Members of the RCMP control the scene near Miramichi, NB, on Saturday, June 13, 2020. Ron Ward/The Canadian Press
The federal government says it won’t bill provinces and municipalities for the retroactive portion of Mountie wages while it considers whether to help absorb some of the burden of the steep pay hike.
The RCMP union negotiated its first contract with the Ministry of Finance last August and received a significant pay increase for its members, prompting some mayors and councilors to say the increased costs could no longer afford the police.
The cost of the RCMP’s nearly 20,000 officers is shared between the federal, provincial and municipal governments.
Salaries have been frozen at the nation’s largest police force since 2016. Total increases in the contract total hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the RCMP’s new pay scale, a sergeant who was making $100,000 a year now gets a $21,000 a year raise.
Because the new contract is retroactive, Mounties are being paid on a scaled salary, as well as an additional 3 percent to 4 percent annual retroactive pay bonuses.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino met in Regina last month with members of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), who have long lobbied for funding to offset the increases. He presented a letter to the group confirming that the federal government will stop charging municipalities for the RCMP while the various governments discuss how to deal with the retroactive portion of the salaries.
Continued discussions “will allow the government to better understand the needs and capabilities of contractual partners for repayment,” Mr Mendicino said in the letter. “The government will not seek payment until a resolution is reached on the contracting partners’ request for flexibility on retroactive spending.”
This pause is significant given the scale of the RCMP. The federal government has policing contracts with eight provinces, three territories and more than 150 municipalities. Those decades-old agreements put the Mounties as local law enforcement officers covering three-quarters of Canada’s territory. More than one in five Canadians live in RCMP jurisdictions.
Ottawa has always subsidized this work. The federal government takes 30 percent of the salaries of most foresters hired as local law enforcement. The only exception is cities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, where the subsidy rate drops to 10 percent.
Local politicians point out that they were never at the negotiating table when the new pay raise was made with the RCMP.
“As municipalities, we cannot have a deficit. So if we get a bill that we didn’t expect, that we didn’t budget for and that we didn’t consult on, that makes it very difficult for us,” said Taneen Ruddick, an Alberta municipal councilor who is also president of FCM.
She said the retroactive portion of the RCMP raises is so significant that in her town of Vegreville, council is considering a 6 percent property tax increase.
Provinces that use RCMP officers as provincial police forces also get a break.
“Invoices for retroactive RCMP increases have been put on hold,” said Chris Donnelly, a spokesman for the British Columbia Ministry of the Attorney General.
He added that Canada’s federal Department of Public Safety has “notified provincial, territorial and local governments that they will be delaying invoices and meeting with levels of government to better understand the impact of backdated payments.”
Mr. Donnelly said the current RCMP wage contract expires next year, meaning all levels of government will soon have to figure out how to approach a new round of wage bargaining.
RCMP policing arrangements have been in place across Canada for the past century, but the sustainability of that model is increasingly in question, with elected officials questioning whether the federally run force still fits the growing communities it serves.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote a mandate letter last December ordering Mr. Mendicino to “conduct an evaluation of contract policing.”
Months before, Parliament’s Public Safety Committee released a report on systemic racism in law enforcement. He called on the federal government to “explore the possibility of ending contract policing”.
This spring, a British Columbia legislative commission studying similar issues released its own report. He called for “a new provincial police service to take over the services previously outsourced to the RCMP.”
Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has been vocal about its long-term desire to scrap the province’s RCMP contract in favor of creating an independent police force. Last year, he hired an accounting firm to audit expenses.
This report highlights how Alberta could be losing nearly $200 million a year in annual federal grants to the RCMP. But the UCP government has nevertheless said it may be prepared to forego this funding in the future.
Alberta, meanwhile, is among jurisdictions petitioning Ottawa to waive RCMP pay raises it says could cost the province tens of millions of dollars.
The Alberta government “believes the federal government should be responsible for paying the retroactive portion of the 2016 wage increase,” said Joseph Dow, a spokesman for Justice Minister Tyler Schandro.
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