This is my third and final question about sheriffs. It’s one I’ve had almost since I learned about the office as a small boy in Canada. When I asked, my father defined a sheriff as “an American police chief”. He believed there were no sheriffs in Canada. Eventually, I found this not to be true. The office of sheriff exists in different parts of the English-speaking world, including Canada. However, the title means different things in different places. For example, in Scotland, a sheriff is actually a kind of magistrate.
In the USA, a sheriff is typically a county (in Louisiana “parish”) official, and in most places is responsible for law enforcement, in other words, is effectively a police officer. The sheriff’s department will often also be in charge of jails, prisoners, court services and enforcement, and so on (and in perhaps two states will only do such things, not police work), but often is a law enforcement agency, especially in rural areas, hence the stereotype of the Western sheriff with his one or two deputies.
In Canada on the other hand, sheriff’s services are no longer county, but provincial agencies. Each province’s sheriff’s service may have a different role, the but such as guarding courthouses, transporting prisoners, evictions/enforcement, or even jury administration. Normally today, they don’t do law enforcement in the sense of police work.
But were things always that that way? Let’s say in colonial days, or in pioneer days shortly after confederation, did sheriffs in any part of modern Canada ever do law enforcement like in the USA? Were there ever sheriffs in pioneer Canada that were anything like the stereotypical American Western sheriff, and if so, when did they cease to do law enforcement?
Here are two potential candidates for Canadian sheriffs doing “police” work: In Toronto, there was William Botsford Jarvis, a prominent citizen in colonial days who at one point was Sheriff of the “Home District”, a former district of Upper Canada (the colony that became the current province of Ontario; it included York, later Toronto). In 1837, he helped stop the famous Upper Canada Rebellion. I have also found a reference to a Sheriff MacDonnell in the Wentworth area (near Hamilton, ON) searching a house, together with a posse, while the rebel leader, William Lyon Mackenzie, was fleeing from the authorities after the rebellion was suppressed.
Second example: In 1903, Stephen Redgrave, Sheriff of Kootenay County, British Columbia, died “… of a massive heart attack which occurred as he attempted to arrest a man for disorderly conduct.” (My emphasis - sounds like an instance of law enforcement-type work, rather than merely court services or jail administration).
A final point: today, in Alberta, the sheriffs’ division there (a new agency founded in 2006) has some roles which are auxiliary to police work, for example they have a highway patrol that shares highway traffic duties with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I have read rumors that the agency was founded as back-door way to re-establish a provincial police (thereby taking away provincial policing duties from the federal RCMP). What is the closest that the Alberta agency gets to doing law enforcement-type work? Would a modern Alberta sheriff ever arrest someone for a Criminal Code offense? How broad are the powers of, for example, their highway patrol?