RCMP Watch

John Boileau, Halifax The Daily News

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are a key element in the national security of Canada. They provide a national police service, as well as a provincial police force in most provinces. This year, the Mounties celebrate their 75th anniversary of policing in Nova Scotia.

While relations remain good between the province and the RCMP, a spanner has been thrown into the works at the national level, with the appointment of a civilian as the new RCMP commissioner, replacing Giuliano Zaccardelli.

Although the force has put on a brave face over the choice of Ottawa bureaucrat William Elliott as their top man, privately the vast majority are “devastated.”

The Mounties are not like a civilian corporation. Nor are they just another government department. While CEOs and bureaucrats move from company to company or agency to agency with relative ease, it is a different story for the RCMP.

This decision is like appointing someone who never wore a hockey sweater, never played hockey and doesn’t know the rules of the game as the captain of an NHL team. Oh, yeah - and he doesn’t know how to skate, either.

No matter how intelligent or capable, no matter how good an administrator or human resources manager, Elliott has no shared experience with the men and women he has been appointed to command.

Never wore uniform

He never went through depot training in Regina, never served in an isolated post, never wore the red serge - and the universal feeling among Mounties is that he must not wear the uniform - and never experienced the sense of pride and tradition that comes with belonging to a police force known and respected around the world.

Elliott has promised to make the RCMP “an organization that is effective, modern and efficient.” Sounds like the trite and tired terms managers like to seize on and repeat endlessly - buzzwords that normally signal significant changes.

The acceptance of Elliott by other police forces across the country and around the world is even more problematic.

How much respect will they have for someone who is not a police officer?

While the RCMP has undoubtedly been plagued by scandals recently - the Air India tragedy, the Maher Arar affair, the pension-fund fiasco, as well as other problems, most notably an autocratic style of management that clearly needed to change - it was far from the “horribly broken” force described by special investigator David Brown in his report on the pension fund.

Instead, we are faced with a “horribly flawed” decision. It is a surprising one, as both the prime minister and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day - who has responsibility for the Mounties - are Westerners, and the RCMP has played such a large part in the history of the West.

There was simply no need to appoint a commissioner from outside the Mounties - especially one with no policing experience at any level. Although four commissioners have been outsiders, the last time was in the 1930s, and the individual had previously been a Mountie and chief of the army’s general staff.

Back then, the world and policing were much simpler. Crime was not as widespread, forensic science was virtually unknown, communications were rudimentary, terrorism was not a threat, the drug culture was minimal and money laundering was unheard-of.

Lack of trust

The message this appointment sends to the RCMP is one of a complete lack of trust in the senior officers of the Mounties. It says that none of the uniformed deputy commissioners or assistant commissioners - 32 men and women - is capable of commanding the RCMP.

The soul-destroying effect on the morale of these senior officers - and the more than 26,000 men and women who work for them, including approximately 20,000 uniformed members - is inestimable. But, like loyal members of uniformed services around the world, they will support Elliott in his new post.

The Mounties will do the best they can to help Elliott ascend a steep learning curve - one that may turn out to be impossible.

Do Canadians really want someone with no experience of policing to head their storied national police force - a situation that could have a negative impact on our national security during these times of a heightened terrorist threat?

The top Mountie should always be a Mountie.