My issue is more the forcing the cost of it onto provincial park radios and Highway trucks. Wasteful in those cases.
With single key AES, there is very little cost. Keys are loaded via software. Done and done.
While there is costs associated with using hardware encryption, it isn't hard to do, By using Over The Air Re-keying(OTAR), there is little difficulty in using and maintaining an encrypted radio network.
Once a radio is programmed, a single UKEK is loaded via a key-fill device, then the radio is OTAR'd securely, to key fill the radio with TEK's.
The only time a radio has to be re-keyed from a physical Key Variable Loader(KVL) is of the radio is zeroized. If it has a valid UKEK, it can be securely re-keyed over the radio network.
There is little additional time needed to set a radio up for encrypted comms vs clear comms these days.
Even though RCMP is a federal coast to coast service, they seem to have province-by-province rules for their comms, as here in province of Quebec, the RCMP is UHF P25 encrypted since at least 25 years.
If they had that P25+encryption in NS (or NB?) when there was this shooting, the lid that was streaming their comms just wouldn’t have been able to do such a disservice back then and created such a mess. But there don’t seem to be a general coast-to-coast rule on encrypted comms, as I can see.
Each division is responsible for their division communications. BUT, from HQ the decision was made that comm's need to be secured. Over the last decade or so, the RCMP have moved to encrypted comm's as radio networks were modernized. BC for example converted their conventional, analogue VHF network to conventional, P25 VHF, and use AES256. When E-COMM went from EDACS to P25 Phase 2, they started using AES256. In Alberta, when the RCMP went from conventional, analogue VHF to 700MHz P25 phase 1, they adopted AES256.
