RCMP Watch

James Travers, Toronto Star

A word is missing from the Help Wanted sign now in the RCMP window: The word is: Desperately.Only a handful of potential candidates is capable of fixing an intricate organization now officially broken. Worse, why would anyone up to the job take it under current conditions?

Filling Giuliano Zaccardelli’s tiny, notoriously expensive boots isn’t the biggest problem. A new commissioner must begin the 10- to15-year reconstruction job without an agreed model.

What’s known is that ruling Conservatives are on the cusp of that pivotal appointment. What isn’t is how much reform will be imposed on an RCMP now free of civilian oversight, paramilitary by choice and overwhelmed by the complexity of its national, provincial and municipal policing.

All of that and more will be considered by a task force that hasn’t yet been named but will make recommendations within months. In effect, the new commissioner’s work will have no meaningful framework, a powerful disincentive for talented outsiders with other options.

Not surprisingly, cynicism is afoot here. Instead of the fresh breezes Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day promises, the expectation is that a new leader from the old guard will hardly ruffle the surface.

Deeper change is essential. In searching its soul and considering its purpose the RCMP must choose between national and local, effective and folkloric.

Those decisions are as difficult for politicians as for Mounties. It’s risky meddling with an icon that resists change, is respected as well as visible across the country and plays political hardball.

A safer response is to advertise change while entrenching the status quo. Anticipate little more if, as expected, Prime Minister Stephen Harper finds a commissioner among those who reported to Zaccardelli on a careless watch.

A long, shameful list includes the pension scandal, the still unexplained federal election intervention and the Mayerthorpe, Alta., shooting that needlessly left four RCMP dead. Each asks a different and troubling question about corruption, a politicized force and training.

An assumption commonly rejected by corporations trying to turn themselves around, but shared by Conservatives and the current RCMP command, is that problems are best fixed by those who contributed to them. A more persuasive argument –— one that made commissioners of weak candidates – is that the unique RCMP corpus will reject a transplanted head.

Maybe. But that ignores two realities. One is that the next commissioner must relentlessly challenge RCMP norms, leaving it to successors to complete the transformation. The other is that the force is thin on top, hollowed-out in the `80s when many of its best left to create the offshoot Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

None of that would matter so much if good governance alone could align the real-life RCMP with its postcard image. Instead the force must confront its multiple personalities.

Put into a U.S. context, it provides many of the same services as the FBI and CIA as well as state and city policing. It can’t be done here or there.

Along with bringing discipline to the crucial political relationship, the RCMP must decide what it wants – and doesn’t want – to be when it grows up. It desperately needs help shedding peripheral functions and focusing on sophisticated crime and security threats.

That’s backbreaking work and too much to ask of any insider who silently watched the force implode.