Public Accounts

The Public Accounts Committee met to review the 2026 spring report of the Auditor General on recruiting for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Appearing were Auditor General Karen Hogan, Commissioner Michael Duheme and Assistant Commissioner Adam Palmer of the RCMP, with Bloc member Maxime Blanchette-Joncas elected second vice-chair at the outset.

Karen Hogan said the audit found the RCMP designated recruitment a priority in 2018 but never knew how many officers it needed, set targets below its staffing needs and missed its processing-time target for 97% of applications, which averaged 330 days. She said the shortfall had worsened since 2023, with at least 3,400 additional officers needed as of September 2025, that only 18% of cadet classes were filled to their 32-cadet maximum over 30 months, and that nine of eleven provinces and territories served by contract policing exceeded the 7% critical vacancy threshold. She credited the flexible posting plan with attracting thousands of applicants but said it worsened chronic vacancies in some areas, and that phasing it out from July 2025 would take years to reverse.

Michael Duheme accepted the recommendations, saying the problems were historical and centred on recruiting, training, vacancy management and measurement. He described a national recruiting strategy released in March 2026, Project Red Serge, a pilot in British Columbia and Yukon, a workforce planning model, a Depot review, an indigenous recruitment strategy due in March 2027, and an increased cadet allowance. He said his mandate is 750 police officers plus 250 public service employees for federal policing over three years, with 350 officers in year one drawn partly from experienced hires, the closing Surrey detachment and Grande Prairie, and about 80 reassignments from divisions; he disputed that this meant 1,000 new frontline officers, saying he had not heard ministers use that phrase, and committed to table divisional targets and three years of applicant, troop and graduate data. He said the 2% expenditure review cut cost about $96 million, absorbed at headquarters, and that he had no recommendations on reopening Roxham Road, disagreeing with a colleague who said its closure made border interception harder.

Adam Palmer said attracting applicants was not the problem, with nearly 21,000 applications last year, but processing was; the February 1 pilot replaced a centralized, linear, public-service-run process with a hybrid model pairing regular members with public service employees, applying queueing theory to screen out low-probability applicants early and targeting six months. He said the pilot's after-action report with seven recommendations would go to the commissioner for force-wide rollout before year's end, that a peace officer pathway beginning October 20 would train experienced candidates in 14 weeks using alternate sites such as Chilliwack, and that indigenous and visible-minority representation was rising, with Depot troops at 25.5% diversity and 20% bilingual.