It looks as if the federal government isn’t about to give in to demands to adjust its cost-sharing formula for Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s services that are provided under contract in British Columbia. But such penny-pinching may hasten a not-so-musical ride out of this province for the beleaguered Mounties.

For almost 60 years now, the RCMP has, in effect, been B.C.’s provincial police force. B.C. now accounts for more than 30% of the RCMP’s total deployment across the country.

However, B.C.’s current contract with the RCMP is set to expire in 2012 and, even though negotiations to settle a new contract are underway, there’s a groundswell of opinion suggesting that on both financial and performance grounds, the time has come to dump the RCMP and return B.C. to the days when it was served by its own independent provincial police force.

Under the current contract, B.C. municipalities with populations greater than 15,000 cover 90% of the RCMP bill themselves; Ottawa covers the balance. Towns with populations of between 5,000 to 15,000 pay a 70% share. But the Union of B.C. Municipalities has been lobbying for the funding formulas to be reset, suggesting 70/30 for larger towns and 50/50 for smaller towns.

“Every mayor and council that has RCMP are concerned about the costs,” City of North Vancouver mayor Darrell Mussatto told the recent annual UBCM convention at Whistler. In fact, a recent UBCM survey found that almost two-thirds of the province’s municipalities already consider RCMP costs to be unaffordable and limiting to their delivery of other services.

And those policing costs are set to increase even more. The RCMP are due for a 1.5% wage increase next year, but the costs per officer will also increase by a further $4,700 because of increased pension costs.

There’s also a school of thought that supports maintaining the RCMP for services in remote regions but establishing independent police forces in B.C.‘s two largest centres — Greater Victoria and Metropolitan Vancouver.

Currently, both are patchworks of RCMP and city-run police forces. For example, most of the 28 municipalities within Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley Regional District are served by the RCMP. But the City of Vancouver, Delta, New Westminster, West Vancouver, Port Moody and Abbotsford operate their own police forces.

Nor does regional inter-force co-operation always work.

Murderous rampages over the years by the likes of Clifford Olson and Robert Pickton within Greater Vancouver, as well as the Peter Lee multiple murder/suicide in Oak Bay, exposed investigative shortfalls often attributed to “balkanized” regional policing systems in Vancouver and Victoria.

In other instances, the RCMP only have themselves to blame for their public downfall. The infamous Taser death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in 2007 — and the RCMP’s totally inadequate response to it — is an obvious example. No wonder Carlton University professor and public servant expert Linda Duxbury tagged the RCMP last summer as the “poster boys of dysfunction.”

If B.C. is to make such a significant change in its policing, the most difficult part is likely to be persuading mayors and councils that operate their own police forces to give them up willingly.

Whatever the result, the looming expiry of B.C.’s contract with the RCMP should also serve as a wake-up call for the RCMP to clean up its act. IE