The myth of the Mountie, and how it prevents RCMP reform

Jordan How did you first learn about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Was it in school from a textbook that told the tale of how they bravely helped colonize Western Canada? Your school probably didn’t use the word colonize. But where did you get the image that you had of the Mounties as a child? Maybe it was from some of this stuff.

Mounties Pop Culture Clips

I’m not a tour guide, I’m the Mountie!

…Into the Northern region of Canada at the close of the 19th century, rode Dudley Do Right of the Mounties…

The example, the behavior, the quality of each and every man who wears the Scarlet and blue, Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Jordan If you have been paying attention to the news over the past few years or to this podcast or to the work our guest today has done in her reporting. You know by now, that the RCMP is far from the heroic myth they’re packaged as. And while millions of Canadians have learned that, the myth still endures. It endures in parts of this country, it certainly endures around the world where the red RCMP dress uniform is basically shorthand for Canada. And the myth endures within the RCMP itself. And that’s the place where it can cause the most trouble. So why does it endure? How did the mountie become so emblematic of Canada? And could anything ever change that? And even if something could, does the political will to push back on that myth to reform the RCMP even exist?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jane Gerster is an independent Canadian reporter. She has covered the RCMP for years. Most recently, she wrote a long feature about the myths behind the force for the Walrus. She also has a book on the RCMP called For The Love of the Force , debuting in 2022. Jane, that’s a lot of reporting on the RCMP.

Jane Yes, it is. But it’s honestly a really interesting topic. So a fruitful rabbit hole. I’ll call it that.

Jordan It is a fascinating topic, and we can’t get into the entire book today. But maybe you could just start… and I realize I’m going to ask you some questions that you could probably answer for hours, you don’t need to do that, but maybe start with the building of the RCMP. How did the force become what it is today, or at least what we think it is today?

Jane Yeah, for sure. So the force was created in 1873, it started as the North West Mounted Police before making its final switch in 1920 to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. So what we have today, and it was an exercise in sovereignty and an exercise in subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, because Canada, very young, realized pretty quickly that if it wanted to grow and to have space to bring in new citizens and really build the economic engine of the country, it needed to settle the west. And to do that, it needed muscle to move the people who already lived there out of the way. So that’s really the Genesis story of the RCMP.

Jordan Beyond the specific origin story, how have we over the decades and I guess centuries built the myth of this police force? How did it become so entrenched in our culture?

Jane Yeah, for sure. One of the really important things to remember here is that this is not like, the RCMP did not create its own myth. The RCMP has definitely capitalized on it at moments and done what it can in various decades to try to bolster the myth. But it comes from fiction. It comes from novels. It comes from early 20th century movies. And essentially, like a really condensed version of what happened is that it was a really common topic and it was so realistic. The fiction all sort of had the same underlying premise of Mounties are white English men, and they go to the Northwest Territories. They go to the Prairies essentially. And that’s where they test their heartiness. And it’s very much sort of Mounties good guys, Indigenous bad guys, framing. And so it really set up this understanding of the force that’s fictional.

Jordan I know you mentioned they might have taken advantage of that at times, but in reality, who is out there selling this myth?

Jane I mean, the RCMP is out there selling this myth. They have a page on their website called “Our Image”. They talk about it a lot. They had a big celebration when they had their 100th anniversary. The RCMP in red surge, like their request through government to represent Canada, in the mountie uniform. Actively, no one’s really selling it right now, but it’s been sold for so long that it’s now considered a symbol of the country. And that is much harder to undo. That lasts longer than just when it’s being actively sold to people.

Jordan And it’s been actively sold not that long ago. I mean, I’m remembering here, like Due South and TV shows like that and stuff that just makes the Mounties seem so quintessentially Canadian. And probably that benefits not only the Mounties, but people in government in Canada. People selling the image of Canada as a country.

Jane Short answer is yes, a lot. And that’s something that a lot of historians and Criminologists and ex-Mounties even have written a lot about that. And it hasn’t always gotten the most traction because the myth is pretty pervasive.

Jordan When you look at that myth and we don’t have to use Due South as an example or Dudley Do Right, or any of those things. But when you look at that myth as somebody that spent years reporting on the RCMP, how far is the myth from the reality?

Jane That’s a hard question to answer, because it fluctuates right. But generally speaking, the myth as it pertains to, like, the Mounties are the good guys and Indigenous Peoples are the bad guys. That’s a false binary. The fact that this idea that the mounties are so powerful they didn’t even need to use weapons, like just their presence, they were so distinguished. We know that that’s not born out in moments, in high profile moments of use of force that has garnered a lot of attention over the years. I think one of the reasons why it’s taken me so long to sort of write this piece and do this book is because it’s not really easily reducible, like it’s much more complicated than just saying it’s very far away, because myths go back far enough, and myths are born out of some facts. It’s kind of hard. It’s a hard thing to talk about.

Jordan Totally. I will shift it less to the abstract then. And maybe your piece in the Walrus begins with the Portapique killings. And can you maybe summarize how that incident just to take one extremely prominent one, as an example, puts the problems with the RCMP on display?

Jane Yeah, for sure. With Portapique, starting from just the day after, as the death toll started to become known, like a lot of questions being raised. Why did they use Twitter to alert people? Why did they wait for RCMP reinforcements further away in New Brunswick, as opposed to getting local police forces to come and help them? How did they communicate with the families after and then when Frank magazine in June published the 9-1-1 recordings, that calls into question, the very timeline that the RCMP put out in terms of when it knew it was dealing with someone in a mock cruiser wearing an actual RCMP uniform. So right away, sort of what bubbled up in Portapique was that similar RCMP secrecy, RCMP defensiveness, RCMP questions of whether or not they’re actually working well with other people, their choice in what they choose to communicate to the public, is it enough?

And then later, once the family has actually filed their class action, proposed class action, they raised a lot of questions around how the RCMP talked to them, how officers spoke with them, how information was being communicated, how they felt they were completely in the dark or had been disrespected. And those are issues that come up in slightly different ways, obviously, because no issue is exactly the same. No tragedy is the exact same as another tragedy. But those issues come up sort of over and over whenever there is a crisis in which the RCMP is involved.

Jordan I’m glad you raised that, because you also write about the Robert Pickton case, and there is no ongoing investigation now, at least not to my knowledge. But it’s one of the things that garnered a ton of headlines at the time. And until you laid it out, I didn’t realize how very similar some of the responses from the RCMP were.

Jane Well, I think that’s actually the key point. It is a reflection of the fact that I’m a person who lives in Ontario, where there’s not the same sort of active Mountie presence as there are in the Prairies or in the north. But it gets very hard, right, because you get really fixated on the event itself and the crises. And like, is this a one off? Is this something that’s going to happen again? Like, what do we need to fix? And you forget to think bigger for a minute, you forget to think, okay, well, how is the RCMP actually structured? And what does that mean in terms of their approach to these things?

And so you saw it in the Robert Pickton investigation, which is that they didn’t work very well with their peers at the Vancouver police and that Pickton was a very probable suspect as early as 1997, many years before he was actually arrested and charged with those murders and that they got lucky. In Portapique, the current narrative is that you have that RCMP team that ran into the Portapique shooter at the gas station. In Pickton, you have a Mountie serving a warrant at his farm who happens to see evidence pertaining to the serial killing when he’s serving a different weapons related warrant. So there is just this, like repetition of got lucky, wasn’t a great team player did not do right by the families, according to the families.

Jordan One of the things that interests me beyond their ability to investigate these crimes and what comes with that, is the attitude that you touched on in terms of communicating with local police forces and with journalists sometimes, as we’ve covered on this show. You kind of call it the cock-of-the-walk attitude. And I wonder how that manifests internally, like having a certain attitude is not itself a crime or a sign of something rotten. But can you give us some examples from the reporting you’ve done on how the RCMP investigates itself, that can illustrate how that attitude infects an investigation?

Jane You don’t ask easy questions, do you?

Jordan That’s my job.

Jane That’s my job too.

Jordan But you’ve investigated several internal RCMP issues, and I wonder if that attitude presents itself all the time, if that flavor is there when they try to police themselves.

Jane I’ll give you an example. The title, “For the Good of The Force” comes from a statement of claim filed by Pierre Lemaitre’s widow after he committed suicide. And Lemaitre was the spokesperson in the aftermath of Robert Dziekanski’s Tasering death at the Vancouver airport in 2007. She in her statement of claim, and that’s been settled out of court with a nondisclosure agreement. But in her statement of claim, she talks about a Mountie coming to her house to talk about funeral arrangements and saying that what happened to Pierre happen for the good of the force.

And essentially what that sort of hits on, which is a recurring theme in the different cases that I’ve investigated, is that the institution is set up to protect the institution. That’s because it’s a paramilitary and paramilitaries are forces that are meant to operate as unofficial armies. They’re trained for war, which is worth its own pause. When you think about all the many things the RCMP is tasked with doing that does not include war, which is 99.9% of what they do. Within this paramilitary, it’s about a top down, hierarchical chain of command, and every bit of training is about how you have to do things, not necessarily because they’re the right things or they help the public, but because that serves the image, that helps protect the institution.

And so that sets up a scenario whereby you have members who want to do the right thing or who feel they have been scapegoated by the RCMP. And there’s a shockingly large number of lawsuits that use that scapegoating language against the force. But it essentially sets up a system in which if you do not fit the mold, which is, it was designed for white Anglo Saxon men, it’s a battle for you to do your job or to try to change things or to do things differently.

And so in Pierre Lemaitre’s case, he was given information, relayed it to the public, it turned out that information was incorrect and a video made it very clear that information was incorrect. And he wanted to tell the public because people were trashing him, like he was just taking the brunt of the impact for the RCMP. And the RCMP let him. The RCMP told him he couldn’t say anything. The way in which that sort of manifests is, it puts the needs of the RCMP preserving itself above anything else.

Jordan How different is that from… I know you mentioned paramilitary, and maybe that’s a place to start. How different is that from a municipal force like the Toronto Police Services or provincial ones like the OPP or the Surete du Quebec?

Jane Yeah. So I want to be really clear. No part of me doing this work is to say the RCMP is the world’s worst police force, and they are uniquely struggling right now. I think it’s pretty clear to everyone with the defund police movement and ongoing, very necessary conversations around racism and systemic issues. I just want to say that sort of first.

But structurally, paramilitaries are categorized as working for governments or against governments. The idea of a police force is that it is supposed to work for the people. So where that manifests itself is that a paramilitary that works for the government in the case of the RCMP will do what it thinks is necessary to protect the government. So this comes up a lot in RCMP history in the sense that the RCMP has a really well documented struggle with differentiating between completely legitimate political dissent and actual threats to national security. There’s very little room within that sort of top down paramilitary to push back on that. And there’s no actual oversight to be like, no, you have to, you have to put the people first. It’s a layered issue.

Jordan So one of the things that I also learned from your piece that I probably should have known is that it’s not like right now is the first time we’re discussing how to fix or how to reform the RCMP. Historically, where have those efforts come from? And how have they fared?

Jane They have come from people. They have very largely been led by people who are advocating for themselves, communities who have been marginalized or who have born the brunt of RCMP actions that are more directed by government than they are by law. And that again goes back to the beginning with the North West Mounted Police, because for a time they were underneath the Department of Indian Affairs. So they did things that they didn’t think were legal, but they did them because the government asked them to.

So a lot of the pushback, and there has been pushback consistently, comes from the people targeted. And that’s really what it is. We’ve essentially left the people who are targeted to spend 150 years almost, advocating for themselves. It’s consistently the same sort of issue coming up over and over and over again. In every inquiry in every report.

Jordan This is where I want to bring it back to the myth we talked about off the top and the fact that to so many people, not in Canada, the Mounties effectively represent Canada, is that the reason why the push for reform has never come from above the RCMP? because presumably, if Justin Trudeau really, really wanted to fix the culture, he could at least get that underway or try to.

Jane It’s more complicated than that. Certainly the myth is an albatross policing itself, not just the RCMP, but more broadly, is one of those issues that everybody and their mother and their sister and their second cousin has an opinion on. And I’ve learned that the hard way sometimes through this reporting. But I’ve also spoken with a lot of people, like, politically, it’s an uphill battle to change the RCMP, because you would have to do it through legislation. You just have to have a very tricky conversation. And it would take a lot politically. Any change attempts would also be sort of weighed down by the mythology. And then one of the sort of growing themes in my reporting is, I do all these different interviews and lately, at the end of the interview, the expert will often say, oh, yeah, and this one time I met this senior RCMP official, and it was very apparent to me that they just didn’t understand the depth of the problem.

I think what kind of happens is this perfect storm of policing is already a hot button issue. It’s a lot of work to make those changes, and this again goes back to the RCMP structure, because when it started, it was just working for the Canadian government. Now it’s working for the Canadian government, but it’s also working at a provincial level, and it’s also working at a local level. And so everything you do at those levels impacts the lower levels. And they’re not just going to sit there and let you do whatever you want without them having their say. So reform is a mammoth undertaking, and the symbolism certainly doesn’t help make that any easier.

Jordan I know you’ve already mentioned there’s been attempts from the people to change it, and it really hasn’t happened. Is there anything that could change that either through the growing anti police movement, for sure, but also just if the investigation wraps up and we learn something horrific about Portapique, could that change anything, or is it just too entrenched by now?

Jordan You’re asking me to choose between optimism and pessimism. When I first started this project, most Canadian media Editors did not want to give me the time of day. At most, they’d be like, yeah, that’s really interesting. Let me know when you have something. Nobody wanted to actually invest in me to do that reporting like I got most of my support out of the States.

I went through this period in which every time I saw a story in Canadian media that was like an RCMP crisis or like a scandal headline, and I’d be like, oh, no, that one’s horrible. This is the time people are going to care. This is the time I’m going to be scooped, even though it’s not a secret idea, it’s one that I’ve essentially just adapted from all the experts. It’s like a very open secret, if you will. And I no longer think that. Which isn’t to minimize any of the tragedies. I think it’s more than likely we’re going to hear more heart wrenching things out of Portapique, but I don’t know if there’s one detail that’s going to tip the scales.

I think I have more optimism for the people who are sort of consistently in the trenches trying to raise this conversation over and over again, because my own sort of personal hypothesis, which is why I have written the book, the way I have and why I sort of keep trying to spend more time sort of doing that explanatory reporting on the myth and the structure, as opposed to doing one off cases, like one off examples, because I think more people need to understand the nuts and bolts. And I think that sort of first step to being able to really absorb the true extent of the RCMP’s history and what that says about what it will take to reform them, like to actually reform them and stop the cycle of scandals. I don’t know that enough people outside of academia or outside of impacted communities, I don’t know that they know enough about the RCMP.

Jordan I mean, the first thing I think about when we have this discussion in terms of reaction from the general public is for lack of a better term, the political shit storm that would result from the fight over ‘they’re trying to cancel the Mounties’, because, you know, that would be the first phrase thrown around on social media.

Jane I really hope you haven’t just started something. Next week they’re like, you’re trying to cancel the Mounties, and I’m like, oh, no!

Jordan For the record, if you’re listening. Jane’s not trying to cancel the Mounties, but wait until somebody tries actual reform on Parliament Hill and the people who are supporters of the party that’s not trying the reform. It just seems to me that’s exactly where they go immediately. And then it just turns into a mess.

Jane Yeah. Now you’re touching on the state of discourse in general and this delightful Internet misinformation age. So I try to not think about that when I’m writing the piece, because otherwise I would wind up putting in, like, 1000 clauses to be like, just to justify. I don’t know. I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by the volume of interest in this work in the last little bit.

Steve Hewitt is a great historian who has written several books on the RCMP and is very well educated on sort of the evolution of the force. And I have often asked him sort of about that, like what it would take and what would give us the political will. And some of the ideas. And I stress that their ideas because we’re just making educated guesses at this point based on what has and hasn’t happened in the past. But my sense is that it would need to become an election issue. The question of RCMP reform would need to become an election issue. Or one of the criminal investigations into the RCMP, maybe one of those… like the Ontario Provincial Police, is currently investigating senior RCMP officers for their handling of the four Mounties involved in Robert Dziekanski’s tasering that I mentioned earlier with Lemaitre. And so there is potential there for some of those criminal investigations to sort of provide an impetus for reform that the toothless oversight boards for the RCMP haven’t achieved.

You need sustained national coverage. And I have thought in the past that that might happen as a result of things. I wondered if it might happen after Portapique, but I’m not sure that it really has, so I’m not sure what it will take. I’m committed to continuing to try a million different ways to explain the RCMP in the hopes of helping more people understand why reform is something we really need to take very seriously.

Jane Gerster. Her book on the RCMP called For the Good of the Force debuts in 2022. In the meantime, you can read her in The Walrus .

That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to The thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can listen to past episodes with Jane, if you’re so inclined. You can talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN, you can email us at the Bigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And you can find us in any podcast player, and you can ask any smart speaker to play the Big Story Podcast.

Stefanie Phillips is the lead producer of The Big Story. Joseph Fish and Braden Alexander are associate producers.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, have a Great weekend. Stay safe. We’ll talk Monday. Back to top of page