Alberta Renews RCMP Contract to 2032

The recent renewal of the RCMP’s contract in Alberta has solidified the national police service’s presence in the province for the next 20 years.
Alberta Renews RCMP Contract to 2032
RCMP officers pose in front of the Olympic Cauldron on Feb. 23, 2010, in Vancouver. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
8/25/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/ah96993129.jpg" alt="RCMP officers pose in front of the Olympic Cauldron on Feb. 23, 2010, in Vancouver. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)" title="RCMP officers pose in front of the Olympic Cauldron on Feb. 23, 2010, in Vancouver. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1798752"/></a>
RCMP officers pose in front of the Olympic Cauldron on Feb. 23, 2010, in Vancouver. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The recent renewal of the RCMP’s contract in Alberta has solidified the national police service’s presence in the province for the next 20 years.

Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews called the deal a “significant milestone for RCMP contract policing.”

“The terms of the agreement reached with Alberta represent excellent value to Canadians and are available to all contract provinces and territories,” he said.

Those provinces and territories, seven in all, are expected to renew their contracts with the RCMP, which expire in March 2012. Negotiations with provincial governments who use the Mounties have been underway for the past four years.

But Robert Gordon, professor and director of the school of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, says the RCMP needs a thorough review and questions of governance, accountability and transparency need to be answered before contracts are renewed.

The force has become too large to manage effectively, he says, and would be more suited to federal policing, much like the FBI’s role in the United States.

“They are stretched thin. It’s too large an organization to be effectively managed. … It’s a giant, and it’s in fact that monolithic nature that has caused a lot of the organizational and administrative problems that we’ve all been seeing, hearing, and reading about over the last little while,” he says.

“The RCMP are a very powerful lobby—they’re too powerful in many respects.”

Its function as a national, federal, provincial, and municipal policing body makes the RCMP unique in the world. It provides total federal policing service to all of Canada and policing services under contract to three territories, eight provinces, more than 190 municipalities, 184 Aboriginal communities, and three international airports.

Currently, Ontario and Quebec are the only provinces with their own provincial police forces. The prospect of having a provincial force has been raised in Alberta as well, but a provincial government study in 2003 concluded that it would be too expensive.

At a recent press conference, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said the new arrangement “makes good financial sense” for Alberta. Under the current contract, the province will share 70 percent of the cost of maintaining the force, while the federal government covers the remaining 30 percent.

Gordon says the public debate about the RCMP’s role and accountability has been more pronounced in British Columbia.

“The alternative [to having the RCMP] in Alberta is not as clearly articulated as it has been in B.C., and I think the lobby for a provincial police service in B.C. is much livelier and much stronger than it was in Alberta.”

Besides B.C. and Alberta, other provinces have not entertained the idea of having their own provincial forces, and are expected to reach similar deals to Alberta.

In the Air India inquiry released last year, Supreme Court Justice John Major called for reform to the RCMP, which included narrowing their focus to federal policing and improving their processes of sharing information with other security bodies such as the CSIS.

In recent years, the once-iconic police force has been wracked by internal turmoil and controversies such as the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver Airport and the 2004 pension fund scandal.