RCMP should be given an expiry date
Over many years, the RCMP has been plagued by internal dysfunction. Multiple successful lawsuits have shown that the Mounties’ workplace culture is anything but healthy; and reports of police abuses, especially of Indigenous people, that superiors either neglected or tried to cover up have hit the news on a regular basis.
In 2018, the Trudeau government appointed Brenda Lucki as the historic force’s first female leader on a permanent basis, hoping that having a woman at the top would help improve both workplace culture and the force’s relations with those being policed.
Being a longtime feminist as well as a professor of criminology, journalists interviewed me then to ask what I thought about the appointment. I said then — and repeat now — that anyone imagining that putting a woman at the top would change anything, especially a large organization spread out across the country, was dreaming.
Further proof of my theory that changing the person at the top is not the route to organizational change came soon after. When Jody Wilson-Raybould was appointed minister of justice after the 2015 election, criminal lawyers and criminologists all assumed that the Harper-era vengeful criminal laws would be quickly repealed. I certainly did — a naive hope, I now realize.
In fact, hardly any changes were made, despite judges taking it upon themselves to either reject or work around mandatory minimum sentences. And the biography of the justice minister also had no effect on the Correctional Services of Canada’s continuing use of risk assessment tools that end up classifying marginal people, including most Indigenous offenders as more risky than their white settler counterparts.
That a strong Indigenous woman would serve for several years as justice minister and prove unable to reform the criminal law, never mind the federal correctional service, should have been a lesson for anyone watching the RCMP file.
When an Indigenous or Black or female officer is chosen as chief, that does not bring about reform. I’d go further and say that even if an Indigenous feminist were appointed chief of a major police force, the institution would win out over the individual. Sociology 101.
If trusting police to reform themselves has not worked, and appointing a token ‘Other’ as head does not work either, why not go back to the drawing board? That is what the often misunderstood call to “defund the police” means.
The RCMP started out as the Northwest Mounted Police, a semimilitary body charged with “pacifying” the West — that is, putting down Indigenous rebellions and securing white settler sovereignty. The Stetsons that Canadians and tourists alike see as photo-worthy originate in that residential-school past.
Increasing numbers of non-Indigenous Canadians are realizing that the postcards of full-dress Mounties that were ubiquitous in tourist shops (when there were tourists) glorify settler colonialism, and that it is settler colonialism that is ultimately responsible for today’s overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canada’s prisons.
And then there’s the litany of gender troubles and toxic workplace issues.
So why not close the book on the RCMP? That would open a new door: a process by which local communities, especially in rural and northern areas, come together to assess their own safety needs and reflect on their justice ideals. That process would lead to communitybased approaches that would be quite diverse, but would likely prioritize safety, justice and well-being, not “law and order.”
Women would need to be centrally involved in those deliberations, given the RCMP’s notorious gender failures. And Indigenous communities should lead the discussions. The Northwest Mounted Police was born to claim the West for residential-school Canada: so Indigenous people ought to lead the process by which Canadians of all backgrounds participate in designing safety tools for local communities.
Giving the RCMP the pink slip would mean that communities could meet to devise safety and security solutions that serve their needs and reflect their values. And if the government no longer buys Stetsons, red serge coats and horse-riding boots, which aren’t cheap, the saved public funds could be spent helping communities across Canada share their experiments and learnings.
Governments today talk endlessly about “innovation.” Surely Canada is in dire need of innovation in safety and justice. The best way to start the innovation process would be to give the RCMP a firm expiry date.