Royal Canadian Mounted Police
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is the national police service of Canada. The RCMP is an agency of the Government of Canada; it also provides police services under contract to 11 provinces and territories, over 150 municipalities, and 600 Indigenous communities. The RCMP is commonly known as the Mounties in English.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was established in 1920 with the amalgamation of the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Dominion Police. Sworn members of the RCMP have jurisdiction as peace officers in all provinces and territories of Canada. Under its federal mandate, the RCMP is responsible for enforcing federal legislation; investigating inter-provincial and international crime; border integrity; overseeing Canadian peacekeeping missions involving police; countering terrorism both inside and outside the country; managing the Canadian Firearms Program, which licenses and registers firearms and their owners; and for the Canadian Police College, which provides police training to Canadian and international police services. Policing in Canada is considered to be a constitutional responsibility of provinces; however, the RCMP provides local police services under contract in all provinces and territories except Ontario and Quebec. Despite its name, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are no longer an actual mounted police service, and horses are used only at ceremonial events and certain other occasions.
The Government of Canada considers the RCMP to be an unofficial national symbol, and in 2013, 87 per cent of Canadians interviewed by Statistics Canada said that the RCMP was important to their national identity.
History
Early history (1920–1970)
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was formed in 1920 by the amalgamation of two separate federal police services: the Royal North-West Mounted Police, which had been responsible for colonial policing in the Canadian West, but by 1920 was becoming "rapidly obsolete;" and the Dominion Police, which was responsible for federal law enforcement, intelligence, and parliamentary security. The new police service inherited the paramilitary, frontline policing-oriented culture that had governed the RNWMP, which had been modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary, but much of the RCMP's local policing role had been superseded by provincial and municipal police services.In 1928, the federal government authorized the RCMP to enter into heavily subsidized contracts with provinces and municipalities, enabling the service to return to its roots in local policing. The federal government paid 60 per cent of the policing costs, while provinces and municipalities paid the remaining 40 per cent. By 1950, eight of the ten Canadian provinces had disbanded their provincial police services in favour of subsidized RCMP policing.
As part of its national security and intelligence functions, the RCMP infiltrated ethnic or political groups considered to be dangerous to Canada. These included the Communist Party of Canada and a variety of Indigenous, minority cultural, and nationalist groups. The service was also deeply involved in immigration matters, and was responsible for deporting suspected radicals. The RCMP paid particular attention to nationalist and socialist Ukrainian groups and the Chinese community, which was targeted because of disproportionate links to opium dens. Historians estimate that Canada deported two per cent of its Chinese community between 1923 and 1932, largely under the provisions of the Opium and Narcotics Drugs Act. The first Mountie to go undercover was Frank Zaneth who under the code name Operative Number 1 infiltrated various "radical" groups along with the Mafia.
In 1932, RCMP members killed Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, after a shoot-out. Johnson had been the subject of a dispute with local Indigenous trappers—he had reportedly destroyed their traps, harassed them verbally, and on one occasion, pointed a firearm at them—and, when confronted with a search warrant, opened fire on RCMP officers, wounding one. Also in 1932, the Customs Preventive Service, a branch of the Department of National Revenue, was folded into the RCMP at the request of RCMP leadership.
In 1935, the RCMP, acting as the provincial police service for Saskatchewan and in collaboration with the Regina Police Service, attempted to arrest organizers of the On-to-Ottawa Trek in the Germantown neighbourhood's market square by kettling around 300 rally-goers, sparking the Regina Riot. One city police officer and one protester were killed. The trek, which had been organized to call attention to conditions in relief camps, consequently failed to reach Ottawa, but nevertheless had political reverberations. That same year, three RCMP members, acting under contract as provincial police officers, were killed in Saskatchewan and Alberta during an arrest and subsequent pursuit.
During the interwar period, the RCMP employed special constables to assist with strikebreaking. For a brief period in the late 1930s, a volunteer militia group, the Legion of Frontiersmen, was affiliated with the RCMP. Many members of the RCMP belonged to this organization, which was prepared to serve as an auxiliary police service.
In 1940, the RCMP schooner St. Roch facilitated the first effective patrol of Canada's Arctic territory. It was the first vessel to navigate the Northwest Passage from west to east, taking two years, the first to navigate the passage in one season, the first to sail either way through the passage in one season, and the first to circumnavigate North America.
In 1941, two African-Canadian men from Nova Scotia applied to join the RCMP. The commissioner at the time, Stuart Wood, allegedly allowed them to sit for entrance tests in the hopes that they could be definitively refused entry to the service as "their colour would raise the question of policy." Both men ultimately passed the requisite tests, but neither was given an offer of employment.
In the wake of the 1945 defection of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko, who revealed that the Soviet Union was spying on Western nations, the RCMP separated its units responsible for domestic intelligence and counter-espionage from the Criminal Investigation Branch to the new Special Branch, formed in 1950. The branch changed names twice: in 1962, to the Directorate of Security and Intelligence; and in 1970 to the Security Service. On April 1, 1949, Newfoundland and Labrador joined in Confederation with Canada, and the Newfoundland Ranger Force amalgamated with the RCMP.
In June 1953, the RCMP became a full member of the International Criminal Police Organization. In 1969, the RCMP hired its first black police officer, Hartley Gosline.
Late 20th century
On July 4, 1973, during a visit to Regina, Saskatchewan, Queen Elizabeth II approved a new badge for the RCMP. The force subsequently presented the sovereign with a tapestry rendering of the new design.In 1978, the RCMP formed 31 part-time emergency response teams across the country to respond to serious incidents requiring a tactical police response.
In 1986, in the wake of the 1985 Turkish embassy attack in Ottawa and the bombing of Air India Flight 182, the Canadian government directed the RCMP to form the Special Emergency Response Team, a full-time counter-terrorism unit.
In the early 1990s, journalists at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The Fifth Estate opened an investigation into rumours that a senior RCMP officer in the Criminal Intelligence Service was on the payroll of a Montreal-based organized crime group, and in 1992, aired an episode identifying Inspector Claude Savoie, then the assistant director of the CISC, as the leak, citing evidence that connected him to Allan Ronald Ross, an Irish-Canadian drug lord, and Sidney Leithman, a prominent lawyer associated with Montreal's organized crime network. Shortly after the episode aired, and minutes before being interviewed by detectives with the RCMP's professional standards unit, Savoie committed suicide in his Ottawa office. One of Savoie's subordinates, Portuguese-Canadian constable Jorge Leite, was found guilty of corruption and breach of trust by a Portuguese court about his work with Savoie.
In 1993, the SERT was disbanded and its counter-terrorism duties transferred to the Canadian Forces, in the newly formed Joint Task Force 2. JTF2 inherited some equipment and the SERT's former training base near Ottawa.
In 1995 the Personal Protection Group of the RCMP was created at the behest of Jean Chrétien after the break-in by André Dallaire at the prime minister's official Ottawa residence, 24 Sussex Drive. The PPG is a 180-member group responsible for VIP security details, chiefly the prime minister and the governor general.
In 1998, the RCMP, with the permission of the owners AEC, bombed an oil well shed as part of a 'dirty tricks' campaign during a dispute between AEC and Wiebo Ludwig.
RCMP Security Service (1950–1984)
The RCMP Security Service was a specialized political intelligence and counterintelligence branch with national security responsibilities following revelations of illegal covert operations relating to the Quebec separatist movement. As a result, the RCMPSS was replaced by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1984, and is statutorily independent of the RCMP.In the late 1970s, revelations surfaced that the RCMP Security Service had in the course of their intelligence duties engaged in crimes such as burning a barn and stealing documents from the separatist Parti Québécois. This led to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, better known as the "McDonald Commission", named for the presiding judge, Justice David Cargill McDonald. The commission recommended that the service's intelligence duties be removed in favour of the creation of a separate intelligence agency, CSIS. The RCMP and CSIS nonetheless continue to share responsibility for some law enforcement activities in the contemporary era, particularly in the anti-terrorism context.