

I would say, “Who do the police belong to? Do they belong to the police or do they belong to me and other people like me?” This is a public service.

I just think that we shouldn’t be taking these things for granted. Former RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki got into trouble when she said she wasn’t understanding what systemic racism is, and then she backtracked and said there’s racism in the RCMP, like other organizations.

But other organizations don’t carry guns and can’t arrest you. We’re dealing with a police force here; we’re not dealing with the library. The police do have a lot of power. They’re an essential service.

Our family has used the police many times. I’ve been victimized. Our family’s been victimized. We had a health-related 911 call to our house in the last two weeks, and the police were the first to respond — I was glad to see them.

I’m not anti-police, but that doesn’t mean you can’t expect more of the police, more accountability and more fairness.