Manitoba RCMP have done an about-face on a controversial change from last year. Snow Lake will no longer share RCMP officers with nearby towns - but Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage will still share police.
The news was confirmed by Manitoba RCMP in a statement to The Reminder last week, saying that police dispatch would no longer force officers to cover from Flin Flon to Snow Lake, a two-hour drive away from Flin Flon. Officers will still be split between Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage, about a half-hour drive away from each other - the detachments have previously been combined but were split apart in the early 2010s.
“I can confirm that Snow Lake RCMP detachment will be moving from an amalgamation model back to an independent detachment as of October 21,” said a Manitoba RCMP spokesperson.
“Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage will continue to work together to provide the best service to citizens of those communities.”
The initial combining of the three detachments was announced last September, with the changes going into effect Oct. 5, 2023. Manitoba RCMP representatives said the change was temporary and done “due to staffing shortages and to better disperse workload amongst officers.”
That measure was unpopular with residents and leadership in all three communities, who wrote letters and signed petitions to try and stop the change. The stiffest opposition came from Snow Lake, where a petition to block the change received hundreds of signatures - Snow Lakers felt sharing officers with a community two hours away could be a possible safety risk in case of emergency or encourage more crime.
The Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, Hudbay, Frontier School Division and several local groups in Flin Flon and Snow Lake each filed letters against the change.
Last fall, Flin Flon Mayor George Fontaine spoke against the change, saying all three communities needed their own in-town RCMP staff members and citing the split of Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage detachments, due largely to transport time.
“I hope that it is temporary. I’m not in favour of running long-term on a system like this. If it was left up to me, it is not the system that I would choose,” he said.
“We have been through this before. We had petitioned to have Cranberry removed from our district, simply because it was too much time with officers in transit between one place and another. We never had anybody where they needed to be, when they needed to be there. The travel just from Cranberry Portage, we thought that was outrageous. Now, if you add Snow Lake to it, it’s going to be very difficult catching people in between having staff able to do all that and not.”
