Media portray accountability as a main issue in BC citizens’ lack of trust in the RCMP, and it is. But money accountability is not the most important issue. It is the performance standards to be met by RCMP officers on the ground . The BC Solicitor General, as the responsible Minister of the Crown, owes it to British Columbia citizens to have the terms of the contract include:

1. the key performance standards that citizens are entitled to see met by the approximately 6000 RCMP officers who would act in BC
2. the provision that the contract will be valid so long as the RCMP in BC accounts publicly, fully and fairly to the Legislative Assembly regularly on the discharge of its responsibilities under the contract, asserting whether its officers are meeting a standard of public explanation that BC citizens are entitled to see the RCMP meet

An arbitrary Ottawa time limit on contract negotiation doesn’t stand against the time needed to have the necessary public accountability terms central in the contract. The federal Opposition in the House of Commons can immediately take up the extension issue if necessary, since it is the opposition’s duty to effectively hold to account the federal executive government and its agencies. It is also to support all those who need and have the right to have adequate public explanation of the intended and actual conduct of contract police officers.

To guide reaching contract agreements, the public accountability concepts involved are authoritatively defined as follows,

Public accountability sensibly means the obligation of authorities to explain publicly, fully and fairly, before and after the fact, how they are carrying out responsibilities that affect citizens in important ways.

Holding to account means the process of obtaining (extracting if necessary) the needed public explanations from authorities, at the time they are needed, validating them for their fairness and completeness and doing something fair and sensible with explanations given in good faith.

The RCMP is a publicly accountable authority.

As to performance, the adequacy of management control in the RCMP is central to its officers meeting standards of performance that citizens respect and are entitled to see met. Management control does not mean “command control,” in the way the military and RCMP view it. It means having the processes in place that effectively cause to happen that which should, and cause not to happen that which shouldn’t. The adequacy of the processes depends on the motivation and ability of all those important to the achievement of adequate management control.. The Vancouver airport tasering of Robert Dziekanski is a prime example of police officers’ actions and later explanations that significantly reduced citizen trust in the RCMP

As the client, citizens have yet to set and tell the RCMP what is to happen through its officers’ performance, and what is not, and the standards of public explanation that all officers are to meet. The accumulated evidence thus far shows that the RCMP in BC, and likely nationwide, has not been meeting the performance and public accountability standards that citizens need to be met. But citizens themselves don’t know what to do about it.

The extraordinary number of horror-story news items on RCMP officers’ actions and inadequate public accountability obligations of senior officers indicates that the situation is getting worse, not better. Thus we now have predictable and demonstrable loss of citizen trust in the motivation and ability of the RCMP.

Yet senior management of the RCMP in Ottawa appears to expect blind trust from Canadian citizens and their elected representatives. It is as if the RCMP, with its current responsibilities and inexcusable management problems, takes for granted continuance of the level of public trust earned by the Northwest Mounted Police over 100 years ago — earned, for example, by a single officer relieving would-be Klondike miners of their firearms without incident as they came up over the Chilkoot Trail.

In fairness to both the RCMP and BC citizens, the needed RCMP performance and public explanation standards must be included in the contract terms with BC clients before the BC signatures. It is the duty of the responsible Minister to set those standards for citizen assurance. The contract terms and scope must be sufficiently clear to allow BC’s Auditor General to report to the Legislative Assembly his opinion on the adequacy of RCMP compliance with the contracts’ terms.

For reaching agreement, the RCMP must state whether it commits to meet the standards proposed for its operations in BC and, if not, to state what stands in the way. For example, if the RCMP argues that its evidence suggests that the governing bodies of prospective municipal clients are likely to be an external force standing in the way of officers meeting certain of the performance standards, those municipalities must explain to the RCMP how they will deal with specific valid RCMP concerns.

As to assessing RCMP performance, the behavioural sciences hold that observed performance of a person or organization is a function of motivation (level and direction of effort) and ability (mainly training). A related axiom from the behavioral sciences says that success in an organization means pleasing one’s superiors, and has nothing necessarily to do with serving clients or the public.

To help produce the needed underlying motivation in RCMP officers, they must be given the reasons why serving citizens fairly and ably in all their circumstances will bring them personal reward and recognition in the form of demonstrably-earned public respect.

Recruits joining the RCMP genuinely wishing to serve the public can be expected to be trained from the outset to serve the aims of RCMP command, and adopt the culture of the Force created by top command. But as a retired Chief of Police of Calgary said, not facetiously, in speaking in Ottawa over a decade ago, that to understand police one needs to understand cults. The notion that police think of citizens as “them versus us” could be refuted, but to refute the notion the precautionary principle requires valid observation of the RCMP officers meeting standards of performance set by citizens.

In the case of ability, training is central but the public doesn’t know how recruits are trained, or for meeting whose performance standards. Citizens need to know this to sensibly decide their trust in the motivation and ability of RCMP officers since they exercise raw power over citizens. The question is whether their training produces commonsense standards of performance on the job that citizens are entitled to see met, and whether their training induces willingness to explain publicly, fully and fairly their intentions and reasons on the job and their actual performance as they see it.

Responsibility creates accountability, but having to explain intentions and conduct publicly, fully and fairly will drive the actual performance of the RCMP. This is because the public explanation obligation exerts a needed self-regulating influence on RCMP officers at all levels.

The BC executive government has the responsibility to propose as RCMP contract terms the needed key performance and public explanation obligations that the RCMP must meet in BC. If reasonable performance and accountability terms are not agreed by the RCMP there can be no credible contract reasonably serving citizens. If later the agreed terms are not met by the RCMP, the contract would have to be cancelled forthwith.