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Uproar at UBCM as Bond says feds threatening to pull 5,000 RCMP as talks break down

September 27th, 2011 · 9 Comments

The news exploded late Tuesday afternoon as AG Shirley Bond announced to a crowd of civic politicians at the Union of BC Municipalities that contract talks have stalled and that the feds are saying, “Sign the deal as is or we pull officers out.”

(Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was probably first with the news. She tweeted about it and I re-tweeted that and then the snowballs started rolling from other directions as well.)

We haven’t heard the federal government side on this, so I’ll be waiting to see if there’s anything they can say to redeem their case. Certainly mayors I talked to were persuasive in how hard it is on them to try to run their cities when they can never be quite sure what kind of bill they’ll get for the RCMP or whether the officers that they raised taxes to pay for will be in the city when needed.

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  • mezzanine

    I like the idea of a BCPP….

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Provincial_Police

  • Andrew

    BC, not surprisingly given our national lightning rod of horrible RCMP conduct, wanted a few tweaks in the contract. The fed’s response? They handed us a copy of the same contract that Alberta and Saskatchewan signed.

    The federal government – and Canada, generally – is so irrelevant it is just astonishing.

    Long live Cascadia!

  • David Hadaway

    Having just seen the battered face of 17 year old Jamie Haller, who in the Alice Through the Looking Class world of the RCMP is predictably accused of assaulting a police officer, I can only say the sooner the better.

  • Bobbie Bees

    All I can say to the RCMP is don’t let the door hit your A$$ on the way out.

  • Bobbie Bees

    Well, I could ask them to take their tazers with them when they leave.

  • Morry

    Lets taser the lot to Alberta and beyound.

  • T Ian McLeod

    Ms. Bond has indicated that the government will be examining the pros and cons of creating a provincial police force. To some extent the ball is in the public’s court: do we want it or don’t we?

  • Adele Chow

    The feds are bluffing. They wouldn’t pull 5,000 officers without negotiating what to do with them. They wouldn’t leave communities without policing. If BC established its own force, RCMP officers would inevitably be hired as new officers. The RCMP wouldn’t be able to afford to keep those 5,000 officers without the BC contracts.

  • Jimbo

    Totally bluffing. Where would they send the 5 or 6 thousand officers? Other provinces? The provinces would say sorry we can’t afford any more officers, and then it’d be layoff time.

    A provincial force is good enough for Ontario and its good enough for BC.