Catherine Anne Galliford: Dec. 28, 1966 - Aug. 15, 2025

There they are in their red serge, beaming happily in the photo taken by one of their dads on that hot day in late August 1991: Nine female graduates in a class of 32, fresh from the six-month Cadet Training Program in Regina and excited to be stepping into their careers as RCMP officers.

Newly minted constable Catherine Galliford is in the photo, second from the left.

Nobody knew it yet, but years of sexual harassment, assault and bullying within the RCMP lay ahead for some of these young officers. One would die by suicide.

Some of the grads tried to stay in touch as the years passed. But it wasn’t until Ms. Galliford’s explosive CBC interview in 2011 alleging years of workplace abuse in the RCMP that they realized just how much they had in common.

That interview was the spark that brought more than 3,000 RCMP officers forward to detail their own allegations of workplace harassment and sexual assault.

“It struck such a chord in so many of us, because we were dealing with the exact same thing,” recalled long-time friend and ’91 RCMP classmate Cheryl Jarvis, who left the force in 2010 after alleging years of harassment.

The extensive national media coverage that followed Ms. Galliford’s interview would lead to commissions, investigations, and a class-action suit that won a $125-million settlement for 2,304 current and former RCMP officers. It foreshadowed Ms. Galliford’s own 2012 lawsuit against the RCMP overall and four particular officers, settled out of court four years later.

Ms. Galliford was proud to have been a voice for thousands of RCMP officers who had been harmed during their years in the force, says her younger brother, Neil Galliford. Her own experiences while in the RCMP left “a shadow over her life” that she could never escape, he said.

She alleged in her statement of claim that she faced “daily, systemic” harassment at work. She spent most of the past two decades struggling with post-traumatic stress so significant that she rarely left her house.

Diagnosed this year with liver cancer, she died Aug. 15 in Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, at age 58.

“Cathy went through all this pain, and it ended this way for her,” Mr. Galliford says. “But I really do think that in the end, change will come. And she will have led the charge.”

Catherine Anne Galliford was born Dec. 28, 1966, in Dawson Creek, B.C., to Anne and Brian Galliford. The middle child between two brothers, she moved with her family at age eight to Prince George, where her father set up an obstetrical practice, then to Richmond with her mother and brothers after the marriage ended.

Ms. Galliford’s first career was as a radio journalist, in Cranbrook and Prince George. But that work left her feeling like “all she could do was report these horrific things,” Ms. Jarvis said. Ms. Galliford craved work that could help people more directly.

Ms. Jarvis was at Ms. Galliford’s bedside in her final days, along with Janet Merlo, a lead plaintiff in the Merlo/Davidson class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the $125-million settlement. “Catherine is a true hero to all of us who lived through this,” Ms. Jarvis said.

Ms. Galliford met her future husband, RCMP officer Darren Campbell, while in training in Regina. Their son, Connor, was born in 1996. By then, Ms. Galliford was a media spokesperson for North Vancouver RCMP and rapidly becoming a familiar face on the evening news.

The couple would split up three years later. Both father and son were destined for their own high-profile media experiences in later years.

Connor Campbell was convicted in 2016 of the second-degree murder of a friend, given a life sentence that he continues to serve. Darren Campbell was an RCMP superintendent in Nova Scotia when Dartmouth denturist Gabriel Wortman killed 22 people in a 2020 shooting spree across four communities, prompting much public criticism and a seven-volume independent investigation into the RCMP’s actions over those two days.

In her 2012 statement of claim, Ms. Galliford stated she was sexually assaulted by a fellow officer on an undercover assignment. She also detailed in the claim of being coerced by another RCMP officer who then threatened to ruin her career chances if she didn’t have a sexual relationship with him.

While acting as the RCMP’s lead media hand during the Robert Pickton investigation, she said she endured co-workers gleefully telling her of their fantasy that the serial killer would escape from prison, track her down, and “gut her like a pig.”

(Ms. Galliford’s allegations were never tested in court because her lawsuit against the RCMP and four of its officers was settled out of court.)

The Pickton murders caused trauma for her in other ways as well. RCMP searched Mr. Pickton’s notorious pig farm for the remains of missing women in 2002, but Ms. Galliford filed a statement with the RCMP years later alleging there was a three-year period prior to that search when police knew enough to act but chose not to – a period when 14 other women were murdered.

Both the RCMP and the Vancouver Police Department went on to issue public apologies acknowledging they could have done more to catch Mr. Pickton sooner.

Ms. Galliford desperately wanted to testify before the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, launched in 2010 by the B.C. government to examine the systemic failures of police and government institutions in responding to reports of missing and murdered women. But by then she was suffering from debilitating agoraphobia, a disorder characterized by anxiety that was triggered when she left her home. So she could not testify.

She was unable to attend the sentencing hearing of her son after his murder conviction for the same reason.

As Ms. Galliford’s health began deteriorating in the mid-2000s, she said she was ordered not to talk to anyone outside of the RCMP about what was happening to her. The RCMP doctor in charge of her care believed her only problem was alcohol consumption, and breached patient confidentiality to consult Ms. Galliford’s RCMP ex-husband about her drinking, years after the couple had divorced.

The doctor ordered her into treatment and told her to sign agreements promising she wouldn’t consume alcohol anymore. She would then be disciplined when her undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder overwhelmed her and she returned to drinking.

“What made me sick was that I had no one to go to, so I just stopped talking,” Ms. Galliford told media about those years. “That’s what made me break. We were never encouraged to speak about what happened to us and if we tried, we were shushed.”

As a media spokesperson for the RCMP for much of her career, Ms. Galliford was the public face of high-profile criminal cases in B.C., including the Air India bombing and Pickton.

But once she had stepped into a different kind of limelight as a whistleblower, Ms. Galliford grew to dread public recognition. Many of the people who approached her wanted to thank her for her bravery, which lifted her spirits, but others were RCMP officers who shamed her for sullying the reputation of the force.

Ms. Jarvis says Ms. Galliford’s 2016 move to Kamloops from her long-time neighbourhood in Langley was largely to escape such painful encounters. Barry Carter, Ms. Galliford’s lawyer for her 2012 lawsuit against the RCMP, recalled her shopping for groceries in the middle of the night to avoid being seen.

In later media interviews after she made public her allegations of abuse, Ms. Galliford always wore a baseball hat. The hat was both a security blanket and a disguise, Ms. Jarvis said.

“She felt she could hide under her ball cap – no one would recognize her. Once you’ve come forward, you just never know when you go out your door who you’re going to see, and what they’re going to say.”

Ms. Galliford’s agoraphobia was intense. But when a coroner’s inquest was called in 2018 into the suicide of her friend and RCMP colleague Pierre Lemaitre, she donned her baseball cap and travelled to Vancouver to be there.

Mr. Lemaitre was an RCMP spokesperson who had suffered greatly in the force as well after being ordered not to correct false information he had inadvertently given to the media in the case of Robert Dziekanski, a Polish traveller who died of cardiac arrhythmia at the Vancouver airport in 2007 after being tasered repeatedly and restrained by RCMP officers.

Ms. Galliford acknowledged after her ground-breaking 2011 interview that she had paid a personal price for coming forward.

“It’s been tremendously hard on my relationships,” she said in a 2012 follow-up interview with CBC. “It’s difficult when you have a child who feels that he has to stick up for you, and yet you’re his parent. It’s been hard on my relationship with my partner. I didn’t ask to be the spokesperson on harassment in RCMP. But I don’t regret it.”

As the years passed, the life traumas piled up for Ms. Galliford.

Her son’s conviction for murder was devastating to the family. (Ms. Galliford and Connor have spoken on the phone every day since his incarceration, and he had the chance to say goodbye to her, her brother said.)

Then Ms. Galliford was treated for throat cancer in 2023. Another life-changing blow came the following year, when her partner – Kevin Bourque, a childhood sweetheart from her Prince George years whom she reconnected with after moving to Kamloops – died of cancer.

Her brother Neil believes she never wanted to settle her lawsuit. She sold her house to pay her legal bills, committed to doing whatever it took to bring about a trial that could shine a light on the harmful RCMP culture.

“But in the end, they wore her down,” Mr. Galliford said. “I see her as a hero whose legacy has yet to be fulfilled.”

Ms. Jarvis agrees that change has yet to come. “We are still hearing from hundreds of boots-on-the-ground officers that what happened to us is still happening.”

Agoraphobia shrunk Ms. Galliford’s world, but she could still be spotted walking her beloved papillon dogs, Foxy and Pirate, around her yard every day. Her brother has them now.

In a 2015 interview, Maclean’s magazine asked Ms. Galliford what she thought would have to change to spare other officers from the suffering she experienced.

“Accountability,” she said. “There has to be some accountability for the perpetrators. I know so many perpetrators who are still working in the RCMP, but the women they harassed are not.”

Ms. Galliford leaves her parents, her son, and brothers Neil and Bruce.