SOUNDING THE KNELL OF THE MOUNTIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 57, 4 September 1937, Page 27

SOUNDING THE KNELL OF THE MOUNTIES

Alberta is tp do away with its. redcoated mounties, say? John MacCormac in an article in the ''New York Times." In the very province wherein they first wpn enduring fame as incprruptribie guardians of law and order in a wide and wicked land, they 1 are to be replaced by an, ordinary, everyday, blue-coated, unmounted provincial police force, ' ■-

That is, if the Aberhart Government gives effect to a Bill passed, by its Social Credit followers, over the heads of the Cabinet, giving a year's notice tp the Dominion tp. • terminate the contract whereby Alberta is policed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and the, Aberhart Government is doing what it is told nowadays.

What has happened to the domestic repute pf one- of the most npted police forces of the world, a body of picked men with a glorious tradition?

They were one of the show pieces of England's recent Coronation ceremony. Abroad they are^till Canada's famous mpunties^-flne-ipoking young men on horseback with scarlet cpats and broad hats, '

But in Canada—to some Canadians -—they have become something else. Canada is not a militaristic country and to some, Canadians the Royal Canadian Mounted Police looks top like a military force. It is headed by a military man, General Sir James Macßrien. It wears a military-looking

uniform and. its men receive at least a semi-military training.

To other; Canadians—organised Labour and its political champions—r the R.C.M-P. is a political police—an instrument of repression in the class war. Only a few months ago in Parliament the name of Sergeant John Leopold,, master of languages and disguises who gathered, evidence against Canadian Communism as '-'Comrade Esselwein" of the Canadian Workers' Party, and was prominently, connected with the Regina riots* was the object Of biting Opposition criticism.

J. S, Woodsworth, leader, of Canada's third (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation) Party, complained that. R.C.M.P. agents had trailed him when he was organising it.

But when"'the Mounties first arrived in Alberta sixty-four years ago, not Communists or Labour agitators, but horse thieves, smugglers, and murderers were the natural enemies of the new force.

Only a year before they came a gang of whisky traders had sallied out from their timber.-, fprtress, "Fort Whoopup," after a drunken carousal, attacked forty lodges of defenceless Indians, murdered them, and mutilated the bodies of men, women,, and children.

The bounties chased the whisky traders over the American line within a few months of their arrival, and they did not return.