After years of pressure, 78% of front-line Mounties now carbine-trained

After years of calls to better arm RCMP officers with carbines, the Mounties say more than 78 per cent of front-line members are now trained on the weapon, but it's unclear how evenly these officers are spread across the country.

A carbine is a short-barrelled rifle that has a longer accurate range than a sidearm or shotgun.

"It appears that the RCMP is making up for some of the lost time on the initial rollout of the carbine program," said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College and Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who specializes in police and security issues.

Issuing RCMP officers carbines was a key recommendation of an expert report in 2010, following the 2005 tragedy in Mayerthorpe, Alta., when four officers were killed.

A review of the 2014 Moncton shooting, where three Mounties were killed and two injured, renewed the urgency of rolling out more carbines to front-line officers. 

The officers who died, and two others who were wounded, did not have carbines. Instead, they had 9-mm handguns.

As of this month the RCMP has 6,650 carbines distributed to the roughly 8,500 front-line members in detachments across the country. That's a major jump from the 1,500 carbines in service at the time of the Moncton shooting, according to national RCMP spokesperson Robin Percival.

At the time of the Nova Scotia mass shooting in April 2020 where 22 people were killed by a gunman, including a Mountie who was not carbine-trained, Percival said the RCMP had about 8,700 front-line members and more than 5,700 carbines distributed across the country.

In December 2020, about eight months after the Nova Scotia massacre, the RCMP updated their national standards to make sure as many front-line officers as possible are qualified to use a carbine.

As part of these standards, the Mounties set a benchmark that as of March 31, 2022, at least 65 per cent of operational front-line members at each detachment would be carbine-trained.

The RCMP have declined to say what their progress is on this goal.

In an email Thursday, Percival said they cannot break down the response capabilities of RCMP divisions, districts or detachments for security reasons.

"These capabilities cannot be made public as they provide information on what type of response/tactics RCMP officers have available to them — potentially putting both the public and police at risk," Percival said.

As of April 1, 2022, at least 72 per cent of RCMP members in Nova Scotia where the Mounties handle front-line policing were carbine-trained, but it's unclear where in the province these officers are stationed.