ALBERTA’S MOUNTIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23332, 26 October 1937, Page 7

ALBERTA’S MOUNTIES

ABERHART LEGISLATION Alberta is to do away with its redcoated mounties, says John MacCormac in an article in the New York Times. In the very province where they won enduring fame as incorruptible guardians of law and order in a wide and wicked land, they are to be replaced by a 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 to the Dominion to 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 of one of the most noted police forces in the world, a body of picked men with a glorious tradition? Abroad they are still Canada’s lamous mounties —fine-looking young men on horseback with scarlet coats 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 too like a military force. It is headed by a military man, General Sir James MacBrien. It wears a military-looking uniform and its men receive at least a semi-military training. To other Canadians 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, who gathered evidence against Canadian Communism and was prominently connected with the Regina riots, was the object of biting Opposition criticism. J. S Woodsworlh, 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. When the Mounties first arrived in Alberta 64 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 fortress “ Fort Whoopup.” after a drunken carousal, attacked 40 lodges of defenceless Indians, murdered 'hem. and mutilated the bodies of men women and children. The Mounties chased the whisky traders over the American line within a few months of their arrival, and they did not return.