City mayor a man of many hats
By TIM KALINOWSKI
When Normand Boucher joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a 19-year-old from Quebec's rural townships he had no conception of how far that first step would take him. Forty-two years later Norm Boucher, now retired from his police duties, sits very comfortably in the Medicine Hat Mayor’s office musing back over a long policing career: a career which took him from Sutton, Quebec, where his father worked in a milk factory, to the highest echelons of the RCMP.
As a Francophone living in Quebec in the early 1970s Boucher explains that joining the national police service, a largely anglophone institution at the time which most Quebecers were barely aware of, was not a natural career choice. His own ambitions in policing stretched only as far as Quebec's own provincial police before encountering the RCMP through a federal food inspector at his father’s factory who brought him an RCMP recruiting pamphlet. He admits it took some convincing before he finally decided to sign the application papers. And with the desperate need for more Francophone recruits in the RCMP at the time, (in 1971 at the height of the FLQ crisis), it wasn’t long before Boucher found himself on his way to Depot in Regina, Sask. for training.
Boucher’s time in Depot was very challenging. Not only was the village boy exposed to “the big city” for the first time, he had to undertake the rigorous RCMP training during the day while taking extra English lessons at night. One of the benefits of not understanding all the English coming at him, says Boucher wryly, was that he was often spared from understanding the specifics of what his drill instructors yelled at him. “In those days the instructors would really yell at us — more than they do today. The good thing though is if you don't understand, you don’t feel as bad. So if they yell at you you’re a dummy, it doesn’t sink in that much,” says Boucher with a chuckle.
Upon graduation, Boucher was immediately posted to 24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa for a year to help protect the residence of then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Boucher confesses the weight of this assignment pressed on him.
“When I arrived there on September 25 in 1971, Margaret (Trudeau) was expecting with Justin. Justin was born Christmas Day in 1971... Again I came from a small town, and all of a sudden I’m protecting the top person in the country. What an extreme. Wow! For
me, what a challenge! You didn't want to screw that up.”
During his time at 24 Sussex Boucher got to know Trudeau a little, and see the kind of man he was out of the public spotlight.
“He had a black Lab called Farley. So I remember the first time he came out he said what’s your name? And I said my name is Norm Boucher. And he said where are you from? I said I’m from Sutton. And he said that’s my favourite place to go skiing. He’d remember me after that. He’d come out at night after his work and he’d take his dog out. One day he came out and pulled up the puppy’s paw and he said you know these dogs have webbed feet? They’re good swimmers. So he shows me the webbing between the dog’s feet. This wasn’t the person you’d see on TV.”
After his year at 24 Sussex, Boucher was assigned to northern Ontario with another young constable where they mostly dealt with narcotics. When a local gangster put a contract on their heads for their efforts, both men were moved, and Boucher’s potential was recognized by his senior officers.
Boucher was then placed in the RCMP’s High Potential Development Program where he had to be willing to move frequently and be ready to take on new challenges. Such challenges included stints with the RCMP's Security Service in Quebec working as a “spy-catcher,” in Hamilton, Ont. as a Commercial Crimes investigator, in Burnaby, B.C. as the RCMP Police Dog Coordinator for all of Canada, (a job which Boucher describes as “the best job I ever had”), and as a shooting instructor at Depot in Regina.
Boucher won the annual RCMP marksmanship competition, the Connaught Cup, in 1988. He was later assigned as Deputy Director of Canadian Police College in Ottawa.
In his domestic policing career, Boucher, now accompanied by his wife Sanja and children Nicholas and Daniel, steadily moved up the ranks of the RCMP. In 1995, Boucher would take on a whole new challenge in the international sphere when he volunteered to serve as a UN Sector Chief in Croatia while the country was in the midst of its civil war. This would prove to be one of the most frightening and horrifying experiences of his policing career when the civilian neighbourhood he was staying in came under artillery attack.
“They shelled through my house and I was still in my house,” remembers Boucher. “That was a close call and I had to testify at the War Crimes Tribunal on that one. It wasn’t pretty... a lot of dead bodies everywhere. It was tough. I’m a police officer, not a military person.”
OUR COMMUNITIES ■ OUR REGION ■ OUR PEOPLE | 43
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116