The federal government's appointment of a non-RCMP official (a "civilian," as the rest of us are known to members of the force) to head the organization signals the most important change in running the service since CSIS took over the analytical part of the national security mandate in the early 1980s.
For 120 years, the RCMP Academy in Regina has been training members of the national police force and, for all that time, we have known that, from among the cohort of cadets, there will come, some 30 years down the road, the next generation of the force's senior management. Notwithstanding that interim commissioner Bev Busson argued that the latest commissioner should be found among those now wearing the RCMP uniform, it turns out that the new leader of the force will never have experienced training and socialization with his fellow 18- to 22-year-olds at the Regina Depot. This will not sit well with the majority in a deeply conservative institution like the RCMP.
Nothing is more threatening to the members of a total career institution than the prospect that people who have not paid their dues will gain access to the most prestigious and rewarding posts. Such appointments are traditionally regarded as the ultimate compensation for a lifetime of accomplishment - inevitably matched with successful conformity to the shibboleths and taboos of the organizational culture. Like the railways and the banks, the phone company and the electric utility, even the post office, is the RCMP now on a course that will see the wholesale revision of the implicit bargain at the heart of the member's engagement with the organization?
The great advantage of the total career institution is the loyalty and devotion to duty that it facilitates; the great disadvantage is the choking of individual thinking, the boycotting of originality, and the flowering of petty tyrannies based on the prerogatives of hierarchy. The history of the RCMP is replete with examples of both.
In the wake of the misadventures of the RCMP Security Service in the 1970s, one of its senior officers testified that "we knew we were confronted, among other things, with severe hierarchical authority problems. Younger members were very loath to express their honest opinion when their seniors were present, because if they were disagreeing with their seniors, some of whom thought we were in the best of all possible worlds ... they would be told off." A telling-off was the least of the risks of thinking for one's self.
The RCMP staffs thousands of positions across the country, in a myriad of locations and types of duty. No member wants his or her personnel file compromised by an unfavourable evaluation, nor their future assignment determined by an unsympathetic commanding officer. The ranks of provincial police forces and private security firms are filled with former RCMP officers who were not able, at some point in their careers, to conform to the expectations of an intolerant superior. As the same senior officer told the McDonald Commission looking into RCMP wrongdoing, "We were so heavily conditioned to think in a sort of stereotyped way."
William Elliott is going to find himself in a very interesting situation. The primary currency of a police force is information. As commissioner, he will be a long way from where the information is gathered. His predecessors had the experience of long years of gathering information, ordering it, husbanding it and rationing it. Furthermore, they had huge networks of contacts throughout the organization - friends, allies and acquaintances accumulated over 30 years of service. As against these advantages, Mr. Elliott has an order-in-council and a letter from the Prime Minister. He will have to play his hand very carefully because he does not have very many high cards. He will need to identify the internal constituencies that may be prepared to give him a chance and address them adroitly. One key issue is the organizational fractures among the rank and file, the non-commissioned officers, and the small minority of commissioned officers, respectively.
What can he offer the junior troops, who are often the objects and sometimes the victims, of the RCMP's culture of obedience? The non-commissioned officers are simultaneously the heart and soul of the force and the best positioned to abuse their authority. They will be subject to ever-increasing mechanisms of accountability, and there is nothing appealing in that. How can Commissioner Elliott connect to them? How can he mollify the commissioned officers, whose interests are most directly threatened by his presence and, more significantly, by the precedent he represents? I have seen a roomful of officers coolly inform a commissioner (whom they respected) that they simply did not want to do what he wanted them to do, and did not intend to do it.
Disaster aside, we will not know how Mr. Elliott has done in his new post for two or three years at best. Even if it were possible, organizational renewal by a substantial infusion of civilian recruitment into the line operations of the RCMP would simply cause undue disruption.
It must be said that the institution Mr. Elliott is being asked to lead is not failing in its primary duties of policing, but rather is subject to tragicomic managerial ineptitude, petty abuse of authority and failures of accountability. He can leave the core policing to the professionals. Mr. Elliott's challenge will be whether the RCMP emerges in five years as an institution better able to hold itself to account for its performance in managing its key human resources, better able to cope with its constitutional obligations in terms of external accountability, more at ease with the idea that its standards cannot be wholly the product of its own making, and more internally democratic in its ability to conduct a dialogue without every difference potentially threatening assignments and careers.
The one temptation that Mr. Elliott must resist is the notion that formal mechanisms of review, audit and verification are all that is required.
There must be some such mechanisms, but they are not a panacea and should be minimized. To establish a culture in which every action is accompanied by an equal and potentially opposite inspection/review/oversight/critique by someone whose job description is to do so, is to invite paralysis or evasion. The key is to foster a more resilient and less brittle internal culture, rather than add rigidity in the form of formal agencies and "gotcha" mandates.
If Bill Elliott succeeds in limiting the demand for conformity to matters of law and standards of integrity, and in breaking the overwhelming value accorded to a blanket orthodoxy within the force, he will have done the institution and the country signal service.
Richard French is a former minister of communications in Quebec and was in the Privy Council Office from 1974 to 1977.