A Surrey police patch on an officer's jacket during the Vaisakhi parade in Surrey, B.C., on April 22. The city is in the midst of a transition from the RCMP to a new municipal police force.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The B.C. government’s decision to back a municipal police force in Surrey, including a hefty financial enticement to drop the Mounties, has left other area mayors worried the new force will suck resources away from their own RCMP detachments and wondering why they don’t qualify for extra funding.
The mess over how British Columbia’s second-largest city polices itself became more tangled – not less – last week after the province concluded Surrey would be better off completing its transition to its own municipal force and Solicitor-General Mike Farnworth said the province would contribute at least $30-million for the next five years to help.
But Surrey’s mayor has said, so far, her city will instead revert back to the RCMP, despite significant costs that will come with unwinding the half-completed transition.
Mayors in cities that are still policed by the RCMP have been frustrated at the province’s mixed messaging and left worried they’ll be hit with financial fallout.
Mr. Farnworth said last week that the province’s main concern was that if Surrey reverted back to the RCMP, re-establishing that detachment – the largest in the province – would siphon off officers from elsewhere and the force is already understaffed in B.C. by at least 460 officers.
But mayors in cities that still have RCMP forces are worried about how the government’s Surrey solution will affect them.
“The RCMP communities I think are going to be significantly impacted by a continued transition because the Surrey Police Service is not fully manned,” said Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart. “The SPS has more than 500 vacancies. The gaps for them are much greater than for the RCMP. If they continue with that transition, we will lose more officers to them than with the RCMP.”
In Langley Township, Mayor Eric Woodward said it wouldn’t make a difference because his municipality has had almost 30 vacancies for years, long before the Surrey situation.
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Surrey has an authorized strength of 843 officers. At this point in the mired transition, the Surrey municipal force has hired about 330 while the RCMP continues to deploy most of the remaining amount. The province had advised the new Surrey force not to hire more than 200 people in 2022 to minimize disruption in the province, but that still meant many other cities, RCMP or municipal force, lost officers to the new, high-paying service.
Mr. Stewart said that the province’s recent announcement about its recommendations and offer of money to Surrey is going to be a major item on the agenda of a meeting this week among mayors of RCMP communities from Hope to Pemberton.
“We have the province making a decision like that without consulting us. It’s a concern,” said Mr. Stewart.
In Burnaby, Mayor Mike Hurley said another consequence is that all the other RCMP-policed municipalities will have to pick up an even bigger share of the provincial administration costs than they do now, once Surrey, which was home to a fifth of all RCMP officers, is out.
“We’ll become the largest city in the country with RCMP if Surrey pulls out. That will be more of a burden for us,” said Mr. Hurley, whose city has an authorized RCMP force of 301 officers.
Both he and Mr. Stewart, along with some other mayors, were dismayed that the province has apparently now chosen to support Surrey’s change with at least $150-million in incentive money – a kind of support that no other RCMP-policed city in B.C. got after they were all hit with huge backpay bills for police after the force’s new union settled its first contract.
In Burnaby, that bill was $11-million, which is now being paid through Burnaby property taxes.
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me from an equity point of view,” said Mr. Hurley.
In Langley, Mr. Woodward said he was also surprised by the province’s about-face on providing money.
“I was taken aback.”
In Richmond, which once considered transitioning away from the RCMP and was strongly pressed by the then Liberal provincial government not to, the city says it has been left in the dark.
“It’s so confusing as to what exactly has been offered to Surrey,” said Mayor Malcolm Brodie. And it’s unclear to him, as with others, how much more his city will end up paying to cover RCMP administration costs.
In 2021, the most recent year where statistics are available, there were 6,452 authorized police officers in B.C.: 3,503 in RCMP forces in the province’s 31 larger cities, which included Surrey that year; 469 with RCMP in 34 smaller towns; and 2,480 in the province’s 11 municipal police forces.
A recent Globe and Mail analysis of RCMP vacancies showed there were 460 unfilled positions and an unknown large number of people absent for medical or family leaves. In Prince George, about a fifth of the detachment was on leave earlier this year.
An all-party provincial committee has recommended that B.C. move to a regional force. Some mayors are wondering whether that’s the ultimate goal behind Mr. Farnworth’s announcement of the incentive money.
“If that’s the direction the province wants to go, I wish they would come out and say that,” said Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West. “I sense the public is getting tired of all of this and we should be working toward a plan to get there if that’s what they want.”
Mayors contacted by The Globe said they weren’t concerned about losing their own RCMP officers to Surrey if it stays with the national force. That’s because they were already seeing high vacancies before the Surrey situation or they’re losing them anyway to the municipal force.
Surrey council is due to meet with Mr. Farnworth and senior staff sometime in the next two weeks to discuss the options.
Mayor Brenda Locke has been critical of the province’s report on the topic, and said that she won’t be swayed by a last-minute offer of money.
But the councillors are looking at a quarter-billion dollar hit in costs if Surrey rejects the provincial offer. Not only will the city not get the $150-million or more for the transition, but Mr. Farnworth has said the province will not help with severance costs if the Surrey Police Service gets decommissioned. The city has currently budgeted $85-million for that.
Special to The Globe and Mail