‘Taxpayers can’t keep paying for this’: Thousands of RCMP vehicles destined for crusher

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

Someone with knowledge of the situation in Winnipeg, whom we aren’t identifying as their job would be in jeopardy, told Global News that these vehicles are spray-painted with large inventory numbers and sit in storage before being taken to another Winnipeg facility where they’re crushed — all of this during a global automobile shortage.

“It’s hard to believe until I saw the pictures of all the cars sitting there,” Haubrich says. “They’ve had years to figure out how to deal with this backlog of vehicles, especially ones that could in no way be used to look like a cop car and could be easily sold but the government’s been dragging its toes on that despite the RCMP calling for these vehicles to be sold again.

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“Taxpayers can’t keep paying for this and we can’t just keep crushing cars when they could be sold.”

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.

Weeks after Global News made inquiries about the vehicles, RCMP headquarters responded that Public Safety Minister David McGuinty has “recently” signalled he will partially lift the ban and “later this winter” the RCMP can resume selling off-road vehicles and others “that are broadly commercially available to the public.” However, “sedans, SUVs and pickup trucks” built for police purposes will continue to be crushed.