page_title: North-West Mounted Police
section_title: Bolshevik fears
hierarchical_section_title: North-West Mounted Police / History / Final years (1914–1920) / Bolshevik fears
caption_attribution_description: A17190
context_page_description: The North-West Mounted Police was a Canadian police force, established in 1873 by the Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, to maintain order in the North-West Territories. The mounted police combined military, police and judicial functions along similar lines to the Royal Irish Constabulary, and deployed the following year to the Alberta border in response to the Cypress Hills Massacre and subsequent fears of a United States military intervention. Their ill-planned and arduous journey of nearly 900 miles became known as the March West and was portrayed by the force as an epic journey of endurance. Over the next few years, the police extended Canadian law across the region, establishing good working relationships with the First Nations. The force formed part of the military response to the North-West Rebellion in 1885, but faced criticism for their performance during the conflict.
  The mounted police assisted in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, including relocating indigenous communities living along the route.
context_section_description: Conscription was introduced in Canada during the final years of the war, which was accompanied by labour shortages, pressures for social change, and the rapid unionisation of the remaining workforce. While concerns about the Central Powers declined, fears grew in government at the end of 1918 that the new Bolshevik government in Russia might be covertly orchestrating a campaign of strikes across Canada. In response the Prime Minister, Robert Borden, created a Public Safety Branch led by the politician Charles Cahan. Cahan envisaged transforming this organization into a much larger secret service, similar to the Bureau of Investigation in the United States, but he soon fell out with Borden and ultimately resigned.
  Meanwhile, Commissioner Perry had put forward three options for the future of the mounted police: the force could be absorbed into the Canadian military; the remit of the force could be reduced to simply policing the far north; or the force could be assigned a much wider role in public and secret policing across the whole of Canada. Perry promoted the third option and Arthur Meighen, the acting Minister for Justice, therefore proposed merging the mounted police and the Dominion Police, placing them under Perry's command. This idea was turned down by Borden, who believed, incorrectly, that the merger would be unacceptable to Perry, whom he thought still wanted a military future for the force.
  Instead, in December 1918 Borden reorganized the federal Canadian security system by splitting the policing of the country geographically, with the mounted police running the western half and reporting to the President of the Privy Council, and the Dominion Police running the eastern side, under the oversight of the Minister of Justice. The establishment of the mounted force was to be permanently kept at 1,200 men, creating a huge demand for manpower: those members of the force still serving in Europe and Siberia were ordered to return. The police began to recruit new networks of secret agents, whom Perry tasked to investigate "foreign settlements" to identify "the least indication of Bolshevik tendencies and doctrines", and the force embraced new laws allowing for the deportation, without trial, of immigrants suspected of holding extremist views. The police's operations were well run, although no significant evidence of any Bolshevik plot was actually discovered.
caption: Christmas dinner at Fort Macleod, 1919
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