Canada should be putting RCMP contract policing on trial: Opinion by Professor Kent Roach

In an Opinion for The Globe and Mail, published May 22, Faculty of Law Professor Kent Roach writes that we need a more specialized Mounties and more locally responsive police:

Two years after the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history – when a gunman posing as a police officer killed 22 people and injured three others over the course of 13 hours – the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia is now investigating what went wrong.

But there is a lot that it does not seem to be paying attention to – most significantly, the question of whether the RCMP should continue to provide services to local communities, or contract policing, in rural Nova Scotia.

The commission has not yet explored material buried in some of its background documents that expressed the need for more staff in both the local RCMP detachment and the emergency response team that responded to the massacre. This raises the critical question: should the RCMP continue to be the police for rural parts of eight provinces and three territories?

Professor Roach is the author of Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change (Irwin Law Inc. 2022).

Read their Opinion article at The Globe and Mail