August 31, 2024

Will Alberta Replace the Mounties With Its Own Provincial Police Force?

	By Ian Austen

Along with pulling out of the Canada Pension Plan, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, has in the past floated the idea of replacing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a provincial police force.

Danielle Smith, wearing a blue cowboy hat and a white apron over a denim jacket, stands behind a lectern with a microphone attached.

Danielle Smith recently said that Alberta would create a new police force through its sheriffs service. Todd Korol/Reuters

Like every province except Ontario and Quebec, which have provincial forces, Alberta has contracted out rural policing to the Mounties for over 90 years, and several of its cities also outsource policing to the federal force.

And like every province that relies on the Mounties, grumbling about the cost and quality of the service the R.C.M.P. provides ebbs and flows in Alberta.

In March, Ms. Smith's government introduced a bill that would allow Alberta to set up a new police agency. But the government said it had no intention of dropping the Mounties, although details about what any new force might be and when it might appear were scarce. Now Ms. Smith has suggested that it will be an incremental move made through an existing law enforcement agency.

"We've also decided to create our own police force under the sheriffs," Ms. Smith told a United Conservative Party meeting earlier this month, according to reporting in The Edmonton Journal. She was responding, The Journal said this week, to a question about what politicians could do to to influence the criminal justice system.

Ms. Smith has been publicly rebuked for not respecting the Canadian legal system's practice of keeping politicians and politics out of policing and prosecutions. She was involved in a situation that echoed aspects of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's attempt to turn criminal charges against SNC-Lavalin, the Montreal-based engineering company now called AtkinsRéalis, into a civil case.

Last year, Alberta's ethics commissioner found that Ms. Smith had broken the province's conflict of interest law and acted improperly when she pressed her justice minister to influence prosectors regarding criminal charges against one of the men who had blocked the border with the United States at Coutts, Alberta. That blockade was formed at roughly the same time Ottawa was paralyzed by a convoy of truckers; both protests were, in part, about pandemic restrictions.

"It is a threat to democracy to interfere with the administration of justice," Marguerite Trussler, the ethics commissioner, wrote. "It is the first step toward the type of judicial system often found in a nondemocratic or pseudo-democratic country where members of and friends of those in power are shielded from prosecution or are acquitted by the courts on the instructions of those in power."

Ms. Smith offered no information describing what she plans to create from the sheriff's service. And that, Temitope Oriola, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta who advises the provincial government on standards for any new police agency, has been one of the key problems with Ms. Smith's police plan from the beginning.

"The government has not been explicit regarding its intentions around this issue," he told me. "There's a bit of mystique."

In an email, Heather Jenkins, a spokeswoman for Mike Ellis, Alberta's public safety minister, mostly told me what the province isn't planning to do.

"The new independent agency police service will not replace, undermine or destabilize the R.C.M.P. in Alberta and will work alongside the R.C.M.P. and other police services just as many of the sheriffs do now," she wrote, adding that a review would "determine which police-like functions currently being performed by the sheriffs will be assumed by the new agency."

A bronze statue of a man wearing a uniform and a helmet and sitting on a horse is in the foreground, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police headquarters in the background.

All but two provinces contract their policing out to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Ian Austen/The New York Times

Alberta once possessed a provincial police force. It was founded in 1917 but was folded during the Great Depression when the province, not yet oil rich and plagued by severe droughts, was in dire financial straits.

Unlike many provinces, where sheriffs are rarely visible and are mostly confined to enforcing court orders, Alberta's sheriffs have a high public profile and have been long been involved in activities like traffic enforcement. The province's last budget set aside enough money to hire 245 additional sheriffs and set up two plainclothes sheriff teams.

The province's two municipal associations oppose replacing the Mounties. The union representing the force's membership has also spoken out against it.

Professor Oriola said that in his view, Ms. Smith's government had already established a provincial police force through the sheriffs, using what he sees as an opaque process.

"A lot of confused and confusing signals are being sent out," he said. "I think it comes from a lack of a clear and clinical assessment of what is missing in existing models or how we should address that."

The current police contract between Alberta and the federal government calls for 1,911 officers in the province, including those doing municipal policing, and runs until March 2032. The federal government picks up one-third of the cost, leaving the province with a bill of 378 million Canadian dollars.

A study for the province by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated in 2021 that a provincial police force would cost Alberta 735 million dollars a year. Alberta would also most likely lose the federal subsidy.

Pointing to the recent experience of Surrey, British Columbia, when it set up its own municipal force to replace the Mounties, Professor Oriola said the consultants' estimate was likely to be an understatement. Ever-rising costs for that transfer brought a new mayor, who came into office promising to keep the Mounties and cancel the new police force; the provincial government ordered the city to continue with the changeover, a decision that was upheld by the province's Supreme Court in June.

There is a need, Professor Oriola said, to reform policing in the province. Currently, he said, Alberta leads the country in the use of lethal force by police officers, on both a per capita and an absolute basis. Hiring and education requirements for municipal officers, he said, lag well behind the those in rest of country, as does gender balance.

Bringing back a provincial police force, he said, could be an opportunity to improve in those areas. But he said that what he saw as the creeping establishment of a new police force did not give him confidence that there would be change for the better.

"Are we simply going to emulate what already exists, and with it inherent flaws, or are we going to allow this new plan to be shaped by decades of scientific evidence of what works and what doesn't work?" he said.

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A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for two decades. Follow him on Bluesky at @ianausten.bsky.social.

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