Surrey city council needs to finally end its fight against the SPS and invest in residents’ needs

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What seems like a million years ago, Doug McCallum was elected mayor of Surrey on a promise to swap the RCMP for a municipal police service, now known as the Surrey Police Service (SPS). The transition was initially expected to be completed on April 1, 2021.

Current Mayor Brenda Locke was elected to council as part of McCallum’s team in 2018 to transition the police forces, but took a 180 turn and became staunchly in favour of keeping the RCMP, which led to her election in 2022.

In her early days, Locke criticized the BC NDP government and specifically Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth, whose ministry is responsible for the police transition.

After the province asked for plans from the city and the SPS to gauge what police service would be most viable for the city, Farnworth decided to mandate the transition would go ahead. Locke hasn’t taken the gloves off and has continued to fight against it, including spending taxpayer money on a campaign to label the police transition as the “NDP Surrey tax.”.

I was initially team “keep the RCMP,” purely because it would be cheaper than the SPS and all police agencies are going to share similarities in their toxic cultures and effectiveness in policing. But once Farnworth made his call, the debate was over. His concerns surrounding the viability of the RCMP in a city as large as Surrey while the organization is struggling to recruit and Surrey draining resources from under policed rural areas are valid.

In exchange for the costly transition, the province offered Surrey a massive chunk of change. Last year the province gave Surrey $90 million, which the city put towards policing costs. Farnworth then offered $250 million to help the transition go through if the city agreed to move it along.

Locke has decided to keep fighting the inevitable at the cost of taxpayers. She rejected the payout and is taking the province to court over an extremely cut and dry issue. The province can mandate whatever it wants for cities — Locke has no power against Farnworth and she knows that. She is clearly trying to use court cases and public campaigns to hit back against the BC NDP in an election year. It won’t matter. The city doesn’t have the bandwidth to counter the NDP, especially with polls in B.C. looking how they do.

Farnworth is still going to fund $150 million that was promised to Surrey for the transition but cut the extra $100 million after Surrey rejected it. That’s an insane amount of money for a rapidly growing municipality to turn down for purely political reasons.

Locke should have given up her anti-SPS crusade when Farnworth made his decision to continue the transition. She had an opportunity to use the issue as leverage to get Surrey more healthcare, housing, or school funding, but instead she decided to dig in and cost the city’s taxpayers.

The transition isn’t being executed well at all, and there are concerns the RCMP won’t be able to serve under the SPS when the service becomes police of jurisdiction. What should have, and possibly still could, happen is a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood approach. First Newton fully swaps to the SPS, then once the SPS has enough people, Guildford fully swaps to the SPS and so on until the transition is done.

Surrey is paying for two police forces right now. The longer Locke stands in the way of the transition, the longer this will go on and more money will be drained from things that really matter.