The Government of Saskatchewan is looking to allow small municipalities to join a regional police force.

The move comes as the provincial government looks to enhance rural policing throughout Saskatchewan.

An amendment called The Police (Regional Policing) Amendment Act which will amend The Police Act, 1990, and allow smaller rural municipalities to be involved in regional policing arrangements, was announced Thursday.

Minister of Corrections and Policing Christine Tell said that she was not yet sure how this reform to The Police Act would affect rural crime.

"Well, we don't really know how it's going to work, what it is intended to do is provide municipalities, rural municipalities, and cities another option with respect to policing, this hasn't been implemented before, we've now included communities under 500, before you needed to be over 500."

The amendment allows for communities under 500 to also join a regional police force, something that Tell says will have to be worked out by a case-to-case basis.

"We do envision that if communities wish to explore, they'll work with the ministry, and all of the issues, the finances, who's going to be responsible for, how many do we need, what occurs to the RCMP that are currently patrolling that particular area, those are all issues that are going to have to be worked out on an ad hoc basis, we're not going to make up policy for the entire province."

Tell said that the rule about communities under 500 now being able to participate was brought about by a city that wished to be in a regional police force but could not, due to the fact that municipalities had to be over 500 people in order to join.

"We had a city in Saskatchewan sort of approach us and say 'listen we would like to maybe look at this, not definitively, [just] look at this, but we can't do it because the surrounding rural municipalities are under 500,' so we included over 500 and under 500 just to be more inclusive, and to give more options."

The amendment was announced at the same time as an amendment pertaining to civil forfeiture was introduced.