Last month the Estevan RCMP held a town hall meeting in Bienfait. It was relatively uneventful, but that鈥檚 a good thing.
The RCMP town hall in Biggar last week had a very different tone than the one in Bienfait.
The geography, land, weather and type of people in rural areas make them unique in their own way, with their own types of common crimes.
In Estevan, drinking and driving is a problem because taxis are expensive, everyone has a vehicle and everything is spread out.
Estevan is the largest city in the area, which means people from out of town, if intending to have a good time at a decent bar, might be driving back home afterwards and getting pulled over by the police.
In Acton, Ont. where I am from, the soil around town has a lot of nutrients in it because much of the town is in a valley with lots of rivers and swamps around it. The result is the dirt around Acton has a layer of brown soil on top of a deeper and thicker layer of dark rich soil.
As such, marijuana fields are found around town regularly, therefore drug busts for marijuana in Acton are just as common as impaired driving arrests in Estevan.
The town hall meeting that occurred in Biggar was reflective of the common criminal activities of the nearby city of North Battleford, and they won鈥檛 be solved with everyone being afraid to talk about them honestly.
Firstly, Indigenous peoples are massively over-represented in crime statistics, and they also are a significant portion of the population in certain parts of the province, like the areas around North Battleford and Biggar.
The government has created reserves for Indigenous peoples. Some are worse than others, and some who spoke in the Biggar town hall meeting say they have failed the people of Canada when Canadians try to understand the convoluted and confusing laws in this country in regards to defence of property and life.
Secondly, Saskatchewan has more in common with the Northwest Territories and other northern jurisdictions than the provinces it鈥檚 adjacent to.
That commonality is this province is just too big and too empty for police to enforce it properly. Response times can be are terrible and calling the police can be pointless if you live far away from a police station. This issue was brought up numerous times at the Biggar RCMP town hall meeting.
Additionally the higher faculties of the RCMP at the federal level have a bias against gun owners, and they are not inclined to instruct their officers on how to explain to rural guns owners like Gerald Stanley the written law for defence of property and life.
It was the RCMP who reclassified the military assault rifle, the CZ-58 Collectors Edition from non-restricted to prohibited, because the collectors鈥� edition had inscribed on the receiver 鈥淢olon Labe,鈥� which in Latin means, 鈥淐ome and get them.鈥� The identical non-inscribed version is still classified in the same legal category as a reproduction civil-war era musket.
The RCMP at higher levels are not lawyers and a bias does truthfully exist. As such they should not be answering questions about how to legally defend yourself or your property with a gun or any other weapon.
Furthermore, self-defence in this country is dealt with via case law. Your average cop doesn鈥檛 know about case law, and even if they did they don鈥檛 have the time to study it. They鈥檙e too busy with other cases.
Lastly, no one wants to attach a face to the crimes that are committed around Biggar and North Battleford.
Politicians seeking power or are afraid of losing it, will never be honest with Canadians about problems surrounding Indigenous peoples in this country.
I conclude that the government as a whole has made the situation irresolvable and the only real way to fix things is hire more officers and build more RCMP outposts across this province.
This is because police are the only ones who are entrusted with the legal onus of deciding what amount of force is necessary during the commencement of a crime.
Because of this and the other closed off pathways to other possible resolutions, it鈥檚 up to the police and the RCMP to ask for more money so they can achieve the capacity to do something positive to curtail rural crime that has resulted in Canadians shooting at each other.
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