Equipping Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Opening Statement to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts

Equipping Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

(Report 5—2019 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada)

16 May 2019

Sylvain Ricard, Chartered Professional AccountantCPA, Chartered AccountantCA
Interim Auditor General of Canada

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our audit report on equipping officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Joining me is Nicholas Swales, the Principal responsible for the audit.

The Royal Canadian Mounted PoliceRCMP is Canada’s largest police force, with more than 18,000 officers. It provides Canadians with policing services at the federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal levels, and it serves within Indigenous communities.

Since 2001, there have been 9 shooting incidents that caused the deaths of 15 RCMP officers in total. On 4 June 2014, an assailant with powerful firearms killed 3 Moncton RCMP officers and wounded 2 others.

This audit focused on whether the RCMP provided its officers with hard body armour and semi-automatic weapons, called carbines. A key purpose of this equipment is to protect officers in active shooter situations. The audit also looked at officer training on the use of carbines and pistols and at the maintenance of those firearms.

This audit is important because the RCMP is required to provide appropriate equipment and related training to comply with its duty to protect the health and safety of its officers under the Canada Labour Codeand the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act.

We found that the RCMP did not define how many carbines were needed to adequately equip officers to respond to active shooters. As a result, the RCMP did not know whether it had provided carbines to all of the officers who needed them and did not know how many more carbines it needed.

We also found that the RCMP had enough hard body armour nationwide to meet its policy requirement of providing one set for each operational vehicle plus 10%. However, the Ontario and Quebec divisions did not meet this requirement, so not all officers had access to the armour.

We found that the RCMP had met its target for the initial training of front-line officers on carbines, but that 13% of these officers had not completed the annual recertification of their training. This meant that these officers were not permitted to have access to the carbines until they had completed their recertification.

We found that half of the RCMP carbines had not been maintained according to RCMP policy. Likewise, the RCMP was not meeting its policy requirements for the maintenance of pistols. A firearm must be well maintained to ensure that it functions when an officer needs it to respond to a lethal threat—which generally occurs without warning.

Overall, we found that the RCMP did not have a plan to manage the acquisition of carbines. In our view, this contributed to the backlogs in firearm recertification and maintenance. Inadequate planning also contributed to bottlenecks in distribution and to the RCMP’s not always following procurement rules.

We made 6 recommendations. The RCMP has agreed with all of them, and has shared its action plan with us.  The plan includes actions and timelines for our recommendations.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the Committee may have. Thank you.