Government consultations on replacing RCMP with provincial service have not impressed several mayors in the province
Municipalities across Alberta are voicing concerns about what they view as a top-down approach by the provincial government to replace the RCMP with a provincial police service.
More than 70 municipalities have signed onto a letter asking the provincial government to roll back their plans to establish a Alberta police service.
“The Government of Alberta has lost the trust of its constituents in its pursuit of an Alberta Provincial Police Service (APPS) by not undertaking fulsome, open, and transparent consultations with all those affected,” read the June 27 letter issued by the National Police Federation. “Albertans have stated loud and clear that they do not want a costly new police service, with an overwhelming 84 percent of Albertans wanting to keep and improve the Alberta RCMP.”
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Brooks, Redcliff and Bow Island weren’t signatories on the letter but their respective mayors said they don’t have a problem with continuing to use the RCMP and expressed a lacklustre opinion of consultations the Alberta government has held over proposals to create a provincial police service.
“The system isn’t perfect, the RCMP aren’t perfect,” said Bow Island mayor Gordon Reynolds. “We believe they are making an effort to improve their own situation and their culture. We don’t see the point of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and trying to build something new.”
Redcliff mayor Dwight Kilpatrick said the town contracts directly with the RCMP for the community of 5,500, covering the entire cost of policing.
Those costs are expected to rise in the coming month in the four percent range, Kilpatrick said, adding they can work around such increases.
“Whereas the provincial police, with no hard information, everything is just a guess,” he said.
“Everything on the provincial police side is guesstimates and estimates and that’s always a scary thing.”
Like his southern Alberta counterparts, Brooks mayor John Petrie said the city of 15,000 has no substantive issue with the Mounties that would necessitate a change.
The biggest question Petrie said communities currently with RCMP have are costs to switching to a provincial service.
“There is that transition cost, which is the big issue there,” he said, outlining his community currently pays 70 percent of policing costs under its agreement with the service amounting to about $5 million annually. “We haven’t got the answers back on the transition cost or what it’s going to cost us down the road and who is going to be paying for things.”
Petrie said his community has expressed satisfaction with the RCMP and his council requires more information before taking a formal stance on the issue.
“It almost seems this UCP government is pretty entrenched on going with this idea but I’d like them to go to the grassroots level,” he said.
In an earlier Western Producer interview, Alberta Justice Minister Tyler Shandro said the province will be going back to municipalities for further consultations.
“I’ve heard loud and clear from municipal leaders that they didn’t feel that we were done our consultations, so I’ve asked for some further opportunities for consultations, to sit down with us and get their feedback,” he said. “We haven’t made any final decisions and we wouldn’t until we finish those consultations with municipalities.”
For Bow Island, Reynolds said if the province is going to re-engage with consultations with the municipalities, it needs to bring more information to the table.
“The discussion is valuable. The discussion is worth having and looking at this proposed idea and looking at what we have and then looking at what we could have,” said Reynolds before adding he’d prefer fixing what they do have rather than starting over with a new service.
The southern Alberta community of Coaldale recently highlighted its costs of policing under its current contract with RCMP, which requires the town of fewer than 5,000 people to shoulder — like Redcliff — 100 percent of the price for the service.
That’s due to a requirement for a community to have historically been policed by Mounties prior to 1992.
Redcliff’s Kilpatrick said his town is in the same boat as Coaldale as both communities had their own police service before contracting those services out to larger nearby municipal forces in Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, respectively, before moving to RCMP.
Shandro recently advocated for a better cost-sharing contract for Coaldale, something Kilpatrick said should be considered for his community as well.
In a statement from a spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino on the Coaldale situation, the federal government is looking into the issue.
Alberta established a provincial police service in 1917 before it was dissolved in 1932.
