People [said] you couldn’t send them here and there. What they are talking about is muscle and muscle is only a small part of the job. No one has ever questioned the courage of the female.
—Supt. William F. MacRae
Leader-Post (Regina), March 3, 1975
*
The fight for equality continued long after 1990 when Marianne Robson placed a Stetson hat on her head for the first time. Issues regarding the differences between male and female uniforms persisted. Although women could now wear the same review and service order uniforms as their male colleagues, there were other orders of dress that remained unchanged. The women’s walking out order uniform for formal wear, which consisted of a long, navy-blue skirt and black pumps, remained an official part of the female uniform. In January 2003, a female Mountie with seventeen years of service filed a grievance with the RCMP’s External Review Committee because she was not allowed to wear the formal dress pants and congress boots worn by men as part of her formal walking out order. The member argued that the dress policy was discriminatory because it differentiated between male and female police officers.[658]
The RCMP denied her petition twice on the grounds that it was force policy when she joined and she should have filed her grievance then. They also stated that one of the problems was that the pants and boots were expensive and difficult to source in women’s sizes. It was not until 2012 that the RCMP relented, deciding that female Mounties who requested the formal pants and congress boots as part of their walking out order would be accommodated.[659] While some female Mounties enjoyed, even preferred, wearing the formal skirt, others decided that it was time that all orders of uniform and dress align with official RCMP employment equity policies. For these women, differences between male and female walking out orders were another visual inequality that called into question their credibility as police officers.
Female Mounties continued to be depicted in gendered ways well into the twenty-first century. In 2010, during the Vancouver Olympic Games, images of Canada formed a significant part of the event’s closing ceremonies. Central to the program were a number of giant inflatable male Mountie figures. Dancing around these figures were numerous female dancers dressed in provocative, miniskirted Mountie costumes.[660] Many members of the RCMP took exception to the way female Mounties were portrayed during the program for an international audience. Female Mounties were no longer willing to remain silent about the sexualization of their image and voiced their complaints. The RCMP, who led security for the Olympic Games, protested to Vancouver Organizing Committee chairman John Furlong, who issued a public apology for the offence that was caused.[661] The sexualized portrayal of female Mounties during the closing ceremonies illustrates how gendered understandings of women persist across Canadian society.
Three years later, the RCMP Foundation, which owns the trademark to the RCMP’s image, officially authorized the production of a Mountie Barbie doll. Mountie Barbie debuted in September 2013 to mark the 140th anniversary of the police force and to celebrate the upcoming fortieth anniversary of women in the RCMP.[662] The doll’s packaging informed buyers that Mountie Barbie also came with “a pink passport for the perfect way for Barbie to travel across Canada, and the world, in style!”[663] Barbie dolls have long been criticized by consumer and parent groups in North America for idealizing an impossible body type for women and for conveying that message to children. Critics also take issue with the sexualization of the more than 135 different uniforms, most with pink accessories, worn by Barbie during the fifty-five years that she has been manufactured.[664] Mountie Barbie struck a negative chord with many female members of the RCMP who feared resurgence in the gendered attitudes toward them that they had fought so hard to overcome. Indeed, the name Barbie was sometimes used as a form of derision by the men of the RCMP when criticizing female Mounties. The appearance of Mountie Barbie, like the dancing female Mounties during the Olympics, did little to promote the respectability and credibility of women as figures of authority.
Scarlet fever, the sexual attraction women are said to experience when they see a male Mountie dressed in his red serge, appears to be thriving. This was very much in evidence in 2013 when Jenny Stewart, an eighty-eight-year-old hospice resident in Pt. Alberni, BC, met a Mountie for the first time. Jenny, who was raised in Scotland, saw her first Mountie as a ten-year-old child while on a school field trip to a British Empire exhibition. Next to a display of Canadian apples stood a handsome Mountie dressed in his red serge uniform. That image stayed with Stewart, who remembered thinking that one day she’d like to go to Canada and see a real Mountie again.
Part of Stewart’s wish was realized when she immigrated to Canada as a war bride in 1946. The second part, however, remained elusive. For all of her years of living in Canada, she had never met a Mountie—that is, until a staff member at the hospice contacted the local detachment and Cst. Scott MacLeod arrived in his review order uniform for a surprise visit with Jenny. According to the hospice staff, Jenny was “starry-eyed” just to be in the same room with a Mountie.[665] We can only speculate about what Jenny’s reaction might have been if a female Mountie had arrived for that visit instead. Her reaction to MacLeod suggests that she may have been quite disappointed. For many Canadians, young and old alike, it is still that handsome hero in his red serge uniform that remains the iconic symbol of Canada.
The RCMP continued to study female Mounties throughout the 1990s. In 1993, the RCMP’s Personnel Directorate surveyed 525 members to determine why female, Aboriginal, and visible minority members continued to experience “apparent” higher attrition rates. The survey addressed issues of harassment, sexual harassment, morale, and job satisfaction. RCMP psychologist Dr. Glen Nosworthy, in the directorate’s final report released in September 1996, found no evidence of “widespread ill-will toward designated group members in the RCMP.” However, the report did conclude that “significant numbers of Caucasian Male members hold negative attitudes about the designated groups in certain areas.” In particular, visible minorities were seen as “not respecting RCMP traditions” while Aboriginal and female members were “perceived as less committed to their careers.” Further, white male Mounties felt that these groups desired preferential treatment and were prone to “imagining harassment and discrimination where they do not exist.”[666] Another internal survey conducted in 1999 was so alarming that the RCMP’s chief human resources officer, Garry Loeppky, issued “a force-wide alert” after the survey found that “60 per cent of female RCMP members reported being the victim of sexual harassment in the workplace.” It was a number that was higher than the number of complaints that were being filed, a matter of “great concern” to Loeppky.[667]
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, researchers began to pinpoint RCMP culture as a contributing factor to the problems women and minority groups in the police force were experiencing. In 2007, the RCMP commissioned an independent study to examine a number of workplace issues. Dr. Linda Duxbury studied the work environment and culture of the RCMP, concluding that “RCMP culture is not one that supports change.” Her opinion was that the force may have been a victim of the “‘success spiral’ which occurs when an organization holds on too long to a culture in the belief that what has worked in the past will continue” to work in the future.[668]
Federal politicians began to conduct their own studies of RCMP culture. The Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence recommended in June 2013 that “meaningful cultural transformation and increased accountability” was needed in the RCMP.[669] By January 2014, the Honourable Judy Sgro and Senator Grant Mitchell were hosting roundtable events with female Mounties across the country to study a number of issues the women faced. Their final report, titled Experts Summit on Challenges Facing the RCMP, made thirteen recommendations including calls for cultural change within the RCMP.[670]
History continued to repeat itself as bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment remained a feature of RCMP culture. In 2012, yet another internal RCMP study revealed that female Mounties continued to be bullied and harassed by their colleagues and superiors. That study suggested that “gender-based harassment happened frequently,” prompting D/Commr. Craig Callens to create a team of one hundred members to investigate harassment complaints.[671]
Many women in the RCMP were no longer willing to be silent about the harassment they were experiencing, and they began to turn to the court system to seek redress. Nancy Sulz, a former constable stationed in Merritt, BC, pursued financial compensation after being harassed by her NCO, whose actions, according to the trial judge, “were consistent with his experience of the paramilitary command structure of the RCMP.” After ten years battling the RCMP in the courts, Sulz was awarded $950,000 in damages by the court in January 2006.[672] Thirty days later, the federal and provincial governments filed a notice of appeal, prolonging Sulz’s legal battle and requiring her to prove, once again, that she had been harassed.[673]
In 2012, lawyers representing former and serving female Mounties, as well as female civilian employees, filed a class action lawsuit in BC Supreme Court alleging systemic discrimination by the RCMP.[674] The number of women joining the class action suit had reached 363 by the time of the hearing for certification in June 2015. One-third of the complainants were still working for the RCMP. Many of the women, representing nine provinces and all of the territories, characterized harassment and bullying as a widespread problem in the police force.[675] Those who were interviewed by the media stated that they hoped that the RCMP would recognize that harassing behaviour “has affected a lot of female members.” They also commented that their motivation for coming forward and joining the lawsuit was to prevent the harassment of new women being hired. In response, the RCMP stated that it had repaired the problem of harassment by dealing with complaints quickly under its new harassment action plan.[676]
The RCMP is also adjusting its hiring practices. As of 2014, women represented approximately 21 percent of members, a number the RCMP is working to increase to 30 percent by 2025. Citing a desire to be more representative of the communities it polices, the force has set a benchmark of recruiting 50 percent women in the 2014–2015 intake year, or half of the one thousand recruits they will send to Depot for training. The RCMP anticipates that it will achieve this number through advertising campaigns that target women, women-only recruiting presentations, an accelerated application process, and assisting female applicants to help them meet physical testing standards.[677] These initiatives suggest that the RCMP continues to believe that increasing the number of female police officers is the solution to the problem of discrimination against them.
History provides the context for understanding the persistence of the issues the RCMP is currently grappling with. The RCMP’s systemic problems are deeply embedded in the nineteenth century and a reliance on a time when Mounties were cast as romantic and popular heroes who always got their man. The past shows us, however, that this heroic image was the creation of a number of historical figures who could not envision that one day women would be working alongside men in the daily operations of the police force. As a result, the RCMP’s paramilitary system of operation, its rank structure, the geographical scope of its mandate, its centralized and hierarchical form of governance, its close ties to the history of Canada, its masculine and iconic image, and understandings of gender all contributed to a culture that was not receptive to the inclusion of women.
During the past forty years, the women of the RCMP have not hesitated to place their lives in danger for the sake of their communities. Five female Mounties have lost their lives in the line of duty. Special constable Nancy Marie Puttkemery, who joined the RCMP in 1975, was the first woman to join the RCMP’s Air Services division as a pilot. She died when the RCMP aircraft she was piloting crashed during snowy and foggy conditions in 1989. Constable Della Sonya Beyak lost her life while on duty in 1989 as the result of a motor vehicle accident near Assiniboia, Saskatchewan. Constable Christine Elizabeth Diotte died in 2002 when she was struck by a motor vehicle near Banff, Alberta. Constable Robin Cameron died from gunshot wounds she sustained while attending a domestic dispute in 2006. And Constable Chelsey Alice Robinson lost her life following a motor vehicle accident in Stony Plain, Alberta, in 2010.[678] Their examples demonstrate that a willingness to be placed in danger to protect others is gender neutral. Courage is not the sole preserve of men.
In 1998, Cst. Laurie White suffered a gunshot wound while attempting to serve a search warrant in Kitimat, BC. After eight hours of surgery, doctors were forced to amputate White’s right leg below the knee. What appeared to be a career-ending event in the eyes of the RCMP was countered by White’s fierce determination to meet the physical requirements necessary to return to active duty. It was just ten months later that White, fitted with her prosthesis, passed the RCMP’s physical ability requirement evaluation test and returned to full, unrestricted, active duty.[679] She became the first amputee to serve as a member of the RCMP, demonstrating that women were more than equal to performing police duties on their own terms. White refused to remain silent about the shooting. She was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal by the Governor General of Canada on September 2, 2000, for her dedication to improving the lives of young Canadians with disabilities, notably for speaking publicly about her ordeal.[680] White is still a member of the RCMP today.
The RCMP finally began to recognize the contributions of the Unpaid Mountie, or the Second Man, in 2010. The initiative was the result of a suggestion made to the commissioner by a member of the public. The RCMP’s Honours and Recognition Directorate in conjunction with the Veterans’ Association developed a “Second Man Commemorative Brooch” in recognition of the service of Mountie wives to the RCMP. As of 2013, more than 470 women have received the brooch during official ceremonies held across the country.[681] Many Mountie wives are still active in the charity work of the Women’s Auxiliary arm of the RCMP’s Veterans’ Associations across Canada.
As of 2015, all of the first female Mounties to be hired in 1974 have resigned or retired from the RCMP. Two of the women have passed away.
In 2006, Beverley Busson, a member of Troop 17, became the first female commissioner of the RCMP. Busson, who was preparing to retire at the time, accepted the post on an interim basis at the urging of the prime minister. Her tenure as commissioner ended in July 2007 when William Elliott, the force’s first civilian commissioner, was appointed. Busson received a number of honours during the course of her long career with the RCMP, including being invested as a Commander of the Order of Merit and a recipient of the Order of British Columbia. She also holds an honorary doctorate.
Doris Toole retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in 1991 with the rank of colonel. She has kept in contact with members of Troop 17 and has attended anniversary events celebrating women in the RCMP as well as reunions organized by Troop 17. Toole has been recognized by the RCMP for her unique role as advisor to Troop 17 and has received commemorative medallions honouring the first women to join the force in 1974.
The women of Troop 17 were officially honoured by the RCMP in 2014 on the occasion of their fortieth anniversary. The RCMP’s website featured articles about women in the RCMP and interviews with the first female Mounties. A commemorative medallion was struck in recognition of their hiring in 1974. In March 2015, the women received a second medallion in recognition of their graduation from Depot forty years earlier. Troop 17 continues to meet once every five years for a troop reunion, the most recent taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, to celebrate their fortieth anniversary. They remain close friends.