RCMP command is still a mess

Opinion (Montreal Gazette) – The serious discord reported this week at the top of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police chain ofcommand is deeply disquieting to Canadians. There will have to be a thorough housecleaning.

Three years after career civil servant William Elliott became the first-ever civilian boss of the iconic police force, Canadians have seen little evidence of the transformation he was expected to bring to it. And now Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has confirmed that there is a “workplace assessment” going on at the apex of the Mountie hierarchy.

This apparently amounts to sending somebody in to get between Elliott and his senior subordinates before any punches are thrown: Several news reports say at least seven top Mounties, and perhaps as many as 12, including two deputy commissioners, have complained directly to Toews or Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They are claiming that Elliott has been insulting, verbally abusive, and the like. In one case he even allegedly flung papers at an underling.

In the quasi-military hierarchy of a police force, stepping outside the chain of command in this fashion is truly extraordinary, clearly a symptom of a real problem.

But a problem with whom? Angry insults from a frustrated boss, though never welcome, are not exactly a novelty in any line of work. Unless there are more serious accusations that have not been reported, this fuss seems unjustifiable. Senior police officers are not usually known for their tender sensibilities, and the artful way this wholesale insubordination has been leaked to the media suggests not anguish at a dysfunctional organization, but rather a calculated attempt at a coup. Toews and Harper will not be eager to reward this kind of action against a senior civil servant; too many others, especially those mandated to make big changes to hidebound bureaucracies, could face the same kind of mutiny.

And Elliott was certainly given a mandate to make big changes when he came into the job in 2007. A head-office pension scandal, the 2002 betrayal of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, the disgraceful Taser death of Robert Dziekanski (shortly after Elliott took office), and a number of RCMP deaths on duty all signalled failures in the force. A 2007 study for the government found that too many of the 17,000 uniformed Mounties were feeling “despair, disillusionment, and anger with an organization that is failing them.”

Since then, Elliott has been trying to fulfill his mandate for change but with little success evident to outsiders. So he might well have had plenty of anger to focus on his uniformed deputies.

Some news reports suggest that RCMP internal politics have boiled over this way because a number of retirements and promotions are expected soon. The Toronto Star says some top officers had expected Elliott to leave, opening the commissioner’s job to a career policeman, and that recent signs Elliott intended to stay on are what raised frustration levels to this height.

It may now be impossible for Elliott to remain in the post. Equally, however, it may be impossible for his accusers to stay on, too. The ponderous pace of change within the force, coupled with this insurrection, suggests that additional immediate high-level retirements are in order. The middle ranks of the RCMP no doubt contain plenty of capable officers who are neither resistant to change nor prone to insubordination.