David Irvine

I just came back this week from working with a group of commissioned RCMP officers on the east coast. Some of the finest leaders you’ll find anywhere. While there are certainly areas that need work in the RCMP culture, it is a culture that is far from broken. When these guys put their lives on the line with each other and for the citizens of Canada, there is a level of trust, respect, and camaraderie between them that you won’t find in many organizations. They have rich values: Integrity, Honesty, Professionalism, Compassion, Respect, and Accountability – and work hard to get these values off the wall and into the hearts of their members. The culture of the RCMP is not in Ottawa. That’s only a very small part of the RCMP story. The real culture is in the detachments and the districts across the country. And, like any great organization, there are great commanding officers and bad ones.

Like any organization that is in the public eye, the challenge facing the RCMP is that we live in a “CNN” world, where thirty-second sound bites and headlines create a distortion of the whole picture. This age of technology creates a false impression of reality, where what’s “rare” is perceived as reality, and what’s reality is rare. You don’t know what is going on in Afghanistan by watching a thirty-second news report on the evening news. You learn what’s going on in Afghanistan by spending hours talking with a soldier who came home without his legs, or you spend time people who live and work there, committing their lives to rebuilding a shredded country.

You don’t know what’s going on in the RCMP by watching the sensationalism of a cell-block story in Kamloops or a YouTube video of a tragedy in the Vancouver airport. There is no denying that these events have taken place and the media serves a purpose in holding the organization to account for these catastrophes. There is an element of truth in all news stories. But let’s not forget that these “rarities” are but a small fraction of the reality of the RCMP. If you want to really know what goes on in the RCMP, spend hours on ride-alongs and witness first hand the amazing work these men and women do everyday in this country. Or take the time to visit with staff commanders, corporals, and constables and get their picture of reality, and learn how hard they are working at the detachment level to develop leadership capacity and the development of a culture aligned with their values.

I have nothing but admiration for so many of the leaders I have met in the RCMP. In recent years, I have become associated with some of the men and women who helped organize and run the SwissAir crash recovery, who had to face the aftermath of their colleagues’ deaths in the bloodbath of Mayerthorpe, who organized the security at the Olympics, and who put their lives on the line in daily undercover operations and “routine” policing. We still have a world-class national police force of professionals, many of whom literally give up decades of their lives to make this a safer, more civil society for all of us. Before we pass judgment, let’s be sure we’re viewing the picture from a broad enough lens to give us an accurate representation of reality.