The Last Guardians: The Crisis in the RCMP - and Canada

The national police force, which has proudly symbolized Canada around the world for over a century, has been having a few bad decades. From barn-burning to break-ins at 24 Sussex Drive all the way to Airbus, the force has seemed to reel from crisis to crisis.

In 1997, journalist Paul Palango, who had already written about the RCMP in the bestselling Above the Law, set out to take another look at the force for Maclean’s magazine. In the course of the article, entitled “Why the Mounties Can’t Get Their Man,” he quoted Commissioner Philip Murray, who lamented that Canada was heading towards a two-tier system of policing, with private investigative and security services dealing with white-collar crimes, because the public police force no longer has the resources – of time, manpower, or money – to do so. Palango wanted to try to show how and why the RCMP had reached this point, and what the implications might be for society as a whole. This book is the result.

With the blessings of the force, he set out across the country, interviewing highly placed officers – past and present – watching cadets train at the force’s historic Regina headquarters, going on night patrol with constables both in a remote Manitoba community and in suburban Burnaby, B.C., checking out the new drive to community policing – and some of the communities it serves. Members of the RCMP co-operated with him everywhere he went – and talked freely to him.

What Paul Palango found at the end of his journey was a force in crisis, struggling to be all things to all Canadians in a society that is no longer sure what role it wants the federal police to play – but is sure that it wants them to do it on less money. Palango also argues that looking carefully at the RCMP, shaped as a federal institution by all the societal and economic pressures that have swept the country over the years, is an effective way to examine many of the problems that ail Canada after the event of September 11, 2001.