In fact the Force, as it now exists, should be abolished. It is stretched far too thin, trying to be almost all things to almost everyone (the Auditor General’s latest report is here)–and the Conservative government refuses properly to fund it.
If today’s RCMP is not what it should be, what to do? I can think of no other developed country (and probably no other of any size) that has a national police force responsible for the following types of law enforcement:
-municipal policing (Ontario and Quebec and many cities in other provinces excepted)
-rural policing (all provinces except Ontario and Quebec)
-All policing in the territories
-highway patrol (all provinces except Ontario and Quebec, and the RCMP also does this on federal roads in Ottawa)
-Organized crime (drugs etc.)
-National security (terrorism, espionage)
-Border policing
-White collar crime (sometimes, e.g. Karlheinz Schreiber).
I’m sure I missed a few things.
It seems to me that all provinces should provide their own municipal, rural, and highway policing, by the means of their own choice. There then should be separate federal law enforcement agencies to deal with, in cooperation with the forces in provinces and municipalities as required:
1) Serious organized crime and national security matters (there are many common techniques involved, and both rely greatly on intelligence)
2) Border, airport, and port policing (this function should be part of the Canada Border Services Agency–think Vancouver Airport; one service might have done better)
3) The territories
4) White collar crime (small and mainly civilian, that is to say lawyers leading, indeed conducting, much of the investigation as is done in the US [think Patrick Fitzgerald, more here]; the Mounties just do not have the skills to do this sort of work properly)
5) VIP protection.

Can you imagine Steve speaking thus?

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard: ‘There is a reason the world always looks to America’
…
She blew them away.
Speaking with a heartfelt tone and, near the end some voice-wavering emotion (full text below), Gillard’s 30-minute speech won 16 outbursts of applause, six of them standing. According to those in the House chamber, there were too some moist eyes at the end.
…few foreign leaders realize that deep down in their collective continental heart, Americans secretly yearn to be liked. Gillard gets that. Or her speechwriter does. But the Australian’s emotion recalling her childhood awe at being let off school to watch Americans walk on the moon could not be faked…
Gillard hit all the right bases, touched all the right notes, recalling joint sacrifices and expressing a level of official appreciation that Congress has not heard at home for a very long time, even though Gillard stressed she was speaking for Australians to Americans.
Probably back home her critics will say Australia’s national leader sounded a bit obsequious toward the Yanks. But for this audience on this day in this place of Washington, the lady from Down Under ruled supremely…

Now that’s serving your real national interests. And note:

Australia’s prime minister told a joint session of Congress on Wednesday [March 9] that Australian troops in Afghanistan would remain with the U.S.-led coalition for years to come, knocking down recent reports that the country was contemplating an early exit from the war-torn country…
Australia is far and away the largest non-NATO contributor to the coalition in Afghanistan, with some 1,550 troops on the ground — a 40 percent increase since 2009…

Some sharp views:

…
David Jones is a retired career diplomat. He served as minister-counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy at Ottawa during the mid-1990s and has kept a close interest in Canadian politics. He coauthored Uneasy Neighbo(u)rs–a study of U.S.-Canada relations.
…The decade-long Canadian combat commitment to Afghanistan is ending in July. It was never popular; Afghanistan is far away, and there was no 9/11 imperative to galvanize popular support. The commitment was a good neighbor substitute for not having been one of the “willing” during the Iraq/Saddam Hussein war. Nevertheless, Canadians are leaving with honor; their mission is morphing into a training contingent with much reduced troop levels. This gives Canadians more of what they prefer: “peacekeeping” rather than “peacemaking,” with much lower casualty counts…
Conservative Principles. While hardly a “conservative” in U.S. terms, Harper…
…because he doesn’t throw horse manure in the U.S. direction every time he picks up a pitchfork, he is unforgiven by those that remain convinced the North American Free Trade Agreement is a USG plot to beggar our neighbor while sucking their natural resources (oil/water) into our insatiable maw…
…there is a further sense that the Canadian public remains suspicious of anything with a conservative label and is willing to bolt away from the party given the least excuse…
With our foreign policy cup overflowing, it has been pleasant to have a northern neighbor that is looking after its interests but not convinced that it must tell us how Ottawa could better run U.S. foreign affairs…
A Liberal government would be… different…Liberals express a traditional attitude against the United States. While Tories want the best relationship with the United States that will not cost them the next election, Liberals have always sought the worst bilateral relationship that would not prompt U.S. retaliation [very nice apposition, that]…
Over 30 years ago, the Iranian revolutionaries seized U.S. diplomats and our Tehran embassy. Then Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor sheltered six U.S. diplomats in his residence, arranged for their escape using Canadian passports, and acted as de facto CIA station chief by providing Washington with detailed intelligence for months. The action was fully supported by a short-lived Tory government; then Liberal opposition leader, Pierre Trudeau, was unhelpful (even when the situation was explained to him). One can wonder whether a “prime minister” Trudeau would have directed Taylor to say “no room at the inn” and wonder equally just what a Liberal government would do in a comparable situation today [nice bit of knife putting-in].

But one of us has been…

Speaking truth to power
An honest man talking to the real thing:

…
The cable also reveals how CSIS feels about Canadian attitudes. Former CSIS director Jim Judd went so far as to complain that judicial rulings and public naiveté were paralyzing his spies – specifically lamenting that Canadians were prone to “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” and “paroxysms of moral outrage.”..

BBC exonerates Israel.

As the MV Sun Sea approaches Canadian waters…

…
A handful of Toronto lawyers were en route to Vancouver Wednesday night to assist the incoming migrants…

Read all about it.

…
Then there’s Number One father, to knot up some very multicultural intellectual knickers:

“…I guess simple extra-judicial killing beats torture. What must Obamabesotted Candians think? ..”

“I guess in the end other countries really just did not care about us…”

The facts, people, just the facts (plus, er, some analysis):

The 2016 vote? It wasn’t even close
Here are the totals from Copenhagen:
First Round:
Madrid 28
Rio 26
Tokyo 22
Chicago 18
Second Round:
Rio 46
Madrid 29
Tokyo 20
Third Round:
Rio 66
Madrid 32
Analysis: Obviously Madrid, with a virtual deathbed plea from former IOC boss Juan Antonio Samaranch, had a bloc of about 30 votes throughout. In the first round, where a majority is rarely achieved by one city, voters often pick a city for political reasons, to say, ‘hey, we voted for you,’ saving their true choice for later rounds. But Chicago didn’t even get much of that charity. The Windy City’s 18 in the first round is a total face-slap. Not even close. They got outpolled by four votes by Tokyo, which no one gave a snowball’s chance in hell at winning this thing? Amazing.
You have to figure the Obamas and Oprah were worth at least a handful of votes. Without them, would Chicago have even broken into double digits?
In the end, almost all the Tokyo votes from the second round swung Rio’s way in the third.
Well, as they say in Seattle, that’s boat racin’…

…the curious case of the absent transcripts.

Related…

A Sentence Never Before Uttered In The History Of The English Language
“Pausing only to wonder idly whether the expressions “38-year-old student of international law” and “the guys who stole my tires off the balcony” have ever been used in the same paragraph in the entire history of the English language…”
Heh.
h/t Maz2

“…when Lawrence Welk was beating up his girlfriends”.