How RCMP on the Prairies are finding work-life balance

“We would finish our shift at either two or three in the morning, and then we literally would go home, sit on the couch and wait for the phone to ring.”

RCMP Sgt. Paul Manaigre recalls being a police officer at a small, busy detachment in rural Manitoba in the early 2000s. His personal life would be laced with phone calls to come back in, because there wasn’t enough staff to work around the clock. To provide 24-7 responses to emergencies, officers were on-call as soon as their shift ended.

The stress of being on-call is a common problem for officers who have worked in rural Manitoba.

Being sparsely populated, the Prairies have always had the challenge of policing its vast area with a limited number of officers. And the way to do that, until 20 years ago, was to spread out with small teams placed in small communities.

However, that way of doing things created problems, including a lack of nearby reinforcements, burnout and the cost of overtime.

Today, the RCMP is pursuing a new strategy, taking a region, such as Pembina Valley, and combining all its small detachments into one team. Rather than having the five detachments of Carman, Morden, Manitou, Crystal City and Altona, the RCMP put all the officers under one roof.

The main purpose is organization, Manaigre told the Sun. Resources can be used better, with officers being deployed within range of each other, and, since the team is big enough, officers who worked the day shift don’t need to be on call while they sleep.

Bobby Baker, prairie director for the National Police Federation, told the Sun that hubs are one way the RCMP is making itself a more attractive employer today. Manaigre agreed, saying time off, and location are big concerns in today’s prospective Mounties.

“That work-life balance is more of a priority for the younger generation of officers that are coming up,” said Manaigre. “Members don’t want that, ‘working seven days a week, on call, 24-7,’ type thing. They want to be in a larger centre where perhaps their spouse can work and they can have, we call it, ‘unfettered time off.’ Where you’re not going to be disturbed.”

It’s a demand that the RCMP has leaned into over the past 20 years, Manaigre said.

And it’s not just an RCMP problem either. This year saw the closure of the Rivers Police Service after several of the town’s four officers left for other jobs that provided higher pay, signing bonuses and other perks, Mayor Heather Lamb told the Sun in December. In the wake of the closure, the responsibility of policing the area was turned over to the RCMP out of the Blue Hills detachment, which includes Souris, Carberry and rural Brandon.

There are about 14 staff members at the Blue Hills detachment.

For Lamb’s town of roughly 2,100 people, she said there are concerns stemming from the change, including that the community lost its visible police headquarters. She said she has been told the area will now be policed by a “drive through” model where officers plan to travel through the town at certain hours depending on statistics.

It makes the city seem more vulnerable, she said, adding: “when you lose visibility, crime moves in.”

Lamb also worries that residents will be less informed under the new policing model. With the local Rivers police, she said, officers would publish monthly updates in the newspaper, letting the community know what crimes were taking place and what they might have to look out for. However, that’s no longer the case.

“Now its 2,200 miles of territory and we get a quarterly report,” said Lamb. “When they say, ‘We’ve had this much fraud,’ we don’t know where that fraud happened.”

While the current situation isn’t ideal, she said it was almost unavoidable as it is nearly impossible to justify taxing residents enough to pay for a local police force.

When asked what the main hope is for policing, she said the town wants more officers to be added to Blue Hills to cover the addition of Rivers.

However, she said that the “drive through” policing model will never compare to the unit, no matter how small it was, in her backyard.

This story was originally published in the Brandon Sun. It is republished under a Creative Commons license as part of the Local Journalism Initiative.