Temitope Oriola: RCMP aren’t equipped to fight 21st century crime

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One of the final actions of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office tenure in the office was the issuance of a white paper called “Canada’s new vision for policing: Modernizing the RCMP.”

This is a very short but serious document. However, it did not gain the level of public participation it deserved, which may be due to the development of the political landscape. One sentence captures the crux of this article: “The organizational and operational structures within the RCMP strengthen the universality of contract policing and undermine the pursuit of federal priorities.”

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In the context, the RCMP provides enforcement in “eight provinces and three territories of 700 detachments and over 600 Indigenous communities.” These constitute the RCMP’s “contract” operations and are currently the center of large resource deployment.

The white paper notes that contractual activities have had a harmful impact on the “21st century threat.” These include “terrorism, foreign intervention, organized crime and violent extremism”, which includes “adopting new skills and strategies to detect” (for example, crime use). These types of crime are an important part of federal priorities.

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The paper shows that the RCMP, as an organization, does not have (in terms of organizational and human and material resources) to deal with the emerging, technologically savvy wave of crime.

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This has survival significance for national security. For example, citing a document from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of the Congressman, the document states: “In the training academy of RCMPs (called warehouses), there are only six trainings out of only 823 hours (i.e. less than 1%), which is authorized by the RCMP’s federal policy.” It is worth noting that the basic training of RCMPs lasts 26 weeks (i.e., 6 months and two weeks). Even with the daily policing, I talked extensively about the deficiencies of duration.

Furthermore, the paper notes that “in the early days of training or recruiting future RCMP officers, no professional training in technical disciplines such as networking, foreign languages, forensic accounting, and other challenges in the private sector and other federal national security partners or recruiting early training or recruiting future career paths.”

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Therefore, this article recommends that the federal government work with other levels of government “support transition to contract policing while maintaining strong interoperability with federal policing.” The document proposes a new federal policing training academy to educate new RCMP officers.

However, RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme disagreed. He noted that “the RCMP was not consulted during the development of this particular document”. He believes: “I firmly believe that we should better consider these challenges as an organization that includes federal, provincial, territorial, indigenous, municipal and professional policing tasks.” I respectfully disagree.

The RCMP has about 250 federal regulations to be processed and has been criticized from all angles. During consultation with rural communities in Alberta, participants were well aware of the slow response time, the distance between the RCMP and their community, and their relationship (or lack of relationship) to the service when I served as a special counsel for the Police Act. The federal government also said its policing mission has not been met.

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So I think it is worth interacting meaningfully with the contents of the White Paper and having all the stakeholders, including the RCMP, in respect and fact-based discussions to list the path forward. Joining the RCMP with the RCMP’s current minimum enrollment and skill set (including language requirements) is not sufficient to be relevant to the various criminal activities covered by federal authorization. These are different times and require different methods. The length of the training and the practical and conceived content must also be changed.

It is important to respect the achievements made so far while recognizing the need for proper organizations to address old and emerging challenges. It was not a war against the RCMP, nor was it a lack of appreciation for its work. Instead, it was a call to participate in the challenge of the time and have an organization that was suitable for dealing with technical requirements.

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In a day when I stole the catalytic converter of my vehicle less than 24 hours ago, we shouldn’t have the same skills to solve such crimes as high-end crimes, such as attacks on critical infrastructure and threats of deep fakes.

Temitope Oriola is a professor of criminology and the J. Gordin Kaplan Award, the most prestigious University of Alberta’s research excellence.

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