A stunning personal account of Janet Merlo's twenty years of service in the RCMP, with an introduction by Linden MacIntyre. In 2012, Janet Merlo was among the first female RCMP officers to publicly allege she had experienced sexual harassment and gender discrimination while serving in Canada's national police force. The women kept silent for so long, she says, because there was no one to tell. In this courageous memoir, Janet recalls how her love of policing was soured by covert and overt sexism within the ranks and by an institutional culture that valued toughness and silence over ethics and accountability. Tracing her twenty years in uniform, Merlo’s story details the highs and lows of her career in the RCMP – while her mental health and personal life disintegrated. Eventually, the cost of keeping quiet was simply too high, and her story emerges as a lone, brave voice seeking change.

Janet Merlo is a retired member of the RCMP. Originally from Harbour Grace, Merlo now lives with her two daughters in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She is the representative plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the RCMP.

Janet Merlot's profile page

Leslie Vryenhoek is a St. John’s-based writer and editor whose poetry, fiction and memoir have appeared across Canada and internationally and have won several awards. She is the author of Scrabble Lessons (fiction, 2009) and Gulf (poetry, 2011), both published by Oolichan. For two decades she has worked as a communications professional in education, development, emergency response and arts, including for the University of Winnipeg, the Canadian Red Cross, and Memorial University. She is currently the writer and editor for the international research/action network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing). Leslie is also the director of Piper’s Frith: Writing at Kilmory Resort.

Leslie Vryenhoek's profile page

LINDEN MACINTYRE was the host of Canada’s premiere investigative television show, the fifth estate, for nearly twenty-five years. Born in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and raised in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, he began his career in 1964 with the Halifax Chronicle-Herald as a parliamentary bureau reporter. MacIntyre later worked at The Journal and hosted CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning before joining the fifth estate. His work on that show garnered an International Emmy, and he has won ten Gemini Awards.

His bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award, while his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2006 and won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller and the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award. His other novels include Why Men Lie, Punishment and The Only Café. MacIntyre lives in Toronto with his wife, CBC radio host and author Carol Off. They spend their summers in a Cape Breton village by the sea.

Linden MacIntyre's profile page

The impunity of RCMP officers who use obscenity and sex and power as tools in their trade is spreading like a stain on a national icon. Will disclosure force change? No One to Tell is a test case for an organization that was once the pride of the nation.

Sally Armstrong, author of Ascent of Women