Former Liberal public safety minister and solicitor general Mike Morris says the NDP provincial government is “usurping” the ability of cities to decide who polices them by introducing amendments to the Police Act on Monday designed to force Surrey to proceed with the Surrey Police Service rather than the Surrey RCMP.
Morris, who currently serves as the Official Opposition’s shadow minister to Public Safety Minister and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth, said from the get-go he could not understand how the provincial government arrived at its firm stance on ordering Surrey to go with the SPS.
“The information was not there, the Province has been very reluctant to reveal the information that they used, that the minister used, in arriving at his decision to move forward and here we are today where they are usurping the sanctity or decision-making process that municipalities have in deciding who polices their municipality,” Morris told reporters Tuesday. “I think this is the wrong direction to go and intend to look at this in depth during the committee stage moving forward over the next few days.”
Morris, now with BC United (formerly BC Liberals), was public safety minister and solicitor general from December 2015 to July 2017.
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Peter Milobar, labour critic with BC United, charged that this is “just the latest” in the provincial government’s “heavy hand” approach to municipalities.
“This is a piece of legislation that is changing because frankly the government’s mishandling of this file so badly and it’s created them to have to change a piece of legislation that has functioned perfectly fine on police forces and decisions local governments make on who will police them literally for decades in this province.
Milobar said the “lack of transparency” in this transition is “very concerning” and has ramifications for municipalities across the province that have RCMP detachments that the provincial government “will not talk about.”
“Obviously a detachment the size of Surrey has a very large portion of the overall municipal complement in the province of B.C. Those costs are going to be now shouldered by all the other municipalities out there that are over 5,000 people that have RCMP as their police of jurisdiction, and so there’s a lot of transparency issues.”
Milobar charged the provincial government with bringing in a “sledgehammer piece of legislation instead of dealing with the issue that they’ve created in the first place.”
