22fun Will Alberta Replace the Mounties With Its Own Provincial Police Force?

Along with pulling out of the Canada Pension Plan22fun, Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, has in the past floated the idea of replacing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a provincial police force.

ImageDanielle Smith recently said that Alberta would create a new police force through its sheriffs service. Credit...Todd Korol/Reuters

Like every province except Ontario and Quebec, which have provincial forces, Alberta has contracted out rural policing to the Mounties for over 90 years, and several of its cities also outsource policing to the federal force.

And like every province that relies on the Mounties, grumbling about the cost and quality of the service the R.C.M.P. provides ebbs and flows in Alberta.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

In March, Ms. Smith’s government introduced a bill that would allow Alberta to set up a new police agency. But the government said it had no intention of dropping the Mounties, although details about what any new force might be and when it might appear were scarce. Now Ms. Smith has suggested that it will be an incremental move made through an existing law enforcement agency.

“We’ve also decided to create our own police force under the sheriffs,” Ms. Smith told a United Conservative Party meeting earlier this month, according to reporting in The Edmonton Journal. She was responding, The Journal said this week, to a question about what politicians could do to to influence the criminal justice system.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.22fun

• The
• will
• 22fun
• replace
• Alberta