New RCMP contract is more of the same: prof
Posted March 22, 2012 7:56 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – You shouldn’t expect much to change under BC’s latest 20-year agreement with the RCMP.
“There are no surprises here,” explains Dr. Rob Gordon with the School of Criminology at SFU. “About the only thing that’s different is the appearance of contract management committees and their job appears to be to engage in a process of cost containment.”
He adds the deal looks very much like the one it replaces. “We’re going to continue to have a police service that is essentially run out of the capital city of Canada and that is not really, truly accountable in terms of organization [and] administration to Victoria.”
Gordon also feels there are many reasons for Metro Vancouver to have its own regional police force, from the communication difficulties during last year’s Stanley Cup Riot to the mishandling of the Robert Pickton investigation. He expects Wally Oppal’s final report from the Missing Women’s Inquiry to explore this issue extensively.
“When you’ve got the deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department saying, ‘This would not have happened if there had been a regional police service,’ you have somebody brought in as a consultant — [a] specifically independent person from outside — who says, ‘you need a regional police service, this is absurd’ and you’ve got other witnesses making the same kind of comment, it will be hard to see how anybody could write a report that ignored that particular issue,” argues Gordon.
The deal means BC will pay another $5.7 million per year on top of the $310 million it already shells out; large cities also be paying slightly more.
