Evolution Of The Force
The North-West Mounted Police's jurisdiction was extended northward to the Yukon Territory in 1895, and then again in 1903 to the Arctic coast. During World War I, the NWMP was responsible for border patrols, surveillance of enemy espionage, and enforcement of national security regulations. Soon after, the Provincial Policing Contracts were terminated, thus making the NWMP responsible for federal policing in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Territories. In 1918, however, enforcement was once again extended to all four Western Provinces (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba). A squadron was later deployed to Vladivostok, Russia in late 1918 as part of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force. Six months later, in June 1919, the NWMP was called in to repress a general strike in Manitoba's capital, Winnipeg, where officers fired into a crowd of strikers, killing two and causing injury to thirty others. Another strike of that scale was never seen again, but clashes between the NWMP and strikers continued; Mounties killed three strikers in 1931, when rebeling coal miners from Bienfait, Saskatchewan, demonstrated in nearby Estevan. These incidents did not help the image of the NWMP, which, since the end of World War I, was being seen at as an outdated organization, more suited to the 19th century “new frontier” than with an industrialising 20th century Canada. From 1900 to 1922, the force was again faced with dissolution, but it was saved in 1920 when it merged with the Dominion Police and was renamed the "Royal Canadian Mounted Police".