The Royal Canadian Mounted Police wants more women within its ranks, so the RCMP is gathering some of their brightest female members at a forum tonight for interested women to meet them.
"I don't care what you've heard in the news lately, it is not the old boys club it once was," said Cpl. Theresa Oelke, one of the Prince George detachment's forensics specialists. She was the only woman in that unit when she was called in four years ago, but now there is only one man.
She was a mother and 30 years old before she applied for the force with the philosophy that "You can't teach your kids that you can be whatever you want to be if you aren't doing it yourself. This is what I wanted to be."
When Cpl. Madonna Saunderson was growing up in Newfoundland and Labrador, she wanted to be a Mountie from the moment she could express herself. They didn't even allow women in the force, then, but that didn't stop her from dreaming and the rules changed by the time she was ready to pursue that dream.
"On my 18th birthday I made my father take me out to the detachment in Donovans, in an Atlantic snowstorm, the drifts blowing sideways across the road, to sign up to be a Mountie," said Saunderson, a member of the regional traffic unit. Since that snowstorm, she has become a supervisor of younger Mounties, a media liaison, and was the first woman ever posted to the Fraser Lake detachment where she served for five years.
"I'm having a blast," she said. "Anyone who wants to join, I encourage them. It's been a great ride. You don't always have the most pleasant issues to deal with, but I've laughed every day of my 26 years in uniform and if I had to sign up all over again, I would do it today."
You also get a real chance to help, said Const. Rachel Cox. She was a civilian employee at the Prince Rupert and Williams Lake detachments and fell more and more in love with the spirit of policing. She applied to be a field Mountie and is posted now to the general investigation unit at regional headquarters, aiding the tougher investigations generated by the smaller communities around the north.
She was also posted to the Missing Women's Task Force in the Lower Mainland and it was there she got that profound sense of purpose she knew existed in the force.
"I solved one that had all the hallmarks for being on the poster, but in actual fact she died of natural causes," said Cox, who started following a trail of aliases and breaking through some false identities to discover one of the women was indeed dead, but of natural causes not foul play. "It was very gratifying for me to be able to give that family the assurance that their loved one did not suffer the fate of the Pickton Farm."
Men are still in the majority in the RCMP, but vastly less so than when they first joined, they said, and all agreed that they had had only the problems that come from any group of people working together. Sexism was never a serious, ongoing problem. On the contrary, it is hard to find a Mountie now who has not worked with female members since the gender lines have blurred a lot since the first troop of female cadets in 1974.
They all added that being a woman had, on many occasions, been a benefit to hostile or unpredictable situations. It wasn't an automatic truth, but many times they each remembered their feminine qualities making a positive difference in diffusing a situation.
"Twenty-five years ago, that was not appreciated but the force now recognizes the value of that skill set," said Oelke.
Tonight's RCMP Women's Career Forum happens at UNBC's Bentley Room starting at 5 p.m. with conversations and presentations ongoing to 8 p.m. Speakers include Oelke, Saunderson, Staff Sgt. Lauren Weare and others.
