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The same government that
banned single-use plastics for environmental reasons has been quietly crushing thousands of decommissioned
RCMP vehicles for the past four years, Global News has learned.
The RCMP has the largest law enforcement fleet in North America, consisting of approximately 12,000 vehicles. Around 1,600 are retired from service each year, along with more than 4,700 light-duty vehicles like snowmobiles and ATVs. Historically, they were auctioned off, earning about $8 million at resale.
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But after a Nova Scotia man went on a killing spree in 2020 using a fake RCMP car, the public safety minister in 2021 put a moratorium on auctioning all used RCMP vehicles pending a new plan for them.
But in four years, and despite annual pleas from successive RCMP commissioners, no plan has been implemented. Access to information requests reveal taxpayers have paid to store the vehicles and turn thousands into scrap.
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“The RCMP used to make $6-8 million a year selling these vehicles,” says Gage Haubrich, Prairie region director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. “Since they’ve stopped selling them, they’re having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to store them instead, and in the last three years it’s just over $1 million that is paid to just have these vehicles sit in a lot before they get crushed.”
A moratorium on selling decommissioned RCMP vehicles has left thousands in storage and thousands more turned into scrap.
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An RCMP vehicle graveyard in Manitoba has row upon row of sedans, SUVs, ATVs, snow machines and boats tagged with government of Canada letters on the windshield that show some have barely been used.
An unmarked Econoline van with only 30,000 kilometres on it sits along with four boats — each with two newer Honda motors — and dozens of nondescript newer model SUVs, ATVs and snowmachines. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation says lots like this exist elsewhere in Canada too but finding out where and how many decommissioned vehicles are there has been difficult to determine.
The RCMP declined an interview but told Global News in a statement that “day-to-day fleet operations are affected as stored vehicles cause a disruption to the flow and timeliness of the vehicle up-fit process due to the lack of space and pressure on existing resources as the vehicles need to be shuttled to off-site storage facilities. Both impact the timely replacement of vehicles used in policing operations.”
Public Safety Canada deferred all questions to the RCMP despite being the department that issued the moratorium.
