The ranks of federal police officers have been shrinking in Canada's largest provinces, even as authorities in these jurisdictions struggle to get a grip on a deadly opioid crisis and manage a growing influx of asylum seekers.

The Mounties have about 15-per-cent fewer officers working in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia than they did in 2011, statistics released by the RCMP after a request from The Globe and Mail show.

These numbers relate to the police force's federal investigations branch, which pursues nationally significant criminals such as drug smugglers, human traffickers and national-security threats.

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Read more: RCMP shelved hundreds of organized-crime cases after terror attacks

The branch's strength appears to be eroding on different fronts. On Monday, The Globe reported that hundreds of RCMP-led organized-crime investigations were put on hold indefinitely after the October, 2014, attacks that killed two Canadian Forces soldiers. Staff and money were redirected to the police force's national-security squads.

While counterterrorism has been taking a big bite out of the traditional criminal investigations done by the RCMP, the force is also relying on a shrinking pool of detectives.

The number of RCMP federal detectives working in Ontario, Quebec and B.C. is down by almost 400 from 2011 – there were 2,500 police officers back then, compared with slightly more than 2,100 today. These specific declines work out to a 12-per-cent staffing reduction in Ontario, and 17 per cent in B.C. and Quebec. (These numbers do not include RCMP officers taking various forms of leave.)

RCMP staffing reductions have followed rounds of federal-government austerity programs, which have cut police budgets and kept salary raises to a minimum. At the same time, new problems are emerging.

Several federal agencies, including the RCMP, are now struggling to respond to an influx of foreign asylum seekers transiting the United States to press their claims in Canada. The vast majority have been intercepted in Quebec – a province where 714 RCMP officers now work, compared with 862 in 2011. That's a difference of about 150 police officers, and the police force is doing what it can to correct the gap.

"I know [Quebec] Division did post, internally, that they were looking for 130 people who would be willing to transfer to Montreal, or the area, to supplement the asylum-seekers file," said Brian Sauvé, a Mountie who works for the National Police Federation.

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The organization represents most rank-and-file Mounties and has filed an application to be certified as a police union. It contends that many RCMP problems flow from understaffing.

Mr. Sauvé said shuffling in more staff would address a need, but might leave other RCMP jurisdictions short. "It impacts your capacity in your front-line environments because … you're losing a body that's not being replaced."

"Federal [policing] is strapped because they are focused on national security and the really big stuff," said Mr. Sauvé, who argues that the Mounties have developed many blind spots. "If I'm a mid-level gangster, or even a low-level gangster, what can I get away with?"

A federal government study released last week said that more than 2,800 Canadians died in 2016 of opioid-related overdoses, with B.C. residents accounting for more than one-third of these deaths. This summer, B.C.'s Lower Mainland has also had more tit-for-tat shootings and homicides.

In August, the province's Public Safety Ministry released a statement calling on Ottawa "to increase B.C.'s federal RCMP complement." Statistics show that those ranks decreased to about 520 federal-policing Mounties today from 610 in 2011.

Despite this, B.C. remains home to about one in every three Mounties working in Canada today. That's because the police-force's contract-policing wing is still growing. On that much bigger side of the force, Mounties are essentially leased out to towns, cities and provinces as local law-enforcement officers.

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The RCMP is a branch of the federal Department of Public Safety.

After the police force supplied The Globe and Mail with the requested staffing numbers, a spokesman for Liberal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale e-mailed The Globe to provide "additional context."

In the e-mail, Scott Bardsley said that $195-million in annual RCMP funding cuts can be attributed to deficit-fighting measures imposed by the former Conservative government. He said the Liberals have tried to plug the hole over the past two years with approximately $190-million in annual interim funding and are looking for better bureaucratic models to put in place.

In 2015, Mr. Goodale was the Liberal finance critic and questioned why the RCMP's national-security squads were consistently underfunded. "The official budget has flatlined at $10-million for more than a decade," he said at the time.