SURREY mayor-elect Doug McCallum on Friday said the Surrey Police Board’s appointment of a permanent Chief Constable, announced by press release on Friday, the last business day before the new council is sworn in, is Mayor Brenda Locke’s handpicked board doing exactly what it was built to do: carry out the mayor’s wishes after the voters have shown the mayor the door.
He pointed out that this is not a full board and it is not an independent one. Two of its nine seats have been empty since June, when Chair Harley Chappell and human resources chair James Carwana, the only two members not appointed directly by or on the recommendation of City Hall, resigned days after the board fired Surrey Police Service (SPS) Chief Constable Norm Lipinski. Chappell wrote that “the political tentacles and pressures have reached far too deeply into our newly formed SPS board.”
Four of the seven who remain were appointed in March from five resumes Locke’s City Hall sent to Victoria, after then-premier David Eby announced the seats would go only to “candidates of mutual agreement between the mayor’s office and the provincial government.” Ten weeks later, that board fired the chief who built the Surrey Police Service, without cause, offered him 18 months’ pay plus three more to sign a release for the City and call it a retirement, sealed the minutes, and gagged the chief’s office from criticizing the board or City Hall. The firing is before the B.C. Supreme Court. No judge has ruled.
McCallum added: “Then there is Councillor Rob Stutt, Brenda Locke’s man on the board. A former RCMP member who ran with Surrey Connect, he was found by the City’s own ethics commissioner to have had a personal interest in the RCMP vote. The Province’s administrator swears Stutt was in the room in December 2023 when Locke said she did not like that Lipinski was chief and was unhappy with his wife. On May 29, Stutt chaired the special meeting that fired the chief, a meeting the chair was told would involve “no substantive business.” On October 17, Rob Stutt asked Surrey to send him back to council. Surrey said no. On October 30 he was still on the board that picked Surrey’s police chief.
“There was no public meeting. The board met on October 22 with no chief’s appointment on its public agenda, and its own calendar sets the next meeting for November 18, with the new council in office. In September, Cheney Cloke, the board’s former vice-chair and now a councillor-elect, called on the Solicitor General to suspend the hiring until the court ruled. The board went ahead anyway, decided in closed session and put out a press release on a Friday.”
McCallum said: “Brenda Locke spent four years trying to sabotage the Surrey Police Service. In her own sworn affidavit she says she ‘fought tirelessly’ against it. Sworn evidence in court says she told a uniformed officer ‘we need to get rid of Chief Lipinski.’ When the Province took the board away from her, she got it back with her own resumes and her own councillor chairing the meeting that fired him. On October 17, Surrey fired Brenda Locke and refused to re-elect Rob Stutt. On October 30, her board picked Surrey’s police chief behind closed doors so the council that replaced her would have no say. That is not civilian oversight. That is one last kick at Surrey on her way out the door.”
He added: “This is not about Chief Matsumoto. The union stands behind him, he will have my support, and SPS officers will get the helicopter, drones and resources I promised. The only reason to do this on Friday was to do it before Monday. Today, I am calling on the Province to remove this entire board, every member of it, and appoint a new, non-partisan board through a public process, immediately. This board was stacked with Brenda Locke’s political cronies. It fired a chief behind its own chair’s back, gagged the chief’s office, left two seats empty for five months, and has now hired a chief behind closed doors three days before the council the voters elected takes office. Nobody in Surrey can have confidence in it. The Province suspended this entire board once before, in 2023. It should do it again now, release the sealed minutes of May 29, and give the council Surrey elected a voice in who oversees its police. Surrey wants a police board that answers to the law, not to any mayor, including me.”
McCallum and the new council will be sworn in on Monday, November 2.
