Mounties have civilizing effect on NHL: study
A new study suggests the Mounties had a powerful pacifying effect on the Canadian West that continues to be felt more than a century later — even in the NHL.
In research published this month by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, economist Pascual Restrepo shows that violent crime rates remain much higher in prairie communities that were founded far from an RCMP fort during the settlement of the West between 1890 and 1920.
What’s more, he says, the Mounties’ civilizing effect extends to the NHL: Statistics reveal that prairieborn players from areas historically outside the reach of the RCMP spent considerably more time in the penalty box during the past three decades.
Restrepo examined data from 737 NHL players from Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta who were active between 1980 and 2007.
Those who were born in communities first established more than 100 kilometres from an RCMP outpost were penalized, on average, 24 seconds more per game. That adds up to about 100 additional penalty minutes during a typical career.
The research draws a straight line between on- ice NHL violence and a century- old settlement pattern in the West.
The study, The Mounties and the Origins of Peace on the Canadian Prairies, suggests that people who lived in areas far removed from an RCMP fort were more likely to develop a violent code of honour to settle disputes — and that the same code continues to be enforced by their descendants in the NHL.
“History shapes the cultural baggage we inherit,” the Colombianborn Restrepo writes, “and Canadian hockey players carry theirs to the rink.”
The most penalized player in NHL history, Dave “Tiger” Williams, hails from Weyburn, Sask. The town, founded in the late 1890s when the Canadian Pacific Railway reached the area, southeast of Regina, was then more than 100 kilometres from the nearest police outpost, Ft. Pelly.
Saskatchewan was also the birthplace of some other legendary NHL players with a propensity for rough justice: Wendel Clark, Dave “The Hammer” Schultz and Gordie Howe. Manitoba produced Bobby Clarke, Dave Semenko and Ron Hextall, the most penalized goalie in NHL history, while Alberta boasts the likes of Tim Hunter, Craig Berube and the rough- andtumble Sutter brothers, Brent, Brian, Darryl, Duane, Rich and Ron, who collectively racked up more than 7,200 penalty minutes.
Restrepo, a PhD candidate in economics at MIT, launched his research to test a theory expounded by Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker. In his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Canadian- born Pinker argued the murder rate in the U. S. is far higher than in Canada, in part, because there was no centralized authority during the settlement of America’s “Wild West,” while north of the border, the Mounties kept order and curtailed the growth of a violent code of honour.
By extension, Restrepo theorized, the civilizing effect of the Mounties would be greatest in those communities built near one of the early forts, and less pronounced in those communities far removed from one.
The Canadian government established the North- West Mounted Police in May 1873 to bring law and order to the prairies, where U. S. whisky traders were wreaking havoc. By 1885, the police force had grown to 1,000 men with forts dotted across the West. ( It would be merged with another federal police force and renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1920.)
In his study, Restrepo plotted the position of the first 10 forts, and compared settlements built near them to more remote communities. Based on the 1911 census, he found that those communities more than 100 kilometres away from an RCMP fort suffered higher male death rates as measured by the number of local widows.
More than a century later, the same areas continued to experience higher levels of violence. In 2014, the study found, communities established far from an original RCMP fort had 55 per cent more violent crime per capita, including 45 per cent more homicides.
“Given that the authority represented by the Mounties long ago expanded into every corner of the Canadian prairies, the persistence of this difference is surprising,” Restrepo wrote in a recent commentary, published in the New York Times. “Apparently, in some remote and lawless areas, the Mounties arrived too late to prevent the development of a culture of violence.”
Restrepo turned to hockey as a proxy measurement for violence because NHL statistics allowed him to compare players born in different parts of the Canadian prairies. He called the NHL an “ideal laboratory” because violence rates are objectively quantified by referees as they hand out penalties.
His study found a strong correlation between a player’s prairie home and the penalty box: those born far away from an original RCMP fort were penalized more often than those who were not.
He found the effect of hometown culture faded as players aged.
Interestingly, he also discovered that the “Mountie effect” waned as each new generation of prairie- born players entered the NHL between the 1940s and 1980s. Those born in the 1980s were much less likely to be influenced by their cultural background than players from earlier decades.