The Pre-Occupied podcast is a production of CICK News. Hosted and produced by Pam Haasen for CICK Smithers Community Radio in Smithers, BC.

The aim of this series is to shine a light on the history of how the RCMP came to exist in Western Canada. Pre-Occupied focuses on the very early years of the RCMP and the controversies created with the long arm of the law overextending itself into First Nations affairs, focusing especially on the peoples of Northern BC. 

Pre-Occupied focuses on Northern BC because CICK, the local radio station is on Wet’suwet’en territory. In British Columbia, treaties, protests and colonial control over land, home, education and human rights have been a pervasive undertaking of the RCMP.

We as British Columbians (and Canadians) have also been sold an idea of the shiny Mountie who "always gets his man" but to what cost? Who is the victim of the Mounties in Canada? How has that public image influenced the way most Canadians think of their mounted police (and what they have gotten away with due to a squeaky clean image).

The podcast highlights the creation of the North West Mounted Police (all the way back to the Cypress Hill Massacre), the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike in which the RCMP officers in total was raised from under 100 up to 1800 or even 2000 men in order to uphold Winnipeg's leading businessmen and politicians' refusal for higher wages and better working conditions.

Pre-Occupied also covers the wide breadth of responsibilities under the RCMP's jurisdiction as well as the Inuit (Eskimo) Tag Program, Residential School System and the Mounties precious image in fiction and non-fictional realms.

Pre-Occupied Part One is available on smithersradio.com/cick-news.