Turnover, vacations leave V Division understaffed

Mounties skip Operation Nanook

By CHRIS WINDEYER

When hundreds of military and government personnel descended on South Baffin for the Operation Nanook sovereignty exercise that wrapped up in Iqaluit Aug. 17, there was one organization notable for its absence: the RCMP.

Nunavut's Mounties couldn't spare even one member for a drug bust exercise in the Hudson Strait that saw a Navy boarding party use a Coast Guard ship to storm a drug smuggler's vessel at sea.

But the Navy may not arrest people in Canadian waters, so under the scenario, the handcuffs had to be applied by an RCMP officer.

So the role of Mountie was played by Master Warrant Officer Dave Porter, a military policeman based in Petawawa, Ontario.

Chief Superintendent Marty Cheliak, the head of RCMP's V Division, was on duty travel outside of Nunavut this week and couldn't be reached for an interview. But in an earlier interview with Nunatsiaq News he said Nunavut's Mounties are in the middle of a staffing crunch.

"We've had a significant number of transfers this year, abnormally high in relation to other years," Cheliak said.

RCMP officers serve four-year postings when they come to Nunavut. Cheliak said a number of Mounties signed single-year extensions to those terms, and in some cases two or three. This year several of those officers – Cheliak didn't say how many – didn't sign extensions.

And summer brings a slew of vacations, which likely further drained the available pool of officers.

"All of a sudden all those extensions caught up to us this year," he said.

Cheliak hopes the arrival of Staff Sgt. Charlie Gauthier this fall from Tuktoyuktuk, NWT as the Iqaluit detachment's commanding officer will help steady the staffing situation.

"I got a comment from the commanding officer in G Division, which is the Northwest Territories, that I just stole their best detachment commander," Cheliak said.

V Division's most recent available year in review document for 2005 pledged to recruit more Inuit for the force and aim to "one day soon have a detachment with all Inuit members and someday have an Inuk… as the commanding officer of the RCMP in Nunavut."

But it isn't clear how many Inuit Mounties have been signed up under the program, and V Division's recruiting officer has been on maternity leave for most of 2007.

A recent study by Statistics Canada showed the number of police officers in Nunavut has hovered around 122, spread across 25 detachments and V Division headquarters, since 2003. In 2002, there were 111 Mounties on duty in the territory.

For the purposes of Operation Nanook, any trained police officer would have adequately filled the role of arresting a drug-smuggling ship captain, but in real life, the RCMP would have to be involved in such an operation. But military sources didn't seem too concerned with the loss of the Mounties, chalking their absence up to just another facet of life in the North.

"A lot of times you can't do anything about that," said Brig. Gen. Chris Whitecross, head of Joint Task Force North. The general also praised the military's working relationship with the RCMP at the federal level.

The absence of the RCMP was just one of a string of delays that shook up the schedule of Operation Nanook. And the weather didn't help either: heavy fog in Kimmirut forced the cancellation of a planned environmental cleanup exercise.

"Oftentimes working in the North means you have to change plans," said Navy Lt. Jordan Holder. "It's something we need to be able to work through."

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