Remembrance Day Takes on Personal Meaning for RCMP Officer After Overseas Deployment

Staff Sgt. Jane Boissonneault says she wanted to be in the RCMP since she was 10 years old. Over the course of her career, she has completed two international peacekeeping missions, one in East Timor (Timor Leste) and one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo courtesy of RCMP/GRC

Remembrance Day has always been special for RCMP Staff Sgt. Jane Boissonneault, but it has taken on a more personal meaning since being deployed overseas on peacekeeping missions.

“My father had served in the Second World War, so I always did have that feeling for Remembrance Day,” Boissonneault told The Epoch Times in an interview, adding she would watch ceremonies with him in the nursing home when he was older.

“Now I wear the Canadian peacekeeping medal on my uniform, and I have a UN medal from East Timor and one from the Congo, and it’s a very different feeling.”

She said she felt more connection to military members who have been deployed following her own experience.

“I guess I didn’t feel that connection prior to my own deployments,” Boissonneault said.

Boissonneault is one of more than 4,000 Canadian police officers who have been deployed overseas since 1989, according to the RMCP.

Training New Police Force

Boissonneault’s first overseas peacekeeping mission was to Timor-Leste (East Timor) in 2001 where she worked for nine months helping to train the police force in the country.

“We were doing the day-to-day police work, and we were field training the Timor-Leste police as they came out of their training academy,” she said.

Boissonneault worked in that role for a few months and then transferred to the vulnerable persons unit, which she said was challenge due to differences in the local legal system at the time, which diverged from her own experience of Canada’s Criminal Code.

“Some of the things that would be criminal here, weren’t there,” she said. “There were sometimes you'd want to do things that you just couldn’t because it wasn’t legal there.”

Boissonneault said one case she worked on involved spousal abuse.

“It couldn’t be considered a spousal assault unless there were serious injuries, but nobody could define what a serious injury was,” she said. “I had a woman with a broken arm, but that wasn’t considered a serious injury. So I found it frustrating.”

She said she was inspired by the young officers in training, who pushed for changes to better support the vulnerable populations they dealt with.

“That was probably the best part, was just working with the local police and watching them and their pride in building their own police agency,” she said.

A Second Mission

Boissonneault returned to Canada but found another opportunity in 2010 to work overseas, this time in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The year-long mission involved more monitoring and mentoring, she said.

“We didn’t get to have the same amount of side-by-side work with the local police,” she said. “We would visit various different commissariats or detachments on a given day. You weren’t spending the whole day with the same group of police officers. You'd be visiting different ones in different parts of the city.”

She said her overseas experiences has given her insight into different cultures and shared universal values, which has enhanced the work she does in Canada.

“The people in those countries—either newly liberated or just emerging from conflict—wanted the same thing everybody wants,“ she said. ”They want to be able to raise their families. Be safe. Have their kids go to school, all those normal things everybody wants to do.”

Boissonneault said there were about 30 partner agencies that participated in overseas deployments, including other policing agencies and Correctional Services Canada.

“I wish people understood what we do, what we can contribute, what we bring back with us when we do return home,” she said.