A PROVINCIAL POLICE SERVICE COULD OFFER BETTER STABILITY
One of the recommendations in the Fair Deal panel report released last month advises that the provincial government create an Alberta police service to replace the RCMP.
Just last week, it was announced that an additional 76 Mounties will be added to Alberta this year along with 57 new civilian support positions to help with the rural crime epidemic that has plagued small town Alberta for several years.
It’s impossible to say where those Mounties will come from. Some might be new recruits from Alberta but most will come from out of province.
And therein lies much of the problem with an Ottawa-based police force.
“The panel notes that the RCMP in Alberta perennially struggles with having enough RCMP officers to adequately staff smaller municipalities. Posting officers in small communities, then relocating them anywhere in Canada is a disincentive for many applicants,” says the report.
As a result of the many gaps in service and the difficulty in recruiting into rural Alberta, in 2006 Alberta created the Alberta Sheriffs to help with traffic enforcement, surveillance, communications, and security at courthouses and the legislature. “However, in many small towns, sheriffs have become the backbone of local law enforcement when RCMP staffing is inadequate.”
An RCMP officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals at work, left Alberta several years ago to pursue a promotion. The officer said a career in the RCMP presented personal and family challenges, and would have preferred a different police service in a city where it could have been possible to simultaneously move up the ranks and put down roots.
“Ever since I was a kid I was mesmerized by the myth of the Mountie, the Red Serge (uniform), the musical ride … and I have to admit I do still really like my uniforms,” the officer said with a laugh. “But it seems just as we really got to know our community, really dug in, I’d be needed somewhere else, and that’s been hard on all of us but it’s been really tough on one of our kids in particular.”
The other frustration for many RCMP officers is how being unilingual is career limiting.
“I can read French, I can speak French, albeit with a terrible accent, but I have troubles understanding spoken French when I hear it no matter how hard I try,” says the officer. “I have what they call a tin ear.
“In retrospect, I wish I had just joined the (city) police service. I could have moved up the ranks without moving around,” said the officer, who now lives in central Canada.
As a result of the frequent moving, many of the officers in rural Alberta scarcely know the communities they serve. It’s not unusual for rural Albertans to call in a crime and the officer they speak to having no idea where their community is.
As the report states: “Several (Albertans) expressed their disappointment with how many of the fine men and women who served in their community would be transferred to another town after having settled in and becoming familiar with the community.
“This lack of continuity means that knowledge and experience never accumulate properly within local law enforcement. This results in criminals having the upper hand,” says the Fair Deal report.
Alberta pays $262.4 million annually for RCMP service, with the federal government paying $112.4 million annually. However, starting this year, municipalities will have to kick in $15.4 million of their policing costs, which will increase to $60.3 million in 2023, states the report.
“Albertans outside Edmonton and Calgary generally called for greater local control over law enforcement, and most certainly not from Ottawa” … and said they would rather spend their own tax dollars “on its own men and women, rather than paying for a bloated Ottawa bureaucracy.”
That bloated bureaucracy is led by a political appointee who reports to the solicitor general of the federal government of the day, rather than to a local police commission. There’s simply less accountability to the community and more to a political master who might not care a fig about the needs of a small rural Alberta community.
The Fair Deal panel believes “that Alberta communities would benefit greatly from having a provincial police service.
“A stable police service that allowed members to stay grounded in local communities would be attractive to men and women considering law enforcement as a career. Officers would become more invested in their local settings, allowing them to better connect with local citizens and gain insights into where and how criminal elements operate in each community. Such local knowledge would be retained in the community and allow for more effective policing,” says the report.
Alberta originally had its own police service — the Alberta Provincial Police — until 1932, and Quebec and Ontario both have provincial police services operating in regions outside of metropolitan areas.
The idea of Alberta re-establishing a provincial police service has been bandied about since Stephen Harper and others wrote their famous Alberta Agenda letter or firewall letter in 2001 that urged the provincial government to reclaim its rightful powers under the Constitution.
Establishing an Alberta provincial police service is an idea that’s been under arrest for too long. Rural Albertans have paid the price.