As the RCMP marks a major milestone, questions linger over the legacy of Canada’s paramilitary police force, and how it fits into modern-day policing.
In its 150 years, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has grown from 300 employees to 30,000, and evolved from a northern policing agency into a country-wide organization.
The agency has jurisdiction over 22 per cent of Canada’s population and works to prevent crime, enforce the law, investigate offences and assist with emergency situations. Currently, Ontario, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador are the only provinces in Canada that don’t use the RCMP as a provincial police force.
On top of the local and provincial policing the RCMP does, it also has a mandate to support the international community through police training and peacekeeping, as well as providing protective details for high-profile officials, including the prime minister.
As the RCMP navigates the 21st century and the changing demographics of the Canadian population, the goals and upcoming initiatives of the RCMP are crucial to understanding how it will evolve.
“We’re tackling head-on the issues that have been raised,” Nadine Huggins, chief human resources officer, told CTVNews.ca in a recent interview.
“We’re acknowledging the complexity of our history, and laying the foundation for us to ensure that legacy of the next 150 (years) is about modern, inclusive, respectful, dignified policing.”
CALL FOR ‘TRANSFORMATIVE’ ACTION
Huggins was asked about the organization’s evolution in light of recent years under a critical spotlight.
Recently, the force has been under scrutiny as reports of sexual assault, racism, internalized misogyny and homophobia plague the organization.
One such report, called “Broken Dreams Broken Lives” and compiled by Justice Michel Bastarache, notes a “toxic” culture within the RCMP. The report, published in 2020, digs into the “devastating effects” of the women who experienced poor treatment within their workplace.
Bastarache highlights the barriers preventing women from succeeding in the RCMP, calling for an external independent study of the future of the federal policing organization. He made 52 recommendations for change, including to training, recruitment, job postings, human resource policies and more.
The lead plaintiffs, veteran RCMP members Geoffrey Greenwood and Todd Gray, allege there was a culture of systemic intimidation and harassment in the force that was condoned by its leadership.
Critics look to the organization’s recent history, asking why multiple reports and damning allegations had to occur before the force took action.
Responding to this, the RCMP says those who are currently in leadership roles with the force are determined to make improvements.
“I think leaders do the best they can in the moments that they’re in their roles,” Huggins said. “And I know that this leadership team, at this time, is quite focused on ensuring that we set a solid foundation for the next 150 (years) of our organization.”
‘A MODERN RCMP’ IS A ‘LONG-TERM PROJECT’
Huggins said one of the current “core mandates” of the RCMP is that it is reflective representation of the communities in which it works.
“All through our organization, we’re holding folks accountable to ensure that we have an organization where sexism, racism, homophobia, discrimination, harassment of any kind… there’s no place for it in a modern RCMP,” she said.
To achieve this, the force is developing guidelines aimed at tackling each of its problems.
Reports detailing the toxic culture in the RCMP placed blame on the leadership team. To fix this, the RCMP says, it is eliminating barriers to the recruitment of diverse candidates, helping bring representation to the top.
As of October 2020, just 21.7 per cent of the regular members of the RCMP were female, and 12.1 per cent identified as a visible minority. Indigenous people represented 7.1 per cent of the RCMP’s regular members.
“One of the key things… is how we’ve changed our recruitment and renewed our recruitment approach,” Huggins said. “The organization has updated everything from its entrance exam to its assessment of new applicants. We’ve updated our exam so that it is bias-free.”
The exam is the first step to determine if the person holds the fundamentals of being an RCMP member. Huggins said if the organization sees people from certain demographics struggling with the same question, the administrators will go back to see if it holds a bias.
Huggins said the organization is also prioritizing younger people in recruitment. Two programs, one aimed specifically at Indigenous youth, and the other Diverse and Inclusive Pre-Cadet Experience, are bringing in new perspectives to the force.
“This is not an overnight thing, this is a longer-term project,” Huggins said. “It’s changing the fundamental so that the culture changes.”
The hope, according to Huggins, is that as new officers join the RCMP, the culture will shift.
“We’re building and flying at the same time,” Huggins said. “It comes to making sure that we continue to provide the services that we need and evolve our model, so that it is going to result in greater diversity amongst the ranks, but also into our leadership.”
FEAR OF SPEAKING OUT
Fear of speaking out against senior leadership is another problem the RCMP is trying to address.
“In June of 2021, we launched the Independent Centre for Harassment Resolution…which is arm’s length from the leadership of the RCMP,” Huggins said.
The centre addresses harassment prevention and resolves complaints as employees come forward.
When a member of the RCMP displays poor behaviour, the issue will be investigated, according to the force’s code of conduct, then the member will be issued educational and corrective opportunities before punitive actions are taken.
While the centre was created in response to complaints and is described as arm’s length, critics have pointed out its executive director was recruited and hired by the RCMP and reports to the force’s highest-ranking civilian officer. Additionally, the external investigators are former officers, rather than someone truly independent.
“They can’t fix themselves. There’s so much hurt and corruption that it cannot be fixed internally,” Shirley Heafey, former RCMP public complaints commission chairperson, told CTV National News on June 2021. “It’s just a stopgap measure. That’s all it is.”
Huggins said having ongoing conversations around removing barriers within the organization about reporting issues is something the force has committed to.
Women in particular have been at the forefront of the RCMP reports, with allegations of mistreatment ranging from gender-based discrimination in teams to penetrative sexual assaults and pejorative comments.
The RCMP says it is working to put more women in leadership roles within the force.
“Under the current commissioner (Brenda Lucki), we have achieved just about gender parity with regard to our senior leadership table,” Huggins said. “Are we perfect? No, we’re not perfect in all regards, but there certainly is a concerted commitment…to ensuring that we strengthen overall equity and inclusion in the workplace.”
While the current government has come to her defence in the past few years over her handling of certain high-profile incidents, Lucki’s future at the helm of the RCMP remains in question as she nears the five-year mark in the role.
At the time, her experience with Indigenous relations was pointed to as an asset, given the force’s ongoing work to improve its relations with First Nations communities.
The RCMP was created on May 23, 1873. At the time, the landscape was hundreds of hectares of dense untouched land.
Indigenous communities were scattered throughout the country, and their languages and traditions were still largely intact before the Indian Act of 1876 forced assimilation.
The very fabric of what many think of today as Canadian culture was still in its infancy.
The RCMP was modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary, Steve Hewitt, historian and police expert with the University of Birmingham, told CTV’s Your Morning in an interview earlier this month.
The force in Britain was used to “control” the Irish, Hewitt said, and in Canada, the RCMP was used against Indigenous people.
“I think that gives you an idea of the initial impetus of the force was to go westward to effectively take control of territory that had been Indigenous land to help displace Indigenous peoples onto reserves to prepare the way for European settlement,” Hewitt said.
As Canada became more diverse into the later 20th century, how the RCMP reacted to issues of racism became a focal point. Serving the people of Canada meant the organization needed to adapt values and protocols to the rapidly diversifying population.
However, discrimination persisted.
Between the 1950s and 1990s, the RCMP was involved in what’s become known as the LGBTQ2S+ purge that saw thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Canadians actively discriminated against, interrogated, and fired or demoted from their jobs in the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP and the federal public service.
Work is ongoing within the federal government to improve inclusivity and rebuild trust, with survivors recently calling out the RCMP specifically.
Some elements of the RCMP past are factors in how it currently operates – from the way it’s set up to core mandates.
Critics wonder whether it’s possible for the organization to evolve, moving away from the harm it caused in the past.
“You’ve got effectively what is a colonial institution, a paramilitary institution that still (operates) in the 21st century,” Hewitt said. “I’m just not sure paramilitary values in the 19th century work so well in the 21st century.”
He said the problems surfacing now are not unfamiliar – but there is a key difference.
“These issues are not new. The difference is obviously through social media, through lawsuits, things such as that, we’re much more aware of them than we would have been in the past,” Hewitt said.
“While the organization certainly is proud of its traditions, it is also eager to be a policing service for the future,” Huggins said. “Our culture change, our new core values, our focus on de-escalation, all speak to how we have taken what is useful from our paramilitary tradition and wedded it to the modern vision that we have for ourselves.”
With files from CTV News’ Senior Digital Parliamentary Reporter Rachel Aiello.
NEW YORK (AP) — Teen smoking hit an all-time low in the U.S. this year, part of a big drop in the youth use of tobacco overall, the government reported Thursday.
There was a 20% drop in the estimated number of middle and high school students who recently used at least one tobacco product, including cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, nicotine pouches and hookahs. The number went from 2.8 million last year to 2.25 million this year — the lowest since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s key survey began in 1999.
“Reaching a 25-year low for youth tobacco product use is an extraordinary milestone for public health,” said Deirdre Lawrence Kittner, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, in a statement. However, “our mission is far from complete.”
A previously reported drop in vaping largely explains the overall decline in tobacco use from 10% to about 8% of students, health officials said.
The youth e-cigarette rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% last year — the lowest at any point in the last decade. E-cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco products among teens, followed by nicotine pouches.
Use of other products has been dropping, too.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly 30% of high school students smoked. This year, it was just 1.7%, down from the 1.9%. That one-year decline is so small it is not considered statistically significant, but marks the lowest since the survey began 25 years ago. The middle school rate also is at its lowest mark.
Recent use of hookahs also dropped, from 1.1% to 0.7%.
The results come from an annual CDC survey, which included nearly 30,000 middle and high school students at 283 schools. The response rate this year was about 33%.
Officials attribute the declines to a number of measures, ranging from price increases and public health education campaigns to age restrictions and more aggressive enforcement against retailers and manufacturers selling products to kids.
Among high school students, use of any tobacco product dropped to 10%, from nearly 13% and e-cigarette use dipped under 8%, from 10%. But there was no change reported for middle school students, who less commonly vape or smoke or use other products,
Current use of tobacco fell among girls and Hispanic students, but rose among American Indian or Alaska Native students. And current use of nicotine pouches increased among white kids.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An Alabama man was arrested Thursday for his alleged role in the January hack of a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission social media account that led the price of bitcoin to spike, the Justice Department said.
Eric Council Jr., 25, of Athens, is accused of helping to break into the SEC’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, allowing the hackers to prematurely announce the approval of long-awaited bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The price of bitcoin briefly spiked more than $1,000 after the post claimed “The SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.”
But soon after the initial post appeared, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said on his personal account that the SEC’s account was compromised. “The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products,” Gensler wrote, calling the post unauthorized without providing further explanation.
Authorities say Council carried out what’s known as a “SIM swap,” using a fake ID to impersonate someone with access to the SEC’s X account and convince a cellphone store to give him a SIM card linked to the person’s phone. Council was able to take over the person’s cellphone number and get access codes to the SEC’s X account, which he shared with others who broke into the account and sent the post, the Justice Department says.
Prosecutors say after Council returned the iPhone he used for the SIM swap, his online searches included: “What are the signs that you are under investigation by law enforcement or the FBI even if you have not been contacted by them.”
An email seeking comment was sent Thursday to an attorney for Council, who is charged in Washington’s federal court with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
The price of bitcoin swung from about $46,730 to just below $48,000 after the unauthorized post hit on Jan. 9 and then dropped to around $45,200 after the SEC’s denial. The SEC officially approved the first exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin the following day.
Google, Meta and TikTok have removed social media accounts belonging to an industrial plant in Russia’s Tatarstan region aimed at recruiting young foreign women to make drones for Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
Posts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok were taken down following an investigation by The Associated Press published Oct. 10 that detailed working conditions in the drone factory in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, which is under U.S. and British sanctions.
Videos and other posts on the social media platforms promised the young women, who are largely from Africa, a free plane ticket to Russia and a salary of more than $500 a month following their recruitment via the program called “Alabuga Start.”
But instead of a work-study program in areas like hospitality and catering, some of them said they learned only arriving in the Tatarstan region that they would be toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.
In interviews with AP, some of the women who worked in the complex complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching. AP did not identify them by name or nationality out of concern for their safety.
The tech companies also removed accounts for Alabuga Polytechnic, a vocational boarding school for Russians aged 16-18 and Central Asians aged 18-22 that bills its graduates as experts in drone production.
The accounts collectively had at least 158,344 followers while one page on TikTok had more than a million likes.
In a statement, YouTube said its parent company Google is committed to sanctions and trade compliance and “after review and consistent with our policies, we terminated channels associated with Alabuga Special Economic Zone.”
Meta said it removed accounts on Facebook and Instagram that “violate our policies.” The company said it was committed to complying with sanctions laws and said it recognized that human exploitation is a serious problem which required a multifaceted approach, including at Meta.
It said it had teams dedicated to anti-trafficking efforts and aimed to remove those seeking to abuse its platforms.
TikTok said it removed videos and accounts which violated its community guidelines, which state it does not allow content that is used for the recruitment of victims, coordination of their transport, and their exploitation using force, fraud, coercion, or deception.
The women aged 18-22 were recruited to fill an urgent labor shortage in wartime Russia. They are from places like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as the South Asian country of Sri Lanka. The drive also is expanding to elsewhere in Asia as well as Latin America.
Accounts affiliated to Alabuga with tens of thousands of followers are still accessible on Telegram, which did not reply to a request for comment. The plant’s management also did not respond to AP.
The Alabuga Start recruiting drive used a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.
Videos also showed them enjoying Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports. None of the videos made it clear the women would be working in a drone manufacturing complex.
Online, Alabuga promoted visits to the industrial area by foreign dignitaries, including some from Brazil, Sri Lanka and Burkina Faso.
In a since-deleted Instagram post, a Turkish diplomat who visited the plant had compared Alabuga Polytechnic to colleges in Turkey and pronounced it “much more developed and high-tech.”
According to Russian investigative outlets Protokol and Razvorot, some pupils at Alabuga Polytechnic are as young as 15 and have complained of poor working conditions.
Videos previously on the platforms showed the vocational school students in team-building exercises such as “military-patriotic” paintball matches and recreating historic Soviet battles while wearing camouflage.
Last month, Alabuga Start said on Telegram its “audience has grown significantly!”
That could be due to its hiring of influencers, who promoted the site on TikTok and Instagram as an easy way for young women to make money after leaving school.
TikTok removed two videos promoting Alabuga after publication of the AP investigation.
Experts told AP that about 90% of the women recruited via the Alabuga Start program work in drone manufacturing.
