A report from Auditor General Karen Hogan, “Recruiting for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,” states that overall, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) did not recruit and post new police officers in their first assignments in a timely and effective way to meet operational needs.

Since 2018, the RCMP has identified recruitment as a top priority. However, it did not accurately identify the total number of police officers it needed to fully staff the force. The RCMP set and reported recruitment targets that fell well short of its actual staffing needs, and it did not recruit as many police officers as planned. The Auditor General’s analysis of RCMP data found that the shortage of police officers has gotten worse in the last 2 years, with at least 3,400 additional police officers needed as of September 2025.

Police officer shortages in front-line Contract and Indigenous Policing were widespread across Canada. As of September 2025, 9 of the 11 divisions had vacancy rates above the RCMP’s critical threshold of 7%, despite the RCMP’s long-standing target of maintaining a much lower vacancy rate. These high vacancy rates pose a clear risk to the RCMP’s ability to maintain operational capacity and deliver policing services in all business lines.

The RCMP did not meet its target processing time for 97% of applications, which made it harder to fill training classes with enough cadets. As a result, some classes were cancelled, and the RCMP trained fewer cadets than expected. This was one of the main reasons that vacancies have continued to increase since 2023. In a survey by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, both successful and unsuccessful applicants often identified the length of the application process as their biggest frustration.

In order to attract more applicants, in 2023 the RCMP changed its approach by allowing new police officers to choose the division for their first assignment, as long as there was a vacancy. In the first year, this change worked as intended: The RCMP received about 6,000 more applications than in the previous year and surpassed its planned application numbers. However, the change also led to an unintended outcome—chronic vacancies in some divisions increased. In July 2025, the RCMP reversed course and returned to assigning new police officers to divisions according to operational needs. Given the high number of vacancies, it will take many years to fully reverse the impacts of the temporary approach.

As a result of chronic shortages of front-line police officers, the RCMP faces a higher risk of police officer absences and burnout, which could make it more challenging for the force to prevent and investigate crime, maintain peace and order, and contribute to national security.

Key Facts and Findings:

* The RCMP did limited workforce planning and did not know how many new police officers it needed to hire to fully staff the force, including shortages in its Specialized Policing Services and its Federal Policing business lines.

* Despite efforts to reduce the average time to process applications for successful applicants, it increased by 35 days (11%) between April 2023 and September 2025, taking on average 330 days to process.

* The RCMP’s Flexible Posting Plan succeeded in attracting more applicants: receiving more than 46,000 applications for the National Recruiting Program during the 30-month audit period and surpassing by several thousand the RCMP’s annual goal of 12,000 applications in the 2023–24 and 2024–25 fiscal years.

* Of the applications that the RCMP processed during the audit period, only 6% resulted in an offer to be trained as a police officer because the remaining applicants dropped out of the process (15%), they stopped communicating with the RCMP (24%), they were deemed unsuitable by the RCMP (37%), or their application was still being processed (18%).

* The RCMP filled only 18% of all cadet training classes to capacity.

* The RCMP’s average cost across the 2023–24 and 2024–25 fiscal years to attract and train a new police officer was roughly $247,000.

RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme said in a statement that the RCMP accepts all findings and recommendations contained in the report. He added: “Under my tenure, recruiting and training has been one of my key priorities and it remains a core pillar of our 2024–2027 Strategic Plan.”

The statement said: “Over the past year, we have launched significant modernization efforts to improve the speed, reliability, and equity of our recruitment processes, and the Auditor General’s report reinforces that this work must continue at pace. We have completed an end-to-end review of the entire recruitment process to prioritize high impact changes that will modernize how we attract and prepare future members. This includes improving processing practices for applicants, filling troops to 32 at Depot on a consistent basis and increasing the number of troops trained annually. Building on this, we have been upgrading screening and application systems to reduce bottlenecks and enhance the applicant experience, with a goal of reducing processing times to six months by 2028–2029.

“We have implemented new workforce planning tools to better forecast divisional needs and ensure our recruitment targets are tied directly to operational realities. At the same time, we continue to assess opportunities to expand training capacity at Depot through more efficient scheduling, curriculum review, and enhanced support for cadets and instructors. This work is supported by a new National Recruitment Strategy that outlines how we will transform applicant processing, recruit the right people, and ensure our internal systems and structures are aligned to sustain meaningful, lasting improvement. Progress will be closely monitored using data-driven performance tracking to ensure accountability at every step.

“To guide the work ahead, we are finalizing a comprehensive Management Action Plan that will outline the concrete steps, timelines, and accountabilities required to respond to each of the Auditor General’s recommendations. The work is substantial, but the direction is clear, and the organization is fully committed to the transformation that is needed.”