RCMP members control the scene near Miramichi, NB, on Saturday, June 13, 2020.Ron Ward / The Canadian Press
The federal government says it will not bill provinces and municipalities for the retroactive portion of Mountie’s salaries while considering whether to help support part of the burden of a package of salary increases.
The RCMP union negotiated its first contract with the Ministry of Finance last August and obtained significant salary increases for its members, which led some mayors and councilors to say that due to rising costs, they could no longer pay the police.
The costs of the nearly 20,000 RCMP agents are shared between the federal, provincial and municipal governments.
Salaries had been frozen in the country’s largest police force since 2016. Total contract increases total hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the new RCMP salary scale, a sergeant who earned $ 100,000 a year now receives an increase of $ 21,000 a year.
Because the new contract is retroactive, the Mounted are receiving arrears on an increasing scale, as well as an additional 3% to 4% in annual retroactive payment premiums.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino met in Regina last month with members of the Federation of Municipalities of Canada (FCM), who had long been pushing for funding to offset the increases. He presented a letter to the group confirming that the federal government would pause its billing in the municipalities for the RCMP while the different governments discuss how to manage the retroactive part of the wages.
Ongoing discussions “will allow the government to better understand the needs and repayment capabilities of contract partners,” Mendicino said in the letter. “The government will not ask for payment until a decision has been made on the partners’ request for flexibility on retroactive costs.”
This pause is significant given the scale of the RCMP. The federal government has police contracts with eight provinces, three territories and more than 150 municipalities. These decades-old agreements install Mounties as local law enforcement agents, 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 charges 30 percent of the salaries of most mountaineers hired as a local authority. The only exception is in towns and cities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, where the subsidy rate drops to 10 percent.
Local politicians point out that they were never at the negotiating table when the new pay rise was made with the RCMP.
“As municipalities, we cannot have deficits. So if we receive an invoice that we are not anticipating, that we do not have a budget and that we have not been consulted, it makes it very difficult for us “, said Taneen Rudyk, Alberta councilor who is also president of the FCM.
He said the retroactive part of the RCMP increases was so important that in his town, Vegreville, the council was contemplating a 6 per cent rise in the property tax.
Provinces that use RCMP officers as provincial police forces also have a respite.
“Invoices for retroactive RCMP increases have been postponed,” said Chris Donnelly, a spokesman for the British Columbia Attorney General’s Office.
He added that the Federal Department of Public Security of Canada has “warned provincial, territorial and local governments that they would delay bills and meet with levels of government to better understand the impacts of retroactive payments.”
Mr. Donnelly said the current RCMP wage contract ends next year, meaning all levels of government will soon have to figure out how to tackle a new round of wage bargaining.
RCMP’s contract policing agreements have been in effect across Canada for the past century, but the sustainability of this model is increasingly in doubt, with elected officials questioning whether the federally managed force is still adapting. to the growing communities it serves.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote a letter of mandate last December ordering Mr. Mendicino to “conduct a contract police evaluation.”
Months earlier, Parliament’s public safety committee had published a report on systemic racism in law enforcement. He urged the federal government to “explore the possibility of ending the contract police.”
This spring, a BC legislative committee studying similar issues released its own report. He urged that “a new provincial police service take over the services previously contracted from the RCMP.”
The Alberta United Conservative Party government has expressed its long-term desire to break the RCMP contract in this province in favor of creating an independent police force. Last year, he hired an accounting firm to see the costs.
This report highlighted how Alberta could lose nearly $ 200 million annually in annual federal grants for the RCMP. But even so, the UCP government has said it could be prepared to forgo such funding in the future.
Meanwhile, Alberta is one of the jurisdictions asking Ottawa for relief from RCMP wage increases, which it estimates could cost the province tens of millions of dollars.
The Alberta government “believes the federal government should be responsible for paying the retroactive portion of the salary increase that goes back to 2016,” said Joseph Dow, a spokesman for Justice Minister Tyler Shandro.
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