The RCMP used to uphold the law. Now it’s enforcing an ideology

The Mounties are no longer neutral arbiters of law. They’ve become defenders of state-approved ideology

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Canada’s national police force is undergoing a dangerous transformation. It is shifting from an institution that upholds the law to one that enforces progressive ideology. That change was evident in a recent CBC interview with RCMP Staff Sergeant Camille Habel, a trained communications officer. Speaking in her official role, Habel warned that someone shifting from support for “equal gender rights” to “traditional values” may be showing signs of radicalization.

This wasn’t a casual remark or personal opinion. Communications officers don’t freelance. They speak for the institution. That makes her words more than commentary—they’re policy signals.

Habel didn’t define “gender rights” or “traditional values,” but the meaning was clear. She was signalling an adherence to a modern doctrine: that gender is fluid, entirely self-declared and must be affirmed through social or medical intervention, regardless of age or biology.

By adopting this view as official position, the RCMP has stepped beyond impartiality. It is no longer enforcing the law. It is defending a belief system. And dissent from that system is increasingly treated as deviance.

This logic mirrors the structure of religious apostasy. In radical belief systems, apostates—those who abandon the faith—are often considered more dangerous than outsiders. Non-believers might be persuaded, but a defector threatens internal cohesion and must be punished.

Canada’s institutional progressivism operates in much the same way. If you never accepted its dogma, you may be dismissed as uninformed. But if you once affirmed it and now question it, you are seen as unstable and potentially dangerous.

Progressive ideology insists that history moves only forward, toward greater inclusion, affirmation and fluidity. Any reversal is cast not as reconsideration but regression. That’s why the RCMP would never suggest that someone who once affirmed biological sex but now embraces the idea of 72 genders may be radicalizing. Even when such a shift contradicts biology and common sense, it is celebrated as progress.

What matters is not the reasoning behind the change, but the ideological direction. Public safety is no longer about upholding neutral laws. It’s about protecting an approved narrative.

In place of open debate, we get slogans. “Trans women are women.” “Children can consent to medical transition.” “Gender is a spectrum.” These are not policy proposals. They are mantras. To question them is to risk scrutiny.

And in Canada today, scrutiny can bring consequences. Parents who challenge their child’s transition may lose custody. Medical professionals who question puberty blockers or irreversible surgeries face disciplinary action. Journalists, academics and commentators who criticize gender orthodoxy are deplatformed, defunded or publicly discredited.

These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a growing institutional reflex to treat dissent not as disagreement but as danger.

After a backlash to Habel’s comments, the RCMP offered a clarification. She didn’t mean traditional values are illegal, they said, only that acting on extreme beliefs could be problematic. But that misses the point.

The concern isn’t what’s criminal. It’s what’s being reframed as suspicious. Once a belief is coded as “pre-radical,” it becomes easier to monitor, isolate and punish. That discretion now lies with institutions that have openly adopted ideological positions.

Meanwhile, radical actions carried out in the name of progressivism—placing children on puberty blockers, approving surgeries for minors, silencing dissenting professionals—are not only tolerated, they are subsidized and protected.

These interventions are invasive, irreversible and often life-altering, yet institutions like the RCMP do not label any of this dangerous. That label is reserved for those who step away from orthodoxy.

A citizen who quietly shifts from affirmation to doubt is flagged, not for what they’ve done but for what they’ve stopped believing.

That is the real offence: defection from the state’s sanctioned worldview.

This shift reveals something more troubling than a single interview. The RCMP, once expected to apply the law impartially, now behaves as an agent of ideological conformity. It is no longer neutral. It is no longer merely a law enforcement body. It is enforcing belief.

We must take Habel’s statement seriously—not because it was extreme, but because it was institutional. It shows how dissent is now handled, not through discussion but through suspicion. Where disagreement was once normal in a democratic society, it is now recast as instability.

Freedom of belief doesn’t vanish in a single moment. It is reframed as extremism, then gradually excluded from legitimacy.

We’ve seen this before—in theocratic regimes, authoritarian states and ideological cults.

Now we are watching it happen in Canada.

And the RCMP is enforcing it.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).