Thank you.
My name is Dave Reichert. I spent 35 years in the RCMP and I've been retired now for the last two years.
The RCMP is a large organization, which has grown and evolved to the point where the needs of management have minimized the needs and health of its members. An RCMP officer who declares they have health problems, PTSD, or other ailments is stigmatized and soon develops into a person who is ostracized by others within the organization. He or she begins to seek support to overcome these issues and related stigma.
The RCMP becomes the client, and the member participates helplessly under its direction. It is the RCMP health service that decides which medical doctors, psychologists, and other specialists are approved. These doctors participate with the affected member, while agreeing to follow the rules and direction of RCMP management. They accept this knowing that they will receive other referrals and become the doctor of choice.
This control by the RCMP has escalated to the point where doctors are told what to do, what the desired outcomes are, what they can say about the treatments, and how the treatments are done. In some cases, the member never knows what is happening.
The RCMP uses bullying tactics, including having officers attend physicians' offices and tell the doctors what to do. They have letters of conduct forwarded to the college of specialists to complain about the actions of the doctors, and they outright refuse doctors and access by members to those doctors. RCMP health services has had its own doctors tell the doctors paid by the force to return people to work without doing any consultation whatsoever with the members.
Trust of the RCMP management is quickly waning. Personal health information is often shared by others. The RCMP has removed doctors from RCMP patients and has failed to follow up to ensure their safety and their health. It has done this without their knowledge and while knowing that some of the people they removed the doctors from were suicidal. Again, there was no follow-up, no phone call, no referral to any doctor. They just left them alone.
The privacy breach that occurred across Canada, mainly in British Columbia, involved the RCMP taking the files of members under the care of a particular psychologist and forwarding them to the college of physicians and sharing them with the membership. The privacy breach was that the information was shared when all the names and everything else remained in the files.
Grievances pertaining to this breach were not replied to by the RCMP. We sent in numerous letters and gave them numerous opportunities to deal with this. I was involved with this particular case, and I gave them every opportunity for change. All I wanted was change. I was forced to go through the court process. I paid for the lawyer myself out of my own money, while the force, or members who were involved or implicated in this, went and used the public purse for their defence and for the actual action. Basically, it's very expensive and it's very cumbersome to deal with.
The RCMP preaches about its core values of honesty, integrity, compassion, accountability, and professionalism on a regular basis, but once a member sees these values violated and sees the outright disregard for the health of the members, the member becomes and feels very isolated.
Accountablility for that breach of trust and privacy was perhaps best demonstrated in a recent court decision that awarded $100 million to the abused female members of the RCMP. This was a great decision, but on one side it wasn't. In that decision, nobody was held accountable. Not one change was required to be made by the force, and no one was held accountable. Again, the $100 million didn't come out of the RCMP budget; it came out of the public purse. That made it very, very difficult for members to swallow that.
Several members are now removing themselves from the process of helping members, citing that it is becoming too political or too much work. The delayed-payment structure in the force is also causing problems.