Documents and evidence submitted in court, as the City of Surrey challenges a provincial order that it create a new municipal police force, has revealed both the city and the province had serious concerns about the impact on policing if the issue wasn’t resolved swiftly.
Surrey has asked for a judicial review of Solicitor-General Mike Farnworth’s decision last July to order the city to continue with a transition from RCMP to a municipal police force. The city’s suit says the minister overstepped his legal powers and denied freedom of expression to Surrey voters.
The province’s lawyer, Trevor Bant, told court this week that even Surrey city staff acknowledged in a confidential report to councillors last June that there could be serious policing issues if Surrey did not have a strong plan in place when reverting to the RCMP.
“That risk of a collapse, it was there,” Mr. Bant said.
He said Mr. Farnworth and his staff were at first concerned that Surrey Police Service (SPS) officers would simply walk off the job after council voted to go back to the RCMP, though that didn’t happen.
Surrey will formally be policed by a new, municipal force as of November
But the province was also concerned, he said, about a more delayed and riskier impact, that the 367 officers already hired by the SPS – almost half of the 734 of Surrey’s police force – would not stay in their jobs waiting to be terminated in favour of the RCMP.
Meantime, the RCMP would have to hire people to replace them, and the province worried that the force would inevitably have to look to other municipalities in B.C. to try to keep the force at its authorized strength and prevent a disastrous reduction in policing in Surrey.
That would have the effect of imperilling policing in Surrey and many other cities around the province, something the minister would be legally obligated to try to prevent, he said.
“The key factual finding here is the conclusion that the city’s plan would destabilize policing in Surrey and across the province,” said Mr. Bant.
He also argued that Surrey came up with no plan for how it would prevent that, except an unrealistic expectation that somehow the province could order SPS officers to remain on the job in Surrey until they were given their termination notice.
“What the city did in response to this was nothing, in my submission. No plan for retaining SPS officers. ‘That’s the province’s job, the government can do it somehow.’ “
But Craig Dennis, a lawyer for Surrey, argued that the same risk prevailed on the other side, that many RCMP officers would start leaving early as they came to the conclusion that their time in Surrey was short-lived anyway.
“They weren’t an indefinite backstop,” he said.
Mr. Dennis argued that the minister only looked at the impact on policing for one side of the equation, not the other.
“The minister has imposed the SPS on Surrey with no one having assessed the impacts.”
Also this week, Supreme Court Justice Kevin Loo declined the province’s request to seal a Surrey Police Union affidavit, which paints a grim picture of nasty interactions between RCMP and SPS officers
The 90 pages of documents show rising tension between the SPS and RCMP for the past two years.
Only a few months after the first SPS officers were deployed in November, 2021, SPS Chief Norm Lipinski expressed concern that the RCMP was not meeting minimum requirements for front-line policing, putting both RCMP and SPS officers at risk.
Things escalated when the RCMP terminated the assignments of three SPS officers in the Special Victims Unit in October, 2022, a move that the SPS said was unjustified and unsupported by evidence for three experienced detectives with specialized skills.
One of the three officers had 14 years of experience with the New Westminster police. She said in the documents that her time with the Special Victims Unit was “dehumanizing, full of hatred and trickery, and was oppressive and emotionally and psychologically exhausting.”
According to a January, 2023, memo from SPS Inspector Bal Brach, this officer has suffered impacts to her physical, mental and emotional health and she worried that she “has been slandered because of the actions and ill intentions” of two RCMP officers.
That document noted that RCMP supervisors “appear to have been engaged in an ongoing scheme of disrespect and harassment” against SPS officers, he wrote.
Insp. Brach then went on to detail other problems, alleging that more than a dozen RCMP officers had “engaged in harassment and created a toxic work environment for SPS staff.”
The union that represents RCMP officers issued a statement Friday saying that the unproven accusations were an attempt to slant the current debate over policing against the RCMP.
The union blamed the province for the unprecedented mess.
Frances Bula