Surrey city council should give up its fight against the Surrey Police Service

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The City of Surrey is bringing the Province of British Columbia to court. It’s doomed to fail and is a waste of time.

I have written a handful of stories about how the RCMP is a better option for Surrey. It was never about safety, it was always about the costs. That was before Public Safety Minister and B.C. Solicitor General Mike Farnworth made his final decision on policing in the city.

Farnworth has been around for a long time, and I can confidently say he didn’t make the call to continue the transition just for kicks. It seems his decision came down to if the city can restaff enough officers. The mayor says they can, the top cop in Surrey says they can, and they probably can. But not without draining resources from other parts of the province.

Every RCMP officer has to go through training in Saskatchewan. After that, they’re sent wherever they’re needed. With 63 cities in the province using the RCMP, it makes sense the province wouldn’t be stoked about sending 250 officers to Surrey rather than those 62 other cities, some of which are already short-staffed.

But Brenda Locke feels Farnworth has been bullying her, where he was lenient with her predecessor. Farnworth watched McCallum fumble the transition for four years. He gave gentle shoves in the right direction at times but maintained that Surrey voted for McCallum, so McCallum could do his thing.

Locke came to power with no political muscle on her side. Her councillors are all new to the office. The longest serving members of council were only elected in 2018, and Locke is the only one of them who wanted to stop the transition. That lack of experience makes it hard to play ball with MLAs, especially when they have antagonized their coworkers by calling Farnworth misogynistic and launching a website directly attacking the NDP with misleading information.

Despite those hiccups, the province offered $150 million to the city to help offset policing costs. That’s a third of the 10 year overage the city is projecting the transition will cost.

But the council seems to have decided to reject that. Instead, they’re bringing a court case accusing the province of violating the city’s constitutional rights for scrapping the police board, which Locke was chair of, and replacing it with former Abbotsford Police Chief Mike Serr. 

Nobody really thinks the court case will succeed because the province has the authority to go over the heads of cities.

So what’s the point?

Well, in a little under a year, British Columbians will go to the polls for the provincial election, and judging by the city’s newest website and social media platforms, their goal is to erode NDP support in the city. Of course, this comes at the significant financial cost of fighting the court case, rejecting the $150 million offered by the province, and continuing to delay the transition.

To be fair, I think Locke has good intentions. I think she genuinely wants to keep taxes lower for Surrey residents and she wants to make good on her only real campaign promise.

But her execution is not good. The debate is over. She lost. It’s done. The Surrey Police Service will be the police in this city in the next couple of years.

So what does the future look like? Locke will continue to fight it. She will continue to lose. Farnworth will continue to step on the city whenever he needs to speed the transition up and actually save taxpayers’ money.