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Transition to Municipal Police Force

Meanwhile, the list of members I know whose next career move has come up, they have won the position and then been refused release from Surrey grows by the month, creating a nice little bubble of members with low morale and growing anger toward our management that made a big stink about accepting the Province's decision and getting us out of there ASAP.

Things are fiiiiiiine. I bet the other Detachments constantly being told no you can't have that Surrey member are pretty pleased as well.
 
Meanwhile, the list of members I know whose next career move has come up, they have won the position and then been refused release from Surrey grows by the month, creating a nice little bubble of members with low morale and growing anger toward our management that made a big stink about accepting the Province's decision and getting us out of there ASAP.

Things are fiiiiiiine. I bet the other Detachments constantly being told no you can't have that Surrey member are pretty pleased as well.
Man we don’t care about our people
 
Man we don’t care about our people
If I ran the place, instead of considering overall service and time in Surrey for whom to release, I would look at how much time on GD they had, and if they were still on GD. You have your fancy section job? Back of the line, or back to the road. The members on GD have been there since the start, they're first in line. Plus SPS was sold as a "boots on the ground, community and patrol oriented force" so thats where the RCMP is forcing them to place their members (which pisses them off. A lot.)
 
The GD positions should be converting first- it’s the most difficult, most expensive, and highest consequence area. Once the meat and potatoes is closed they can move on to the easy stuff.

And I would also be releasing the burnt road warriors first as SPS fills their gaps. There is more to a members career than being hostage for a decade while Surrey plays “will they won’t they”

That career stagnation will affect folks for the rest of their careers.
 

“Public Safety, in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is undertaking engagement with provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous partners and other stakeholders to assess the RCMP contract policing program,” department spokesperson Tim Warmington said in an email. “The goal of the engagement is to gather feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the program, and to develop a vision of what contract policing could be after the expiry of the current contacts in 2032.”

Considering all the points raised in the article, I'm surprised the Federal bureaucracy isn't pushing for less contract policing and more federal policing. Instead there seems to be fighting back against any initiative by a province or municipality take that responsibility where the RCMP currently hold a contract.
 

“Public Safety, in collaboration with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is undertaking engagement with provinces, territories, municipalities, Indigenous partners and other stakeholders to assess the RCMP contract policing program,” department spokesperson Tim Warmington said in an email. “The goal of the engagement is to gather feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the program, and to develop a vision of what contract policing could be after the expiry of the current contacts in 2032.”

Considering all the points raised in the article, I'm surprised the Federal bureaucracy isn't pushing for less contract policing and more federal policing. Instead there seems to be fighting back against any initiative by a province or municipality take that responsibility where the RCMP currently hold a contract.
There isn’t a push one way or the other. The organization is slowly separating the the contract and federal streams.

Where municipalities and governments have asked to take over a contract we go a long with it. We just ask that it is orderly. Our association, which has an interest in keeping the organization as big as it can be, is the outspoken part.

The issue is with the article- they have, again, cherry picked the portapique results. A local
Constabulary in that area would have had no different actions that night. And they could actually have even less experience.

I’ll give you an example of the difference. ERT members have many months of training to be what they are. The average mid sized “swat” in Canada measures their training in weeks. Excluding a few absolute pros in the country that have excellent training, but for every one of them there is a midsized with a 5 day basic swat operator from NTOA and then odds and ends.

The rural Nova Scotia police force that everyone suggests would be amazing would be a no different, if nothing ever happens somewhere- when the big one pops off- it’s a goat rodeo.

When the various levels of government see the bill to switch that’s when it turns into reluctance. And it’s not us. It’s the various municipalities.

We actually have a very high satisfaction with our services in a good portion of our contracts. But that doesn’t play well with the chemtrails types.

When you look at some of the resumes of the members running detachments you would be shocked at the expertise floating around small town Canada in a lot of places. Expertise those communities would never have with a local force

Provincial police forces and regional forces make more sense than tiny departments, I’d get behind provincial forces.
 
My biggest two points in favour of ending contract policing is that:

A. the RCMP is needed to focus on Federal files; and
B. Municipal and Provincial governments love to blame Ottawa and the RCMP when things go wrong. That is a lot harder to do when it is your own force. Instead, you might be forced to actually fix the underly problems..
 
My biggest two points in favour of ending contract policing is that:

A. the RCMP is needed to focus on Federal files; and
B. Municipal and Provincial governments love to blame Ottawa and the RCMP when things go wrong. That is a lot harder to do when it is your own force. Instead, you might be forced to actually fix the underly problems..
Those are my big ones for a transition as well. Politicians get way too much mileage from blaming Ottawa. And I also find federal procurement and management to not work for rapidly changing expectations and technology.
 
Policing low-density rural/remote areas is expensive. It might be one thing to police urban municipalities, even small ones, but it's a lot more expensive to police the Telegraph Creeks or Burgeos of the world. How many more members could NSPP or Cumberland County PS have scrambled to Portapique in the middle of the night? I'd be more willing to believe the provinces are interested in assuming the responsibility if the BC lower mainland was unified to a regional service or HRM actually policed all of the RM.
 
I applaud Alberta’s willingness to actually commit legislation and resources to taking up the provincial responsibility for policing.

At the end of the day, a hypothetical Alberta service will face the same challenge as the RCMP: if you go to Google Maps, look at a zoomed out view of Alberta, and search “RCMP”, an Alberta police service will need to figure out how to attract people to work in all those same places where red dots show up, without having all of the mid-to-late carrots that the RCMP is able to dangle in front of junior members looking at remote service. Relastically, this will likely come with a fairly hefty bill to incentivize remote posts.

If there’s a province with the means and political will to do it, it’s Alberta.
 
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