The Town of Rocky Mountain House agreed at this week’s council meeting on Nov. 9 to join the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) in requesting the federal government absorb the retroactive costs being imposed on municipalities from its new collective agreement with the RCMP.

This August, the federal government made their first collective bargaining agreement with the National Police Federation, representing 20,000 RCMP officers.

The agreement sets a six-year contract with a beginning date of April 1, 2017 to include an economic increase of 1.75 per cent each year and a market adjustment of 11.53 per cent for the six year term, to compensate for wage differences between RCMP workers, reservists and other police services in Canada. This brings the total increase per year to around 3.67 per cent, retroactive from 2017.

Currently 153 municipalities, or 75 per cent of the country’s policing services, particularly in rural sectors, the north, and small towns, are contracted with the RCMP. These municipalities would, therefore, have to assume the costs of the pay increases.

However, FCM outlines the issues with the collective agreement are that municipalities were not consulted with before or during the process, and most cities do not have the budget for the increase in costs and would, as a result, have to compensate in other areas, such as cuts to essential services or increasing taxes to local residents.

The FCM also argues in their letter to the federal government that not only should municipalities be focusing on recovering financially from the pandemic, but the cost that some cities were told to prepare for was much lower than what the final agreement turned out to be. The estimation was just 2.5 per cent per year, for a total of 15 per cent over six years. However, with the later added market adjustment, the total for six years is 23.7 per cent, around eight per cent more than was expected.

“It’s astonishing to me that the federal government could negotiate a contract like this without discussing to the municipalities that have the direct result of paying what they’ve negotiated,” said Rocky Mountain House town councillor Len Phillips.

The FCM is asking the federal government to take financial responsibility for the retroactive costs and to committing to proper consultation with municipalities in the future before implementing procedures that impact economic sustainability to communities and policing.