This summer, the Cullen Commission released its final report into money laundering in British Columbia. The key finding? Money laundering is everywhere in the province, but the federal government — whose job it is to detect and eliminate financial crime — is not. Even as billions of dollars are laundered through the province, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is nowhere to be seen. A report in 2019 found that of the 6800 RCMP officers in the province, only five were devoted to investigating financial crimes. All five of the Mounties had their salaries paid for by the provincial government, which was paying for 26.

The other 6795 Mounties were conducting traffic enforcement on provincial highways, responding to break-ins in Burnaby, or investigating assaults in downtown Nanaimo. Despite being one of Canada’s national symbols, the Mounties increasingly function as a local constabulary — and not a particularly effective one. Report after report has detailed the RCMP’s failure to conduct basic investigations, communicate with other law enforcement agencies, or weed out corruption. As the RCMP struggles with recruitment and retention, it has become increasingly impossible for the agency to fulfill its unusually broad mandate for federal and local policing, maintain federal crime labs and police colleges, and administer services like the Canadian Firearms Program. In the meantime, the short-staffed RCMP puts officers in subsidized “contract policing” agreements that enable Mounties to act as local police officers in rural Saskatchewan and Metro Vancouver, at the expense of the federal duties that should make up the core of its duties.

In 1928, Canada’s Mounties were on the decline. The original North-West Mounted Police had been folded into the Dominion Police eight years earlier, forming the RCMP and creating a strange hybrid of an agency with paramilitary discipline and a local policing posture but with a specialized federal law enforcement mandate. Eager to get Mounties back into communities, the federal government began offering provinces a sweetheart deal: any province which outsourced policing to the RCMP would have a portion of its policing costs bankrolled by Ottawa. In the years that followed the force expanded dramatically. By 1950, only three provinces continued to maintain provincial police services: Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec.

The program backfired. Instead of enabling the expansion of the RCMP at little cost, a 2020 briefing to then-Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair explained that the contract policing program was a drain on federal resources, the RCMP could neither recruit nor train enough officers to fill its contract demands, and in the meantime, “federal policing responsibilities have been and are being eroded to meet contract demands.” Because RCMP contracts require the force to satisfy an acceptable minimum number of officers in each detachment at all times, the RCMP has no choice but to prioritize its contracts over its mandate.

—

Mounties are among the lowest-paid police officers in Canada, and few candidates seem to be interested in putting up with low pay for the work environment: officers from other agencies absorbed by the force complain of a toxic, paramilitary culture; employees report being bullied and harassed for reporting misconduct; and the force has spent millions of dollars unsuccessfully fighting lawsuits brought by employees over its workplace culture. What candidates the RCMP can find all go through one facility in Regina, Saskatchewan, where they learn from a curriculum geared towards frontline policing in rural communities. Countless reports have cited a lack of quality training in systematic racism and investigative tactics as the cause of the federal agency’s inability to maintain even basic investigative standards, but RCMP cadets continue to learn more about marching than they do Indigenous policing or criminal investigations.

Although graduating Mounties can shortlist a handful of desired postings across the country, officers are ultimately deployed on the whims of the RCMP bureaucracy, decisions that are based less on skill and more on need. One anonymous Mountie interviewed by Maclean’s underscored the consequence: officers “[come] out of the north, [having] just spent two years in one of the communities, and [are] suddenly in the drug section or the market enforcement team or something, but [with] no particular skills to work in those settings . . . . They’re probably not equipped to [write warrants or reports]. And so they’re . . . just going to do whatever they can to get out of doing it.”

There seems to be no energy within the RCMP for positive change. Although former commissioner Bob Paulson identified retention as a concern, Mounties who leave the job report having no exit interview. And under Paulson’s leadership, frontline officers were denied access to carbine rifles over concerns that the weapons would militarize the force. Instead, three members of his paramilitary died in a firefight with a man using a carbine rifle. They had been armed only with handguns engraved with the RCMP logo. 

—

Over the past few years, lawsuits, scandals, and a massacre that left 21 people and a beloved Mountie dead have tarnished the image of the force for many. But it may not be enough to provoke meaningful change. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the force bounced from scandal to scandal: a corrupt Mountie was exposed not by police investigation but by CBC journalists, the agency earned international rebuke from an American judge who accused the force of conducting smear campaigns against Indigenous activists, and the force provided inaccurate tips to U. S. law enforcement that led to the detention and torture of a Syrian-Canadian engineer. Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper appointed the force’s first civilian commissioner, who implemented a handful of minor reforms before retiring. His successors, all of them career Mounties, have carried few of his projects forward.

Today, the focus of reformers is less on culture and more on structure; all-party committees in Ottawa and Victoria have both recommended removing Mounties from communities, municipalities across the country are either considering or already developing their own police forces to replace the Mounties, and when Marco Mendicino took over the public safety file this year, a part of his mandate was to review the force’s role in local policing. But closing the contract policing program would be enormously costly, and the RCMP and those around them seem keen on fighting the closure every step of the way. The City of Surrey, which is in the process of establishing its own municipal police service, has had to do battle against retired RCMP leaders, astroturfed “citizen campaigns” led by RCMP union lawyers, and jaw-dropping stunts: last year, the RCMP union tried to trademark names like “Surrey Police Department” and “Surrey Police Union.” 

Removing contract policing from the Mounties’ mandate, if it happens, won’t come close to fixing the myriad problems with the force. But it will put it into a better position, focusing the force, its training, and its culture on federal law enforcement. Already, developments in the force’s federal policing program seem promising. This year, Mountie leadership decided to “[play] with the DNA” of the force, hiring non-police specialists to conduct investigations into financial crime and cybercrime. The detectives have limited police powers and work closely alongside police officers. One high-ranking Mountie interviewed by CBC News said that in 15 years, “you may very easily have a civilian investigator leading the investigative team supplemented by [police officers].” 

In the meantime, poorly-equipped Mounties continue to fan out across Canadian cities, prairies, forests, and tundras. Laundered money continues to flow through British Columbia’s economy. And the number of Canadians and Mounties alike who have been failed by our national institution continues to grow.