Last fall, 11 Conservative Party of Canada MPs — including Westlock-St. Paul MP Arnold Viersen and Fort McMurray-Cold Lake MP David Yurdiga — joined together in a special task force with the intention of investigating the problem of rural crime in Alberta.
Each MP gathered input from their constituents, which was eventually used to piece together a report. The task force’s ultimate goal is to present the report to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, but first they released it to the public.
The report acknowledges that rural residents are “fearful, frustrated and angry” over the growing problem, which is exacerbated by long delays in police response to rural crime.
There are some sensible recommendations within the report, such as increasing RCMP resources to address response times in rural areas, reviewing the current system used for police dispatch and increasing support for enforcement of restitution orders on behalf of victims.
Other recommendations aren’t as logical, such as revising the criteria for ‘reasonable use of force’ in defence of persons or property. We could write an entirely separate editorial detailing why that’s a bad idea, but suffice it to say, we don’t need people getting shot when their car breaks down and they wander into the wrong farmyard to ask for help.
And then there’s the suggestion that’s utterly ridiculous: the possibility of replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force. Naturally, this is the recommendation that’s gotten the most media attention.
Even the Town & Country has gotten in on it; the Page 1 story about the province’s rural crime strategy brings up the recommendation and has Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley refute the idea as impractical.
In fairness to the authors of that report, the suggestion to investigate a provincial police force isn’t the centerpiece of the document, and as we said before, they do make some good suggestions.
Sure, Alberta had its own police force a century ago, but that was a very different time; the province’s population wasn’t even a tenth of what it is now.
The cost of such a venture would be astronomical, and it would take years to build a police force of sufficient size to actually replace the RCMP. And then there’s also the possibility that rural communities like Barrhead, which is small enough that the province funds the cost of policing, would have to pick up a greater portion of the tab to pay for this private force. No, it’s a terrible idea, all in all.
There’s other ways to address the problem of rural crime: finding ways to cut down on the administrative workload of officers, tackling opioid addiction and putting more resources into addressing repeat offenders.
However, reinventing the wheel is not the solution.
