If we want to achieve not just functional efficiencies—performing tasks better—but also cost savings.... Currently uniformed members are performing tasks for which they really do not have a comparative advantage or particular training, nor are they particularly well prepared to carry them out. In particular, we have a deputy commissioner who looks after financial accountability, and we have a deputy commissioner who looks after human resources. Those are ultimately tasks that in just about every department, including the Department of National Defence, are, by and large, carried out by civilians who are professionalized in those particular areas.
I think the RCMP would benefit from being able to invest its resources and its attention into the core function of policing—both the provincial policing part and the federal policing task that it carries out—rather than being distracted by a whole bunch of other tasks that are really purely administrative. I've noticed in the last couple of years that the organization has civilianized a couple of these particular functions. But ultimately, I would envisage an organization that has—and I think the initial spirit of the idea was correct—essentially a civilian commissioner just the way the Department of National Defence has a deputy minister, and a uniformed cadre that looks specifically after the policing functions of the organization.
I also think we have considerable inefficiencies in the way the organization is divided. We don't have clear boundaries, in terms of the human resources side, between the federal investigative functions and the provincial policing functions. In just about every other country we can think of, the functions that the RCMP performs in one organization are performed by separate organizations. We don't necessarily need to stand up a whole separate bureaucracy, but we do need to essentially provide some firewalls within the organization to designate one to look after the provincial policing tasks, and another that recruits directly and has direct-entry opportunities for everybody from lawyers to accountants into the federal investigative branch of the organization.
While there are problems with the FBI and I don't think we can transfer the FBI model to Canada, basically we need an FBI type of organization for Canada that is not tied in to the RCMP's traditional and conventional recruitment and training type of system through Depot. It's highly unattractive to many people who have professional degrees to enter a system that doesn't value people for the professions they have.
It is baffling to me how many people with master's degrees, with law degrees, and with Ph.D.s are out there in the organization, writing traffic tickets because the organization says they don't have enough time in and they need to work their way up through the hierarchy. In other federal investigative policing organizations such as the FBI and the German Bundeskriminalamt, there are direct-entry positions for people who are simply looking after federal investigations per se.
I'll submit this document. I've written on this particular subject matter, and I'll submit that also for the committee's reference.