RCMP pauses billing to local governments, provinces as salaries soar

The federal government says it won’t bill provinces and municipalities for the retroactive portion of Mountie salaries while it considers whether to help shoulder some of the burden of a steep pay-raise package.

The RCMP union negotiated its first contract with the Treasury Board last August and gained significant wage increases for its members, prompting some mayors and town councillors to say that because of the heightened costs, they could no longer afford their police.

Costs for the nearly 20,000 RCMP officers are shared between federal, provincial and municipal governments.

Salaries had been frozen at the country’s largest police force since 2016. The overall raises in the contract total hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the RCMP’s new salary grid, a sergeant who had been making $100,000 a year is now receiving a $21,000-a-year raise.

Because the new contract is retroactive, the Mounties are being paid back pay on a rising scale, as well as an additional 3 per cent to 4 per cent in annual retroactive pay premiums.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino met in Regina last month with members of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), which had long lobbied for funding to offset the raises. He presented a letter to the group confirming that the federal government would pause its billing to municipalities for the RCMP as the various governments discuss how to handle the retroactive portion of the wages.

Continuing discussions “will allow the government to better understand contract partners’ repayment needs and abilities,” Mr. Mendicino said in the letter. “The government will not seek payment until a decision has been reached on the request from contract partners for flexibility on retroactive costs.”

This pause is significant considering the RCMP’s scale. The federal government has policing contracts with eight provinces, three territories and more than 150 municipalities. These decades-old deals install 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 picks up 30 per cent of the salaries of most Mounties contracted out as local law enforcement. The only exception is in towns and cities with more than 15,000 people, where the subsidy rate drops to 10 per cent.

Local politicians point out that they were never at the negotiating table when the new wage hike with the RCMP was struck.

“As municipalities, we can’t run deficits. So if we receive a bill that we’re not anticipating, that we haven’t budgeted for, and that we weren’t consulted for, it makes it very difficult for us,” said Taneen Rudyk, an Alberta town councillor who is also president of the FCM.

She said the retroactive portion of the RCMP raises was so substantial that in her town, Vegreville, council was contemplating a 6-per-cent property-tax hike.

Provinces that use RCMP officers as provincial police forces are also getting a respite.

“The invoices for the retroactive RCMP raises have been postponed,” said Chris Donnelly, a spokesman for British Columbia’s Ministry of the Solicitor-General.

He added that the federal Public Safety Canada Department has “advised provincial, territorial and local governments that they would be delaying the invoices and would meet with the levels of government to get a better understanding of the impacts of the retroactive payments.”

Mr. Donnelly said the current RCMP wage contract ends next year, meaning all levels of government soon will have to figure out how to approach a new round of wage bargaining.

The RCMP’s contract-policing arrangements have been in place across Canada for the past century, but the sustainability of this model is increasingly in question, with elected officials asking whether the federally managed force still fits the growing communities that it serves.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote a mandate letter last December directing Mr. Mendicino to “conduct an assessment of contract policing.”

Months before that, Parliament’s public-safety committee had released a report on systemic racism in law enforcement. It urged the federal government to “explore the possibility of ending contract policing.”

This spring, a legislative committee in B.C. studying similar issues released its own report. It urged that “a new provincial police service take over services formerly contracted to the RCMP.”

Alberta’s United Conservative Party government has been vocal about its long-term desire to rip up that province’s RCMP contract in favour of starting up an independent police force. Last year, it hired an accounting firm to look at the costs.

That report highlighted how Alberta could lose nearly $200-million a year in annual federal subsidies for the RCMP. But even so, the UCP government has said it might well be prepared to forgo this funding in the future.

Meantime, Alberta is among the jurisdictions petitioning Ottawa for relief from the RCMP pay hikes, which it estimates could cost the province tens of millions of dollars.

Alberta’s government “believes that the federal government must be responsible for paying the retroactive portion of the pay raise dating back to 2016,” said Joseph Dow, a spokesman for Justice Minister Tyler Shandro.

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