RCMP turns 150, with its reputation in tatters

National Post, 19 May 2023

Was the RCMP erased from Canada’s new passport because of, or in spite of, its 150th anniversary?

Was the RCMP erased from Canada’s new passport because of, or in spite of, its 150th anniversary? Did the sesquicentennial remind the federal government that that part of our history was due for some modest canceling?

The Mounties made Canadians proud last September as they led the magnificent funeral procession for Her Late Majesty Elizabeth II. Was the prime minister, on hand in London, embarrassed by that homage to our history and thus decreed their ejection from the passport?

Next Tuesday, the RCMP marks 150 years from its founding as the North West Mounted Police in 1873 (they became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1904). It remains a distinctive part of our history that a police force was critical to the development of Canada’s north and west. The “wild west” of American history was not replicated here, where the law had to catch up to the outlaws. In Canada the law went first.

The NWMP’s formation in 1873 gave concrete expression to the “peace, order and good government” of the BNA Act of 1867. Confederation was agreed to in Charlottetown, but it was the early Mounties in the west who helped stitch together the new dominion, stretching from sea to sea. The RCMP are a founding institution of Canada.

We no longer look at policing through red-serge-coloured glasses, and that is a good thing. The police are highly susceptible to corruption simply because of their immense power, as Lord Acton reminded us. And those in power find it hard to resist employing the police for their own purposes, whether it be strike-breaking a hundred years ago, or using the Nova Scotia massacre to advance the government’s gun control policies recently.

The RCMP has had a very tough 150th year. The Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission report in March was scathing about how the RCMP mishandled the massacre of April 2020. It was not a matter of abuse of power but staggering incompetence. When the RCMP said that it did the best that they could, it was a confession that their best was not very good that day.

That was not entirely news. In 2005, James Roszko, a lone gunman holed up in a quonset in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, killed four RCMP officers before turning his gun on himself. He managed, rather easily, to outmaneuver four trained officers. The Mounties did not get their man. The man, catastrophically, got the Mounties.

After losing four of their own unnecessarily, the RCMP devoted millions of dollars and hundreds of officers in order to pin the blame on those who gave Roszko a ride. It was a prosecution borne of the RCMP’s guilty conscience.

That conscience has become somewhat dull. Also in its 150th year, the RCMP was revealed to have deployed spyware on Canadian mobile phones. They issued assurances that they took great pains to respect privacy, but they were not pained enough to actually inform the privacy commissioner.

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