Dissatisfied with a 20-year RCMP contract that the province is pushing, a cluster of Lower Mainland municipalities is investigating alternatives that include a single Metro Vancouver police service.
Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan is one of the mayors who have refused to sign the contract. He said Burnaby has escalating, unpredictable policing costs under the old contract, and the new one doesn’t clearly delineate what costs the municipality will be on the hook for.
Those unknowns, he said, include what municipalities might have to pay to run the new Green Timbers RCMP headquarters in Surrey, plus three years’ of a retroactive pay hike for RCMP officers if they win a legal challenge against the federal government.
“The retroactive pay issue is hanging like the sword of Damocles over our head as potentially costing municipalities millions of dollars,” he said.
Corrigan told Business in Vancouver that his council voted to investigate alternatives to the contract, including:
- a municipal police force;
- a regional, Metro Vancouver police force; and
- the expansion of other local police departments to encompass Burnaby.
Corrigan said the RCMP could still be a viable option, “but I think that the inability of the provincial government to provide any kind of certainty in the agreement has provoked us to say, ‘We need to look for more certainty’.”
He stressed that, unlike other tiers of government, municipalities are required to balance their budgets. “So certainty is a key element in the way we approach our expenditures.”
Burnaby isn’t alone in looking for alternative options.
B.C.’s Ministry of Justice refused to provide Business in Vancouver with a complete list of non-signing municipalities; however, non-signees include Richmond, Port Coquitlam, Coquitlam and the city and district of North Vancouver.
The contract impasse has re-ignited broader calls for a single police force to serve Metro Vancouver. Metro Vancouver is the only densely populated metropolitan area in Canada without a single, unified police force.
“I call it a balkanized system of policing for the province of British Columbia,” said Kash Heed, MLA for Vancouver-Fraserview and former solicitor general.
“Most [B.C. police forces] are located in Metro Vancouver or the capital region, and it makes absolutely no sense to have the structure that we have in place now.”
Heed said failures of the current system include the Robert Pickton investigation and the police response to last year’s Stanley Cup riot.
But Heed said that while a single police force would deliver better police work, it’s unclear whether new cost efficiencies from administrative reductions could offset the loss of the 10% federal subsidy large municipalities receive for signing RCMP contracts.
“There are economies of scale to be derived from having one metro police force for Metro Vancouver and one for the capital region in Victoria. But that work has to be done in order for us to determine that.”
Rob Gordon is the director of Simon Fraser University’s school of criminology and an advocate for a single Metro Vancouver police force.
He argues that the 10% subsidy is smoke and mirrors because municipalities are being billed for a full complement of RCMP officers, which, due to RCMP recruitment and retention problems, they frequently don’t have.
“The 10% is mythology because all the municipalities are … running at least 10% under strength.”
While local municipalities have just launched investigations into the costs and arguments for alternative policing structures, Corrigan said they would likely cost Burnaby more.
But he added that the municipality stands to gain more local control and better service.
“You’ve got to put a value on the issue of lack of control,” he said.
Both Heed and Gordon estimate that establishing a regional police force would take approximately three years.
Gordon said to make that happen, municipalities could sign the new RCMP contract before its June 30 deadline, develop a transition plan over a year, and then give two years’ notice under the contract’s two-year opt out clause and proceed to a new structure.
Senator Vern White , who was previously chief of the Ottawa Police Service and Durham Regional Police Service, suggested an alternate approach.
He said if local municipalities want a single police force but aren’t willing to give up federal RCMP subsidies, they could create a Metro Vancouver force under the RCMP.” •
