Honey Dwyer, sworn in as Deputy Chief on Monday, has officially become the highest-ranking female officer in the 173-year history of policing in Saint John.
Dwyer steps into the role left vacant when Tony Hayes retired in April, bringing 27 and a half years of policing experience with her.
Hailing from the Lac La Ronge Indian Band in Woodland Cree First Nation in northern Saskatchewan, Dwyer has experience working in Indigenous policing, national security, drug enforcement and more, and most recently served as commander in charge of the Saskatchewan RCMP’s Central District.
She says she felt it was time for a change.
“Around the 25-year mark you start looking at, where do I go next with my career?” Dwyer says in an interview with Global News.
“It was time to make new changes and new impacts and I think a smaller organization is easier to make change than a bigger organization that has to wait for a lot of approvals from higher levels.”
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Dwyer’s still finding her way around Saint John, having arrived in town just under a week ago, but says from a policing perspective it’s really not that different than the jurisdictions she’s used to.
“The issues are the same in every community across Canada,” she says.
“I’ve faced them before and I know we have to work together with the community to resolve those issues.”
She says she hopes to get out on foot patrols to meet residents and get to know the community.
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“Come say hi,” Dwyer says. “I’m very approachable and I will listen.”
Shattering a glass ceiling within the Saint John Police Force is not lost on Dwyer, who says being a woman in policing means being prepared to prove yourself at a moment’s notice.
“I think we put the pressure sometimes on ourselves of having to prove ourselves,” she says.
“But I always try to give 100 per cent, if not more.”
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Juanita DeSouza-Huletey, a mentor and public speaker focused on empowering women and former IT leader with the Winnipeg Police Service, says this is an overdue step.
“We are making some progress but the needle is not moving fast enough,” she says.
Still, she calls Dwyer’s hiring a big deal for the force.
“It empowers other women to say ‘OK, I’m not there but I can’t give up.'”
“This history being made is an eye-opener.”
DeSouza-Huletey says the internal pressure Dwyer talks about is something all women have had to grapple with.
She says young marginalized Saint Johners will be able to look up to Dwyer and know they can reach a position of power, too, if they want.
Dwyer brings a fresh perspective to the force in the form of her experiences as an Indigenous person, with the relationships between the two sometimes at odds. She says:
“I always say in order to be to make change, we have to be part of the change.”
“If I want to make that change, have input that a lot of our Indigenous elders didn’t have in history, well, we can change that by being part of the organizations where the negative has been and be the face there.”
Settling into Saint John, Dwyer says the most significant change from the Prairies so far? The fog.
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