Partway through the RCMP training program, there’s a class that covers two-person handcuffing – as in, restraining someone who really doesn’t want to help.
It takes place in a gym where the floors and lower walls are swathed in dense blue crash mats, for good reason. The lesson typically makes cadets nervous in anticipation, but it often ends up being a favourite at Depot Division, the force’s national training academy in Regina.
One bright, frigid morning in March, a troop hustles into the gym and begins jogging and windmilling their arms to warm up. An instructor sets out ground rules: No fish hooks, no eye gouging and when someone taps out, it’s over. This is about controlled aggression, he tells them, which means being aggressive while keeping your emotions in check.
They split into four groups, with one cadet in each playing the suspect and two others the police officers.
It turns instantly into sweaty, screaming, writhing chaos.
In one corner, a tall cadet with an extravagant mustache is sprawled on his stomach with his arms tucked under him, so that the others can’t get a grip.
“He’s rolled up like a sausage!” one instructor says admiringly. Then he demonstrates digging into a pressure point under the shoulder blade, and the suspect dissolves in a full-body cringe.
Cpl. Miles Hiebert gives a tour of Buffalo Detachment, a mock detachment within Depot Division which provides scenario-based training for cadets mirroring real working environments.
In another corner, the cadet playing the suspect is screaming curses and scuttling around the perimeter like an enraged crab. Eventually, another cadet manages to plant herself on top of him, straddling his back and driving her knees under his upper arms to immobilize them.
All around the room, they keep switching but, on average, Team Suspect is winning. As some of the wrestling matches drag on, the instructors – they’re called facilitators at Depot – send in additional pretend police officers as backup.
“The public reception of this would be four cops beating up on one guy,” says Miles Hiebert, senior protocol and visits co-ordinator at Depot and a uniformed officer, pointing to a group with a particularly wily suspect. “But it took four of them.”
Posters designed by RCMP cadets are displayed at Depot Division.
That remark sits in the centre of the deep chasm that exists right now between how the public sees the RCMP and how the force sees itself.
The first jobs for most Depot graduates are detachments where the RCMP provides police on a contract basis to provinces and territories (except Ontario and Quebec, which have their own provincial forces). A mounting drumbeat of criticism has painted that policing as depleted, resistant to change and no longer fit for purpose.
The RCMP has come under fire for its officers’ use of force and deadly interactions with Indigenous people, and there have been repeated accusations of toxic internal culture. A class action settlement approved in 2017 paid out $125-million in damages for sexual harassment and discrimination of female RCMP employees.
Perhaps most damning of all, the Mass Casualty Commission that investigated the RCMP’s muddled response to the Portapique, N.S., shooting that killed 22 people in 2020 recommended Depot be shut down and training fundamentally redesigned.
The RCMP, for its part, maintains that it is a world leader in policing and training, that its curriculum and policies are constantly evolving and that its officers do their best in the face of sometimes unimaginable danger.
So The Globe and Mail asked to visit Depot and see training firsthand. The force allowed open access, but a reporter and photographer were accompanied everywhere by two members of the media relations team.
This was not an undercover exposé, then, but more like show-and-tell: This is what an institution that has lost the public’s confidence – and which feels misunderstood by that public – wants everyone to know about how it prepares its newest recruits.
Welcome to the Mountie Factory.
RCMP cadets gather outside Depot Division's Mess hall. Every couple of weeks, new troops arrive on base to begin the six-month intensive training program.
Depot Division’s cadet training program is a constant pipeline, graduating an average of 725 new constables a year over the past decade. Every couple of weeks, a new troop arrives on base; you can pick them out by their civilian clothes, sneakers and “What have I done?” facial expressions.
And every two weeks, another troop on the far side of six months of intensive training graduates wearing their red serge and newly acquired Easter Island faces, then ships out from Regina to cities, small towns and rural specks across Canada.
They’ve been building new RCMP officers at Depot since 1885; the story of every Mountie begins here. In both the careers of individual officers and in the soaring crimson mythology of the force itself, Depot sits somewhere between the Vatican and a beloved alma mater where the craziest things happened back in the day.
On base, everyone is supposed to march everywhere, whether to class or to the Mess for breakfast. Some commit more than others. “Bear walking” is when new cadets get their limbs mixed up, so each arm swings with the same leg instead of the opposite one. It makes you look like a stoned grizzly, and it brings great, cackling joy to people who have already mastered marching.
Seniority is always visible at Depot. It’s in people’s faces and bodies and capability in everything they do, and also in their clothing. New cadets earn the right to wear certain components of their uniform based on drill performance (marching in formation) and RCMP historical knowledge, and they pass or fail as a troop.
“There’s a lot of different emotions that come through here. People are super happy, people are super nervous,” said Daulton Kadash, who works in the vast uniform and equipment infrastructure on base. “There’s been people that have thrown up putting the Stetson on, because they’ve waited so long to get here.”
Depot sits on the outskirts of Regina near the airport, but also in its own self-contained universe. In the evenings, a parade of delivery drivers stops at the guard room to drop off food, but other than that, the outside world doesn’t encroach.
The whole place feels like you’ve been dropped onto a movie set.
There’s an entire village of fake houses and businesses – travel agent, bank, convenience store – where cadets practice investigating crimes. There’s a recreation of a small-town RCMP outpost, called Buffalo Detachment, where dispatchers send cadets out on fake calls to the ersatz village. All of it is paused in some past moment of Canadiana that you can instantly recognize, but not quite place.
Underneath the frozen-in-time quality, though, plenty about life at Depot has changed.
Pepper spray exposure used to mean lining cadets up and emptying a canister directly into their faces. Now, it’s voluntary and more like the light overspray they might experience on the job. There’s a Learning Resource Centre that provides study space, support staff and stress-relieving activities like adult colouring books and a collective jigsaw puzzle in what looks like the nicest municipal library you’ve ever seen.
The Mess has gone from being a temple of deep-fried everything to a cornucopia of variety and special diet options. The “pits” where cadets live used to be in huge, barracks-style rooms lined on each side with closets, drawers and beds. Now, they live in glass-and-steel dorm buildings, and each cadet has what amounts to a small private room, with the fourth wall cut off and open to the hallway.
The to-the-inch standards governing how every item needs to be arranged for inspection in those pits have not softened, however. A scrunched paper liner will get a shoe tray tossed across the room.
“It develops what we call attention to detail, so an investigative skill: What’s there that shouldn’t be, what’s missing that should be, what evidence do I have that something’s occurred?” said Sergeant-Major Mike McGinley, a chief tray-chucker during inspections. “We want them to get that into their head, so every call they go on, they’re thinking that way.”
Top brass at Depot, and particularly the Commanding Officer (CO) in charge of the base, used to be a bit like the sun – impressive, glowering, best to avoid direct eye contact. Chief Superintendent Mike Lokken, who took over as CO in September, seems to move at a more earthy orbit.
He grew up on a farm near Codette, Sask. (population: 200), and his family had little contact with the RCMP outside of school visits and bike rodeos, but he remembers always being in awe of policing.
Most nights of the week now, he and his husband, Jamie Rattai, eat dinner in the Mess together because the food is good, it’s cheaper than buying groceries and work hours are long. Cadets often stop by to chat about training or life back home.
Chief Superintendent Mike Lokken, the Commanding Officer of RCMP Depot Division.
A few years ago on a trip to Banff, Chief Superintendent Lokken wore his red serge on a hike. He told Mr. Rattai that he just wanted a great photo op, but it was a cover story. He proposed to Mr. Rattai at the Moraine Lake lookout and, yes, the internet absolutely loved the video of this maximally Canadian moment.
“The number one priority of the organization right now is recruiting – that segues into training as well – and pumping out new police officers onto the streets of Canada,” the CO says. “And so my role here is to put out a quality entry-level police officer, representative of the communities that we serve.”
A 2022 report from the RCMP’s independent advisory board described recruitment as a “crisis” and raised concerns about “both the quantity and quality of cadet recruits.” There are signs the focus is paying off: 17,672 people applied to be Mounties last fiscal year, compared with an average of 10,610 over the previous nine years. Still, the vacancy rate in front-line RCMP jobs currently sits at 17 per cent across the country.
But inevitably, the sanding down of some edges in training means that just as an older generation viewed his own as being coddled when he joined the RCMP 27 years ago, some people in the field now scoff that today’s cadets have it easy, the CO said.
“There’s more than one way to do something. And I think that this generation is a lot different. Whereas when I went through training, they told you to do something, you did it. Now you tell them to do something, and they say why, and you have to be able to articulate,” Chief Superintendent Lokken said, adding: “If you can’t articulate the reason that you’re doing something, then maybe you should consider other options.”
On base, RCMP cadets are supposed to march everywhere, whether to class or to the Mess for breakfast.
The six-month Depot program currently encompasses 800 hours of training. About half of that is devoted to academics covered in Applied Police Sciences classes where cadets study the Criminal Code, investigation techniques and RCMP procedure, along with role-play scenarios putting it all into practice. The other chunk is hands-on, including fitness, firearms, driving, police defensive tactics and drill.
The streets of Depot routinely whoop with sirens as cadets practice roadside stops. One afternoon, a minivan parks diagonally across the sidewalk, like a neon sign flashing “DRUNK DRIVER.” A cruiser pulls in behind and a cadet walks up to the driver’s window. He’s wearing a uniform tuque that looks two sizes too big, though that might just be his eager-but-rattled vibe.
A facilitator coaches him through each detail: Put your notebook away so your hands are free to deal with whatever happens next; scan the car for evidence sitting in plain sight; don’t say “arrest” when you mean detention.
A cadet a full head taller than the officer-cadet is filling the role of the drunk driver. He’s helpfully wearing a black bomber jacket, like he’s playing a tough in a high-school production of Grease. The officer-cadet is clearly ransacking his brain for procedures as he haltingly handcuffs his quarry and pats him down for weapons.
“Make sure you get behind him, get a good footing, because he’s a big boy,” the instructor says. “If he starts face-planting, you’re not going to be able to hold onto him.”
Once he’s folded the pretend drunk into the back, the officer-cadet climbs into the driver’s seat.
“That wasn’t messy, that was like smearing makeup on a pig,” he moans to two classmates.
“I’ve seen a lot worse,” the facilitator reassures him afterward. “I mean, we make mistakes. I’d rather you make mistakes here than in the field. And nothing you did here today was life-threatening.”
The officer-cadet smiles, wobbly and unconvinced.
There are only two written exams in the program, and everything else is evaluated in role-play scenarios – live like this one, or virtual – and in practical skills testing like on the driving course or firearms range.
“We have the cadets show us what they can do instead of telling us what they know,” says Christine Hudy, manager of training program support and evaluation.
If someone fails an assessment, they get extra tutoring and a second chance to pass. If they fail again, they’re terminated, or, if staff decide it’s warranted, they can be “reinserted” with a newer troop to complete the entire program again from an earlier point. For the 2022-23 fiscal year, 17 per cent of cadets who began the program didn’t graduate, either because they quit (9 per cent) or were terminated (8 per cent).
One early morning in March, a troop eight weeks into training gathers for an Applied Police Sciences class on the use of force. They wear black duty vests with “POLICE” emblazoned across them and the desks in front of them are crowded with laptops and copies of the Criminal Code indexed with colourful sticky notes. But the slumped-over energy is like any 8 a.m. college class.
They watch a video of two police officers in a cruiser, with a ponytailed man in a loud patterned shirt thrashing in the back seat. As the officers pull him out of the car, he head-butts one. The other officer kicks him while he’s sprawled on the ground, sneering, “That’ll teach you to mess with us, wise guy!”
The facilitator asks what the class thinks.
“It didn’t feel right,” one cadet offers.
Then the instructor asks what might cause a police officer to overreact, and the cadets suggest anger, adrenalin, stress, lack of training or fear. He asks what consequences someone could face, and the answers trickle back: criminal legal action, civil litigation or on-the-job discipline.
“What will the public think of you if you use excessive force?” the facilitator prods.
“Public perception goes down,” one cadet says.
“If one of us do it, we all do it,” the facilitator agrees.
Gregory Krätzig is director of research and strategic partnerships, and his department works closely with Ms. Hudy’s on the curriculum. When Depot staff talk about how they educate cadets, one thing that comes up, often and unbidden, is that if something goes wrong, the RCMP will have to account for its training and policies.
Being able to make that case is not an incidental part of his job, Dr. Krätzig said, but at its core. He pointed at a fistful of academic papers he’d authored on pistol skill acquisition, emergency driving simulations and making virtual situations feel like real life.
“It’s really, really important to go through that process, whatever we do, to say, ‘Yes, we have the evidence, it’s done independently, and it’s been peer-reviewed independently,’” he says. “You have to do that.”
The idea that police work happens in view of a public that has strong opinions about that work forms a steady hum just below the surface at Depot. When cadets work through virtual scenarios, there will usually be a character recording the action with their phone, to remind them it’ll be like that in the real world.
The six-month Depot program currently encompasses 800 hours of instruction, half of which is devoted to academics covered in Applied Police Sciences classes, and the rest hands-on training.
Later, Dr. Krätzig showed off one of the training environments closely connected to his research: the judgment simulation rooms, or “JSIMS,” where cadets apply classroom lessons in something approximating real life. They’re housed in a cavernous building that feels like a defunct department store, with thick black curtains hanging from the rafters, so that when you walk in, you can’t see what’s going on and can only hear yelling.
Behind the curtain is a row of drywall rooms each about 20 feet square, with no ceilings. Inside, the first room is darkened and the wall opposite the door glows with a video projection, stilled for the moment. A pair of chairs are positioned in front of it.
A facilitator sets up a scenario for two cadets, explaining that they started their day with an e-mail from last night’s shift, saying a blue pickup was stolen from a convenience store and security cameras captured a suspect.
The cadets sit in the chairs like they’re driving, and the facilitator plays radio dispatcher, relaying a report that a truck matching the stolen vehicle had been spotted. Now, the video projection shows them travelling along rural roads until they come to a blue truck on the shoulder. A man who matches the suspect description is loping away.
The facilitator prompts the cadet in the driver seat to narrate what’s going on. “This person’s walking away. I don’t see hands right now,” he says. “My risk assessment is a little high, I don’t know what he has on him.”
The cadet tells dispatch to put him on a one-minute timer, which means they’ll check in if they don’t hear from him, and draws his gun as he gets out of his pretend car; in simulations, they use real pistols and pepper spray canisters that have been converted to virtual versions with lasers.
“Stop, police! You’re under arrest for possession of property obtained by crime!” he bellows, then repeatedly orders the suspect to take his hands out of his pockets. The truck thief refuses, drawling in an extravagant southern twang that the officer can’t pin anything on him. (This video is American, but Depot also films its own homegrown scenarios, including walking into an arena to find a jumped-up hockey dad looming over a ref with a bloodied face).
The cadet and suspect yell back and forth, their voices sparring with one-way arguments spilling over from the adjoining rooms. Finally, the digital hillbilly has had enough. He peels off his jacket, yelling, “I can take you,” and lunges at the screen. Only 60 seconds has elapsed since the cadet climbed out of his car.
Here, the video pauses. The cadet takes out his pepper spray and presses the button. Nothing happens – it’s an accidental equipment failure that turns into a teachable moment – so he switches to his baton, narrating as he thwacks his imaginary suspect and neutralizes the would-be assault.
Afterward, the facilitator asks the cadet to walk her through what happened, like he would if he testified in court.
He says he noticed as he drove in that the landscape didn’t offer much cover, and he drew his pistol at “depressed ready” – muzzle pointed down – as he got out of his car because he didn’t know what the man could be hiding.
“How is that making you feel?” the facilitator asks.
“That made me feel a bit nervous,” the cadet says. “Like, why is that one hand still not out?” Once the guy yanked off his jacket, it was clear he didn’t have a weapon, so the officer-cadet ratcheted down his risk assessment and reached for his pepper spray.
Even louder than this idea of your reactions always being watched and judged is something several shades darker that forms a low, throbbing constant at Depot: the possibility of bad things – even the very worst thing – happening.
Street signs at the RCMP training academy bear the names of RCMP members who died in the line of duty.
When cadets arrive on base, they’re each assigned a “Silent Partner,” a Mountie killed in the line of duty whose story is printed on a commemorative card they carry. They learn to perform their new jobs on Depot streets named after people who died doing the same work. One of the fake houses where they investigate crimes has a long driveway that meanders to the front door. To the untrained eye, it looks like a picturesque rural property, but one of the facilitators calls it “the driveway of death” and teaches cadets to approach from the side, where there’s more cover.
There’s even latent danger in how cadets learn to do something as mundane as parking at a roadside stop: Steering wheel cranked to the side so if someone hits them from behind, the vehicle will shoot out into the road rather than straight at them.
Fewer Canadian police officers are dying on duty now than in decades past, and fewer of them are killed by intentionally harmful acts (as opposed to an accident like a car crash). But those facts do little to lessen the emotional blow – particularly for fellow police officers – when it happens.
For working RCMP members, the calls that ended in horror are referenced in a muted, knowing shorthand: Moncton, Spiritwood, Portapique, among dozens of other incidents burned into their collective memory. The uniformed work force is small – 18,835 officers as of July 1, 2024 – and they rotate often through different detachments. So when something bad happens to one of them, it could easily be a friend or acquaintance.
It is almost certainly true that the public misunderstands the RCMP. Most people don’t have any idea what it’s like to know more dead colleagues than you can count on both hands, or to go on a call that might be boring or depressing or futile or ridiculous, but could veer suddenly into carnage.
But the inverse reality is what this does to an organization’s ability to see itself clearly. If it feels like you and your co-workers constantly face dangers other people can’t imagine, and the public is always watching you with eyes narrowed in judgment, is it even possible to avoid thinking your critics must be wrong, because they’re out there, while you’re in the trenches?
Maybe outsiders can never truly understand policing because they don’t know what it’s like to face unthinkable ugliness or mortal danger regularly.
But then, what do you become blind to because you know it all too well?
On graduation days at Depot, like the one in March that sent Troop 14 out into the world, the soon-to-be RCMP constables go to the airport in red serge to pick up their families, who haven’t laid eyes on them in six months. But even after they’ve toured the base – one of the few times the public sees it – and gathered in the Drill Hall for the graduation ceremony, the parents and spouses and siblings still look slightly gobsmacked by the tourism-symbols-on-legs their loved ones have transformed into.
A map of Canada sits on an easel, surrounded by photos of Troop 14, each connected by red yarn to the place where they’ll be working in a matter of days: Rocky Mountain House, Alta., Sheshatshiu, Nfld., Fort St. John, B.C.
Below the packed bleachers, the troop marches into the Drill Hall and forms up in precise ranks, then a corporal gives the families permission – and exactly two minutes – to swarm the floor and take photos. They bunch up in front of the cadets with the same energy as the swooning audience at a grade-school play, only here the performers stare straight ahead stone-faced, aside from a few bashful smirks.
One woman stands in front of a cadet who is obviously her son, pointing proudly at him like he’s a roadside attraction, while someone snaps a photo of them.
Next, Troop 14 performs drill – they learn the unmounted cavalry drill, which is the Musical Ride performance without horses – for the first time in front of their families and for their last time together as a troop.
What’s mesmerizing about drill is that the better you are at it, the less you look like a person. New cadets are all jelly arms and sweaty chaos, touchingly almost too human. By the time they reach the end of training like Troop 14, they move like precision watch parts.
When they finish, they swear the three oaths of the red-serge priesthood they’re about to join: allegiance to the King, secrecy of “any knowledge or information” they obtain and the oath of office to “well and truly obey and perform all lawful orders and instructions that I receive as such, without fear, favour or affection of or toward any person.”
The final step in the ceremony is their commanding officer, Chief Superintendent Lokken, handing over badges to each of the RCMP’s newest constables.
He knows that the job he’s loved for nearly three decades is at a low ebb right now. To him, that’s much broader than just the RCMP, because first responders of all sorts are having a hard time recruiting from younger generations who see work and life differently. And it’s been much more common for members of the LGBTQ community to question his allegiance to policing than the other way around. “It’s not exactly a popular job right now,” he says.
RCMP Constable Benjamin Muamba, left, receives his badge from Chief Superintendent Mike Lokken during the graduation ceremony.
But he’s devoted to it and wanted the job at Depot so he could help shape the next generation of Mounties. “Any type of criticism, especially from the outside, is sometimes hard to take,” he says, adding, “What I need to do is immediately not get your back up and not say, ‘Okay, these people have no idea what they’re talking about.’ ”
Depot graduates 40 troops a year, so every week or two, Chief Superintendent Lokken and Mr. Rattai preside over the head table at a graduation dinner. One of the stories the CO likes to tell in his speeches, which he would relate to Troop 14 later that night, is about his first day on the job, when he was posted to a small town in Manitoba.
His field coach was away – after Depot, new RCMP members spend six months training on the job – so he was paired with someone else who had “far outlived his happiness in the organization.” They went to a neighbouring detachment for coffee, and there followed a festival of non-stop complaining among the experienced Mounties.
RCMP officers embrace each other after the graduation ceremony of Troop 14.
“I’m right out of Depot, right out of training, looking to go out and change the world, catch bad guys and make the world a better place. And this was a real eye-opener for me,” Chief Superintendent Lokken explains to the graduating class and their families. “I looked at them and I said, ‘Well, if you hate your job that much, why don’t you go do something else?’”
The grizzled vets laughed and told him he had no idea, because one day he would be just like them.
The point of this story is that Chief Superintendent Lokken promised himself he never would be, and he always urges the new members never to become that either. He tells them that after almost three decades, he still loves this work, and he hopes it will be the same for them on the path they’re travelling behind him.
The graduation ceremony, earlier in the day, concluded with the last orders anyone at Depot would give Troop 14, before the fresh-pressed constables scattered to the far corners of the country.
“Number 14 troop attention!” Chief Superintendent Lokken barked, and they snapped into form.
For everyone else in the room, there was the briefest moment of silence. Down at the centre of the Drill Hall, in a voice only his new colleagues could hear, Chief Superintendent Lokken offered a more private command that might be read as an occupational love letter, a warning or a vow. “Be careful out there and take care of each other,” he said softly.
Then his CO voice bounced off the rafters again and he gave their final order: “To your posts dismissed!”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misattributed RCMP Kim Chamberland's rank as Corporal in a photo caption. It has been corrected to Sergeant.