My wife and myself and my kids are really excited to be here.
— Staff Sgt. Greg Nichol
Yorkton RCMP Boss
After 27 years with the RCMP, the last 15 in Kamsack, the only place Staff Sergeant Greg Nichol would have considered transferring was Yorkton.
Yorkton’s new city detachment commander took over the job January 5 following Staff Sgt. Joe Milburn’s retirement in December.
Bio
Greg Nichol grew up on a family farm about half an hour northwest of Winnipeg near Grosse Isle. After high school, the farm boy dutifully attended the University of Manitoba graduating in 1986 with an agriculture degree. He worked on the farm briefly, but the writing was kind of on the wall for family farming.
“My parents kind of encouraged me to look elsewhere for making a living and it was probably a good call on their part,” he explained.
But going from agriculture to law enforcement was almost accidental.
“It was the result of me driving down Portage Avenue in Winnipeg one day and heeding my parents’ advice,” he recalled. “I drove by [RCMP] headquarters in Winnipeg and I thought I may as well stop and put my name in and see what happens. Lo and behold, three or four months later I got a call that I was accepted.”
The young Nichol loved depot.
“It was excellent,” he said. “I think we had 30 members in our troop and it was really good, I made some lifelong friends that I still keep in touch with.
“In fact, we had a troop reunion in New Brunswick a couple of summers ago where I got to touch base with them and it was like we stepped right back in time; it was pretty amazing actually,
“I’m a team guy and it’s just everything we did there was as a team and as a group; we worked out hard and we had some real good times; it was a team atmosphere and that’s what I like.”
After graduation, Nichol was assigned to Foam Lake. He was thrilled.
“Back in the day there, you weren’t allowed to go back to your home province, so my first choice was Saskatchewan and then Alberta and B.C. I thought I’d like to stay in the west,” he said.
“I was very, very fortunate, I still remember the day when they gave us the provinces where we were being assigned to and I was so happy that I got Saskatchewan.
“It’s close enough that if we need to get home, I can get home, but far enough that we have our own kind of life out here, my family and myself.”
Nichol and then-fiancé Lynn stayed in Foam Lake for three years before he was transferred to Punnichy. It was during that time Lynn went back to Manitoba to finish her nursing degree.
While in Punnichy, they had their first child, a son they named Landon.
From there, Nichol was assigned to the Regina Integrated Drug Unit and the couple had their second child, Regan, a daughter.
In 1999 they made their penultimate move, to Kamsack. Nichol earned two promotions there to sergeant and then staff sergeant.
Reflections
Looking back on nearly three decades as a Mountie, Nichol feels very fortunate that neither he, nor any of the people he has worked with have been seriously injured or killed.
“You’re always going to get into a few jams, and I’ve been in a few jams myself,” he recalled. Looking back in hindsight you think ‘thank Christ, that turned out the way it did,’ but maybe when you’re younger, your adrenaline gets going and that, but, yeah, I’ve been in some situations when I look back.”
He does not hesitate for even a fraction of a second though about the most satisfying aspect of being a police officer.
“The people we’ve met over the years,” he said. “I would say there’s probably not a small town in southern Saskatchewan, from Saskatoon south, that I wouldn’t know somebody through hockey or through my job. The people we’ve met and the friends we’ve made, it’s been a life experience, it really has.”
Nichol has watched the job change a lot over the years.
Back when I started out, there was very little time put on reports and report writing, it was all physical stuff,” he explained. “Now it’s very technological. I remember being in Punnichy probably in 1995-96 and one of the members was kind of a computer guy and he was typing some reports and this and that and we used to laugh at him and say, ‘you’re wasting your time.’ Now, he’s the one laughing at us. We’ve come a long way as far as technology is concerned.”
Community involvement
So far, Nichol is happy with his new position.
“It’s been a pretty smooth transition,“ he said. “They had a great boss here before, things were running smoothly and I haven’t really had to do much to get the guys motivated to work; they’re self-starters here, so it’s been very smooth.”
He does want to put a bit of his own stamp on things, however.
“I’d like to see visibility,” he explained. “By visibility I mean I’d like to see guys out on patrol, I’d like to see members involved in the community. I’d like to see them popping in at sporting events, for coffee and stuff like that. I kind of want them to be what I always thought a policeman should be. It’s the person in the community that people know, they know him as a policeman, but they know him as the coach of the baseball team or the coach of the hockey team or involved in the boy scouts or involved with the air cadets and such. “That’s my goal.”
It’s a goal that he has always exemplified. Since that very first assignment in Foam Lake, he has been coaching minor hockey. Landon, who is now apprenticing as an industrial electrician for a firm in Regina, made it as far as the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s Swan Valley Stampeders. Regan currently plays female triple-A midget with the Melville Prairie Fire.
Nichol also wants to help the HUB initiative, which draws together resources from numerous community organizations and authorities in a collaborative effort to identify at-risk persons and proactively intervenes to prevent crime.
“From what I can see Yorkton’s kind of leading the whole province in the HUB program and we’ve had very dedicated members, and we’ve had great support too from the other organizations involved,” he said.
“I like it. I think it’s been proven in other areas to prevent crime, like Prince Albert and places like that, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work here.”
He also sees respect as a very important part of an officer’s duty.
“People are people,” he said. “Throughout my career, I’ve dealt with a lot of people who other people might consider bad, but I’ve always tried to have the mentality and the mindset, you know, that no matter what you have to do the night before, if you have to fight them, or whatever, the next morning in cells you should be able to have enough gumption to shake a man’s hand because 99 per cent of the people we deal with are the same people and we deal with them day in and day out. It’s certainly not a job where you can have grudges.”
Final word
Although Nicol has no intention of retiring any time soon—at only 53 he potentially has many good years ahead of him—he does intend for Yorkton to be the last stop of his career.
“My wife and myself and my kids are really excited to be here, we’ve got friends in the community, my kids have played hockey here in years past,” he said.
“It’s moving, but it’s not really moving because we used to be in Yorkton four or five times a week when we were in Kamsack anyways, so I’ve been pretty fortunate to get posted here, I’ll be honest with you.”
