A National Police Force
As the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, we became responsible for federal law enforcement in all ten provinces and all territories. Our headquarters, based in Regina up until now, moved to Ottawa.
Some provinces hired their own provincial police forces. Others, like Alberta, Saskatchewan and BC, eventually asked us to take care of all their policing. Today, only Ontario and Quebec have provincial police forces. Most large cities also have their own police force. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Our role changed. We traded in our horses for motorcycles, automobiles, airplanes and boats. We now had telephones and radios to keep in touch with each other. We went from chasing whisky traders to arresting drug lords, from checking for stolen cattle to breaking international theft rings. To help us and other police forces solve crimes, we became experts at fingerprinting and all aspects of forensics. Our forensic laboratory can identify the gun a specific bullet was shot from, match soil samples from a shoe to a crime scene, identify a criminal or a victim from hair samples and DNA, and more.
The St. Roch trapped in Arctic ice.
We sent more men into the high Arctic to protect Canadian sovereignty. Our ship, the St. Roch, supplied far northern posts and made her historic voyage through the North West Passage in 1940 to 1942. The St. Roch was the RCMP's first wooden schooner. Launched in April 1928 in Vancouver, it was responsible for High Arctic patrols and provisioning of distant outposts. Under the command of Sergeant Henry Larsen, it left Vancouver in June 1940 to traverse the Northwest Passage. After being trapped in ice for two winters among the southern Arctic islands, it sailed into Halifax in October 1942. Only the second ship to make it through the Northwest Passage, the St. Roch was the first to make the trip from west to east. The St. Roch returned to Vancouver in 1944 in only 86 days by a more northerly route, making it the first ship to sail both ways. Its journeys cemented Canada's ownership of the Arctic lands and waters. The St. Roch can now be seen in the Maritime Museum in Vancouver.
During the Second World War, we were responsible for national security at home and some of our men worked as military police in the No. 1 Provost Company overseas. Other members, in our Marine and Air Section fought with the Royal Canadian Air Force. After the war, we continued to be more and more involved in national security issues. This led eventually to the creation of a separate agency in 1984, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Some people say that CSIS is the Canadian CIA.
In the 1970s and 1980s, we added airport policing, guarding of politicians and other VIPs, and white collar crime investigation to our list of duties. Our first women police officers were sworn in September 1974.
Canada has always sent soldiers to help keep the peace in countries recovering from war. In the 1990s we joined them. We helped to re-establish law and order in countries like Namibia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Croatia, East Timor, Guatemala and in the Western Sahara. In some ways, you could say that we went back to our roots for these postings.
Who would have thought, back in 1873 when our first men were recruited to march west, that we would be doing these things today!