OTTAWA — Royal Canadian Mounted Police staff shortages worsened after officials bet wrong on their recruitment needs and let rookie officers choose the locations of their first assignments, says the auditor general.
In a new report tabled in Parliament on Monday, Auditor General Karen Hogan said the force set targets that fell far short of its own needs, then failed to recruit as many officers as planned despite a flood of applicants.
The audit found the federal police force was short about 3,400 officers in fall 2025.
Hogan also said a flexible posting policy introduced to boost recruitment produced uneven staffing levels across the country and worsened shortages in the North, the Prairies and some Atlantic provinces.
“Without fundamental changes, the RCMP will not be able to hire enough new police officers to meet operational demand,” Hogan’s report said, adding that the chronic shortages mean front-line officers “face a higher risk of police officer absences and burnout.”
In 2023, the RCMP stopped including key details in its workforce planning, such as up-to-date head counts, the number of vacancies and the overall need for officers outside of community policing. It never told the auditor general’s office why, Hogan’s report says.
Because of that change, the report says, the RCMP failed to establish how many new police officers it actually needed.
Instead of using human resources data to set its recruitment targets, the RCMP set its target based on the amount of funding it had to graduate 1,280 new police officers per year, the audit said.
That target, the report said, was “less than half of the number of new front-line police officers needed,” and recruitment fell short even of that.
In 2025 — when the RCMP actually needed 2,700 new officers — it still failed to hit the 1,280 figure and only hired 892.
The RCMP introduced a new flexible posting policy in 2023 which let new officers choose the provinces or territories where they would carry out their first assignments. The idea was to attract more applicants — and it worked.
The RCMP received thousands more resumes than the brass anticipated — 46,000 over the 30-month audit period that ran from April 2023 to September 2025. The RCMP’s recruitment target at the time was 12,000 a year.
But bureaucratic delays prompted many applicants to drop out, Hogan’s report says. Just over three-quarters of applicants who were processed dropped out or were rejected by the force.
The audit said the force failed to meet its own target for processing times and that “many files were delayed because they were waiting to be assigned to a recruiting analyst” or another type of reviewer.
The force was not taking in enough cadets, Hogan’s report says. It couldn’t fill most of its training classes and even had to cancel some because it didn’t have enough bodies to fill seats.
The flexible posting policy, meanwhile, produced problems officials hadn’t fully thought through, the auditor’s report said.
After just four months of the policy, the RCMP started to realize it was producing uneven staffing levels across the country — although it made no adjustments to the policy at that point.
“The net result was an imbalance of police officers between divisions, with some divisions being chronically understaffed while others were staffed with more police officers than they should have proportionately received based on needs,” the auditor’s report said.
Hogan found nine provinces and territories saw vacancy rates higher than seven per cent in contract and Indigenous policing. Out of 11 divisions, all but two suffer from a “critical shortage” of front‑line officers, she said.
For instance, Hogan said, British Columbia wound up with an extra 110 officers, while Alberta was short 63 and Saskatchewan was short 39.
The highest vacancy rates were in Northwest Territories, at 22.9 per cent, Nunavut at 21.5 per cent and Manitoba at 17.5 per cent. Prince Edward Island had a surplus of officers.
The RCMP started to phase out its flexible posting policy last July, though the force has not said when it will fully end flexible posting across all its divisions.
Hogan said early results suggest ending the policy has started to lower vacancy rates, but the RCMP still needs to speed up the process of hiring of new police officers.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 23, 2026.
Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press
