Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939 (review)

The change from the old Royal North West Mounted Police to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1919 and its evolution over the next two decades into a national police force is one of the critical episodes in the growth of the modern Canadian state. A book-length study of the subject is well worth doing. This one, regrettably, adds little to the existing literature. Apart from the lengthy study of the RCMP Security Service written for the McDonald Royal Commission in the 1970s by Carle Betke and S. W. Horrall, the historiography on the subject falls almost entirely into two categories: a body of uncritical memoirs and histories by former Mounties and studies of the security activities of the RCMP by academic historians on the political left. Hewitt's book is emphatically in the latter group. It re-asserts the idea put forward by Greg Kealey and others that, in the aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, spying on socialists, communists, and labour militants became the main business of the RCMP and the reason for its survival as an organization once its frontier policing days were at an end.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book lies in the narrowness of its conception. It looks only at RCMP activities in Alberta and Saskatchewan and, within those provinces, only at their security and intelligence work. This probably made sense when the study was in its original form as a PhD thesis, but the failure to expand the scope of the work creates a number of serious problems. In the first place, the biggest change in the RCMP after 1919 was its expansion as a national police force across the country, whereas up to that time it had only operated in the west and north. Looking only at Alberta and Saskatchewan makes comparisons with what was happening in other parts of the country impossible. Alberta and Saskatchewan were special cases because they were the only provinces where the RNWMP had acted as provincial police before 1919. Saskatchewan in 1928 and Alberta a couple of years later returned to contracting with the RCMP for provincial police duties. This extremely important development is hardly mentioned in the book. It not only paved the way for later RCMP contracts with all other provinces except Ontario and Quebec, but, as a recent study suggests, substantially changed the character of criminal policing in Alberta and Saskatchewan. (See Zhiqui Lin, Policing the Wild North-West: A Sociological Study of the Provincial Police in Alberta and Saskatchewan 1905–32 [University of Calgary Press, 2007]. The PhD thesis on which this book is based was compiled in the mid-1990s.) The McDonald Commission explicitly identified the RCMP's failure to separate criminal and security functions as one of the causes of the excesses of the 1970s. Did that pattern emerge in Saskatchewan and Alberta in the 1930s? The book does not suggest an answer or even raise the question.

Concentrating on just the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan might have provided the opportunity to explore in some depth the political, social, and economic context within which the RCMP operated. Alberta went from Liberal to United Farmer to Social Credit in the period. Saskatchewan saw a brief Conservative interlude at the start of the great depression, followed by the rise of the CCF. What effect did these political upheavals have on the RCMP, especially after it resumed its provincial police duties? The book asserts that "[d]eportation [of suspect immigrants] became less important in the mid-1920s as the economy turned around" (p. 41). The economy may have turned around in some parts of Canada in the mid-1920s, but Alberta and Saskatchewan were not among them. The economies of both provinces were wholly dependent upon agriculture in the period and benefited not at all from the manufacturing-based prosperity of other parts of North America. Readers of the book could...