If you see a smiling, mustachioed young police officer in Olds and area, it's likely Const. René Daoust.
Daoust, 26, has only been with Olds RCMP for a few short weeks. He came here directly from the RCMP training Depot in Regina April 23 for his first-ever posting and has been learning the ropes ever since.
Daoust likes to smile and laugh, but perhaps his most striking feature is his handlebar mustache.
"There's a lot of people at Depot now who have been growing them," Daoust says. "It's just been a fad that the RCMP I think is into at Depot."
His dad, an Ontario Provincial Police officer, also has a mustache, but just a small one.
"He doesn't like maintaining it, so he has a straight one and keeps it nice and short and nice and trim," Daoust says with a smile.
Daoust grew up in Rockland, Ont. and Hawksbury, Ont., east of Ottawa.
Daoust admits his dad's profession had an impact on what he decided to do with his life.
"It's always been something that I wanted to do," Daoust says. "Dad always wanted me to be a lawyer. He said 'less work for them; you make more money.' But he said he's very proud, and he was at the graduation ceremony; gave me my badge.
"(He was) pretty impressed," he adds. "He always wanted to be a Mountie, but it didn't work out for him."
As a raw recruit, Daoust is currently doing general policing -- everything from traffic duty to domestic issues. That suits him just fine.
And he likes the fact he's starting out in a smaller community.
"I'm from a small town, so going into a small town, I was ecstatic," Daoust says. "Yeah there's different types of policing out there. There's municipal policing, where you share policing, going from call to call to call to call. Small-town policing you go from call to call, but you're investigating all those calls.
"You're doing the file from A to Z and you're not handing it off to a steno or you're not handing it off to a specialized unit; you're doing it from A to Z, so for experience-wise, I was very happy," he adds.
Daoust figures his sense of humour and his tendency to smile should stand him in good stead most of the time.
"It comes from my dad. Dry jokes there. Lame jokes he calls them. Bad jokes," he says. "I like to smile. I like to interact with people. It's fun to be in this position where you help people or make people's days, which is a lot of fun. Just putting a smile on people's faces is rewarding."
But Daoust is aware that smiling or joking may not be the right approach in every situation.
"You've got to deal with the situation how you see it," Daoust says. "You can't always treat it with a smile, because it doesn't deserve a smile.
"But if you can turn the situation into less of a confrontational style of interaction, then -- if you can pop a smile, you can make that interaction a lot better than if you went to more of a physical interaction.
"You want to make that smile come out a lot quicker so you can avoid that physical confrontation. So sometimes it's good. You can use that to your advantage a lot," he adds.
Right now, Daoust is just trying to soak up as much experience as he can, but he may opt for a specific role later in his career.
"My ultimate goal right now is to learn as much as I can in general duty. Maybe down the road, I'd like to maybe try a specialized unit. Maybe the emergency response team or, depending on how good of a shape I am in in the coming years, but we'll see," he says.
A bonus for Daoust is that his girlfriend, Shannyn Guthrie, got her first posting relatively nearby -- in Red Deer.
"I met her while at Depot. We kicked it off and we got posted to pretty much the same spot, so I'm happy with that," he says.
