Time for new management
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is an organization in chaos. Report after report has exposed widespread mismanagement and an ossified culture of abuse in our national police force. It’s time Ottawa stopped waiting for the Mounties to reform themselves and took matters into its own hands.
This week brought three more expert reports that all raise extremely serious concerns about how the RCMP is run.
It started with the release of two reports on harassment and bullying within the force — one from the RCMP’s watchdog agency, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission, the other from former auditor general Sheila Fraser.
Both came to the same conclusion: Civilian governance of the force is necessary because its own leadership seems incapable of implementing change.
This is hardly a new thought. Another report issued a decade ago made the same recommendation. It’s high time that Ottawa listened and introduced a measure of civilian control over a force that the review commission calls “dysfunctional.”
How bad is it? The commission concludes that bullying and abuse of authority within the RCMP are so bad that they threaten the force’s very ability to police the country.
As commission chair Ian McPhail noted: “If the last10 years, over15 reports and hundreds of recommendations for reform have produced any lessons it is that the RCMP is not capable of making the necessary systemic changes of its own accord.”
Indeed, the commission described it as an organization that responds to each harassment scandal by “circling the wagons.” It found RCMP leaders are resistant to meaningful cultural change because their careers benefit from maintaining the status quo.
That criticism seems more credible in light of commissioner Bob Paulson’s response to the report. Instead of producing or even promising a plan to implement reforms, he said he has seen no proof of a link between the force’s persistent cultural problems and the way it is governed at the top.
Yet the evidence of deep-rooted resistance to change is not hard to find, beginning with how it treats those who complain. Out of 69 complaints filed after the RCMP’s new harassment policy came into effect in 2014, the force determined that only three were founded. That, the commission notes, was a “startling low rate” that raises “serious concerns” about the quality of the force’s investigative and decision-making process.
In short, the RCMP has not only learned nothing from a stack of critical reports, but has wilfully ignored them. Now, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has promised to do whatever it takes “to help RCMP members, trainees and employees feel safe and respected among their colleagues and supervisors.”
To achieve that, Goodale will also have to deal with a third report this week that slams the RCMP for failing to allocate enough money and staff to implement the mental-health strategy it rolled out in May 2014.
As a result, the report by federal Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that 20 per cent of the Mounties who sought mental-health support ended up not returning to work or being discharged. That is a sad loss of talent.
The complaints commission lays out a series of options for bringing in a measure of civilian control at the top of the RCMP. They include recruiting a senior civilian leader to take charge of non-policing roles such as administration and finance, or creating a civilian board of management to provide general oversight of the force.
Regardless of exactly how it is done, the government should take the commission’s advice and move in this direction. It’s clear at this point that the RCMP cannot be relied on to heal itself. Paulson is due to retire within weeks, and appointing a new commissioner is an ideal time to send a clear signal that the time for real change is now.
It’s time the government stopped trusting the RCMP to reform itself and brought in a measure of civilian management