Public Accounts Committee on Sept. 24th, 2026

[Commr Michael Duheme]

Net bodies...?

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

The government has promised 1,000 new officers. I don't care about the experience. Is it correct that there are going to be 1,000 net new bodies?

[Commr Michael Duheme]

There will be 750 net new police officers.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

Okay.

They constantly state publicly that they will add 1,000 officers. Have you ever contradicted that or spoken to the Minister of Public Safety and said, “Wait a moment. That's different from my mandate”?

[Commr Michael Duheme]

I'll be honest. I have not heard the phrase “1,000 new officers”.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How did you not hear it? It's probably been stated about 20 or 30 times by senior ministers, including your boss, in the House.

[Commr Michael Duheme]

I'm not always with every minister. I'm trying to correct—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

I'm sorry, Commissioner. Not one of your executives, Mr. Palmer or anyone else, has come up and said, “Hey....” They're very public with this.

I would think that if your mandate is 750 and the government has repeatedly stated 1,000—including your boss, the minister in charge, and the Attorney General—surely someone....

Mr. Palmer, have you never heard this 1,000 number?

How has no one gone to you and said, “Hey, boss...”?

[A/Commr Adam Palmer]

It's 1,000 personnel: 750 police officers and 250—

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

They stated publicly 1,000 officers.

[A/Commr Adam Palmer]

I've heard both being used in the media. I don't know who to attribute that to, but I have heard both being used in the media.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

It's many ministers: the public safety minister, the Attorney General, the Treasury Board president, who is responsible for the money.... That's who you can attribute it to.

[A/Commr Adam Palmer]

It is 1,000 personnel. It's 1,000 people, but the devil is in the details, because it is 750 police officers and 250 public service employees.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

The devil is certainly in the details.

Were you consulted before the 750 were added to your mandate?

I ask because, since 2018, as has been identified in the Auditor General's report, we've known there's a recruitment issue. Were you consulted before they decided to add the 750?

[Commr Michael Duheme]

Yes, Mr. Chair, I was consulted. The team and I.... The human resources team and the federal policing team got together, did a number crunch and felt comfortable with the mandates being given.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

How do you feel comfortable with that when the Auditor General's report states you're short 2,700? When I read “Key facts and findings” in the report, it says that the RCMP “did not know how many new police officers it needed to hire to fully staff the force”.

How can you be comfortable with a mandate to add 750 when you don't even know how many you need to fulfill your mandate to serve Canadians?

[Commr Michael Duheme]

As I tried to explain earlier, for the first target for the first year—which is 350—the organization was relying on three things: experienced police officers coming into the organization, anywhere between 100 and 150; the closing down of the Surrey detachment, where we had a couple of hundred people; and Grande Prairie. There would be a minimal impact on the front line.

[Kelly McCauley, Conservative, Edmonton West, AB]

[Inaudible—Editor] the key fact that the Auditor General has written in the report under “Key facts and findings” that the RCMP doesn't “know how many...officers it [needs]...to fully staff the force”?

[Commr Michael Duheme]

I said in my introduction that I accept the recommendations the Auditor General has made. I also said that we are working towards a new system that's digitalized; data-wise, it's easier to get the information that's required.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

The time is up, Mr. McCauley.

Ms. Tesser Derksen, you have the floor for five minutes, please.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks so much for being here today, everyone. It's great to be back.

Welcome to new members.

I want to thank the RCMP for all the work they do. It's a challenging time to be in policing. That's one of the reasons our government invested in hiring new RCMP positions back in the 2025 budget, a budget that our opposition colleagues, unfortunately and most regrettably, refused to support last November. That was a month after the leader of the official opposition made some rather unfortunate comments about our national police force, but that's in the past. Let's move on.

I want to ask the Auditor General and her team my first question.

I want to note that it seems as though there may be a time misalignment between the release of your report, Auditor General, and the national recruitment strategy. I think they were maybe crossing timelines a bit. Is that a fair comment? It was, maybe, three days before or after.

[Karen Hogan]

I believe the national recruitment strategy was updated a few days before we released our report, yes.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

I mention it only because it's important for context that this information was coming out around the same time.

Auditor General, paragraph 28 of your report notes that you “found that the RCMP did not use the human resources data it had to set [the] targets” for new recruitment and that human resources instead based recruitment targets on the amount of funding it had.

I'd like you to expand on this. To me, it doesn't seem as though aligning capacity of the task to match cost and funding is a terrible business decision, but because this is a matter of public safety, it's a bit of a different discussion.

Can you talk to me about that misalignment of targets and recruits as a problem of funding?

[Karen Hogan]

As the commissioner mentioned, there are contract agreements with provinces. A good place to start is to know you've made an agreement between a province and a territory and know how many police officers you need.

The way the RCMP staffs other areas outside the contract and indigenous policing is they take experienced officers there and move them. You have to think not just about the hard vacancy rates you have in your contracting line of business but about all the other vacancy rates, because that's the feeder pool. We would have expected all of that to be considered and then also to have attrition layered in. Police officers will be ill. They will take leave. They will leave and retire. You have to plan for this. We found that they were basing the recruitment targets on their capacity at Depot and the amount of funding they had for training, and that was well below the actual needs.

When you're not meeting the target and you're already starting below the target, you're lining yourself up to never be able to meet your actual needs or to make it a very long pathway to get there.

[Kristina Tesser Derksen, Liberal, Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON]

Thanks for that clarification.

I'll go over to the commissioner. I read the national recruitment strategy with a lot of interest. It notes that there's a need to define and target those whom the RCMP needs to hire and that the RCMP needs to hire “the right people” to “meet the needs of Contract and Federal Policing and develop a comprehensive approach to workforce planning”. This is on page 7 of the strategy.

You also note at page 14 that there are current challenges not necessarily in the number of applicants but in the quality of applicants relative to what the RCMP needs. You note attributes, skills, fitness and those sorts of things.

There's also a bit of talk about diversity of the force reflecting Canadians, particularly with respect to indigenous and bilingual applicants or recruits and other under-represented groups. It's really important that the force reflect Canada.

That's a very important thing.

I'd like to know a little more. Maybe we'll focus specifically on the indigenous folks. How do you see the indigenous recruitment strategy possibly helping you with recruitment targets in places where it is difficult to fill vacancies, like the north, for example?