‘An insult to the people of Surrey’: Councillor slams city policing decision

A Surrey councillor is speaking out, calling a behind-closed-doors vote on the city’s police transition an “insult to the people of Surrey.”

Coun. Linda Annis’ comments come after Mayor Branda Locke announced Friday that city council voted to keep the RCMP as the police force of jurisdiction and to halt the in-progress transition to the Surrey Police Service (SPS).

Speaking with CityNews, Annis says councillors received documents relating to Thursday’s policing vote less than 24 hours before, on Wednesday.

“Nobody can digest 400 pages, get the questions answered, and make an informed decision in that length of time. Quite frankly, I think that we should have been given much more time, and this should have gone to a meeting on Monday night at the council. And it should have been an open and transparent meeting,” she said.

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Annis says the whole process has been “backwards” since former mayor Doug McCallum began the transition to the municipal force.

“Since 2018 I’ve been calling for a referendum. Because I really think a decision of this magnitude, the people of Surrey deserve a say, they deserve to know exactly what it’s going to cost if we were to move forward with a Surrey Police Service or not, and what the new plan was going to look like that didn’t happen,” she explained.

“It would have prevented a lot of this back and forth and unnecessary expenditures. I would guess that we have spent millions of dollars now. In fact, I know we’ve spent millions of dollars, and we still are not finished this policing issue.”

Annis says the provincial government has not yet had the opportunity to review the documents before they were presented to council, which she believes “they should have.”

The vote should have been done at a regular, open council meeting, Annis says, where the public could listen to debate and hear the rational behind councillors decisions.

“This one was done behind closed doors. … I think it’s an insult to our residents of Surrey. They’re paying the bill, they have every right to know what’s going on. And they have every right to hear council debate the issue.”

Annis says the issue of policing “isn’t over” as the city’s vote now must go back to B.C. Minister of Safety Mike Farnworth, to determine whether Surrey can fulfil the obligations the province has set.

In April, the provincial government recommended the city move ahead with the SPS and was promising $150 million to help with the transition. Part of that decision came down to it being a safety issue, as there are currently 1,500 RCMP vacancies in the province.

“When someone calls 911, they need to know that a police officer will be there in time to help. Now is not the time to put policing levels at risk in any community. In Surrey, or anywhere else in B.C. The people of Surrey have been through enough,” Farnworth said at the time.

Annis says it could have been a very easy process if the council had the issue gone to a referendum at the beginning.

“It’s a very frustrating time, I think, because it hasn’t been done the way that it should have been done.

“I kept calling for a referendum. I did several motions around that, and it was always defeated. And I think, in hindsight, many of the councillors probably wished that we hadn’t done that. But clearly, we didn’t. And you know, I think the province should have insisted that we do it if we couldn’t do it on our own,” she said.

Trade board welcomes Surrey council’s vote to keep the RCMP

Meanwhile, the Surrey Board of Trade says it is “pleased” with the city’s decision to keep the RCMP.

Speaking to CityNews, CEO Anita Huberman says that this has been an “ongoing drama,” and that everyone just wants a final decision.

“We need to focus on our economy on infrastructure investments. In theory, we’re going to be the largest city in British Columbia very soon, and we need to get the drama, the politics, out of the way. And we need to focus on what needs to be done.”

Huberman says the SBoT has always advocated for the retention of the RCMP, to “ensure that we’re focused on wraparound support, infrastructure to address mental health, drug addiction, all of those pieces that are needed to reduce crime prevention.”

However, Huberman is unhappy with the level of transparency during the policing process, and says the business community and the city’s residents want to know what happened during the behind-closed-doors meeting Thursday, and what the “facts” are.

“There’s an accountability by politicians to really be transparent and accountable, especially on such an important topic that is impacting the bottom line for property taxpayers for both residents and for both, and businesses as well.

“Certainly from day one, since the transition from the RCMP to the Surrey police service took place, there’s been no transparency, there’s been no accountability, there’s been no communication. Costs have continued to escalate. The burden of taxation is always on businesses. And yet, you know, we don’t have a vote, and there’s no communication to the business community.”

Huberman says while the SBoT is welcoming the decision, there’s still a lack of information about what the next steps are, and what the actual costs are going to be.

“Now we are receiving our property tax bills for businesses, and we didn’t know what that bill was going to be like, I know, the mayor wants to be more accountable, more transparent, especially in the next budget cycle. But there’s a lot of work to do. And we have paid the price in terms of all of this uncertainty, these politics, these decisions by politicians,” she said.

–With files from Dean Recksiedler and John Ackermann