Letter to Commissioner Duheme following the MAB's August 2025 Quarterly Meeting

September 11, 2025

 

Commissioner Mike Duheme 
RCMP National Headquarters 
73 Leikin Drive 
Ottawa, Ontario  K1A 0R2

 

Dear Commissioner Duheme,

On behalf of the Management Advisory Board (MAB) for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), thank you for participating in the Board’s Quarterly meeting on August 19-21, 2025, held at the RCMP Eastern Region Headquarters in Westmount, Québec. We appreciate your involvement and are thankful that the majority of the RCMP’s Senior Executive Committee (SEC) members were able to join us either virtually or in-person for the meeting.

You and your team continue to show dedicated and exemplary leadership. The MAB supports your ongoing transparency in tackling both systemic and emerging challenges on issues that affect not only RCMP employees, but all Canadians. As always, you and the SEC members provided us with informed and nuanced perspectives, which are vastly important and greatly appreciated as these facilitate the MAB’s ability to deliver on its mandate.

As you know, the focus of this quarterly meeting was Operational Independence and Accountability through the lens of the RCMP’s relationship with government at all levels. It continues to be a busy and tumultuous time for the RCMP and all federal government departments, with shifting priorities and ongoing fiscal reductions. In this context, we felt that this meeting’s focus was especially timely and relevant.

A theme woven throughout the meeting was the potential impact of the Comprehensive Expenditure Review (CER). Conversations on the CER generated some concerns within the MAB about how this exercise will impact the RCMP’s continued efforts and investment related to modernization. The MAB will be following the Budget 2025 announcement and will bring this matter for discussion again at our next Quarterly meeting.

The Board was grateful to have the experience of being hosted in Québec, within a Federal Policing region, with different mandates and operational duties than a Contract Policing province. While at Eastern Region Headquarters, MAB members were given an overview and tour of the various units that are housed there, including Border Operations, the Operations Communications Centre, and the Cyber Crime Unit, amongst others. This exposure enhanced MAB members’ appreciation of the complex and multifaceted responsibilities held by the RCMP.

The MAB also had very constructive engagements with two policing organizations based in Québec, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM). We learned valuable information about their recruiting programs, as well as their procurement practices and how they interact with policing partners, including the RCMP. The MAB believes that there is great value to sustained RCMP consultation with both the SQ and SPVM regarding their recruitment efforts and with the SPVM on its specialized training on interacting with elected officials.

We were also glad to engage once again with the Deputy Minister of Public Safety Canada. The important initiatives and ongoing work of Public Safety Canada is tightly connected to the future of the RCMP, and it is very important that the MAB collaborates closely with Public Safety to understand the priorities of the Minister and the government as these relate to the RCMP.

In addition to the above, we found our focused discussions on the topics of the RCMP’s relationships with elected officials, government directions, and relationships with provincial and territorial governments to be highly informative. It reflected for the MAB how the RCMP must navigate increasingly complex relationships with contract holders and political/community leaders while maintaining the independence necessary to run its operations.

We also continued to explore the issues of RCMP Regular Member recruitment, leadership development, and collaboration with non-policing partners, including health, community and social services. We did note incremental progress on recruitment since our last Quarterly in May 2025 and we are engaged on the RCMP’s development of a national recruitment strategy. The MAB maintains the view that the RCMP must be bold in its recruitment reform strategies while identifying and pursuing aggressive, yet attainable, targets. To support this end, we urge the articulation of a clear and persuasive rationale for the RCMP’s recruitment goals.

Lastly, the MAB appreciated our discussion on the RCMP’s initial reaction to its Well-Being Taskforce Advisory Report on RCMP Well-being and Issues Related to Long-Term Off-Duty Sick. We are encouraged to see our recommendations accepted and embraced by the organization and look forward to discussing the Management Response Action Plan (MRAP) at the October meeting of MAB’s Human Resources Standing Committee.

Our next Quarterly meeting is scheduled to take place at RCMP National Headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, from December 3-5, 2025. We hope that meeting in this location will allow increased in-person participation by SEC members.

In closing, please accept our individual and collective thanks for the continued professionalism, dedication, and commitment displayed by the RCMP. I look forward to meeting with you to further discuss key topics of importance and to hear from you about your current priorities and challenges.

Sincerely,

Professor Angela Campbell
Chairperson, Management Advisory Board for the RCMP

CC:       Minister of Public Safety
             Deputy Minister of Public Safety Canada