LET’S face the facts:
- Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum and seven of his Safe Surrey Coalition members won the 2018 municipal election fair and square on the pledge that they would form a Surrey police force to replace the RCMP. In fact, all the eight new Councillors, including the lone one from Surrey First, voted to ditch the RCMP at the very first Council meeting.
- The Police Act says that any city with a population of more than 5,000 can decide what type of police force they want. So, when the City of Surrey approached the Provincial Government with its proposal, the latter had no option but to give the go-ahead. In spite of three Councillors ditching McCallum’s group, the mayor still continued to control the majority vote in Surrey City Council.
- Among the tactics that the pro-RCMP forces then started resorting to was the call for a referendum on the change in policing. However, legally, only the City can authorize such a referendum – the Province or the federal government cannot.
- Surrey voters delivered a slap in the face of those who wanted to keep the RCMP in Surrey in the 2020 provincial election when they not only re-elected all six incumbent NDP MLAs, but also booted out Liberal MLA Marvin Hunt (Surrey-Cloverdale) and replaced him with the NDP’s Mike Starchuk in spite of the BC Liberals and RCMP supporters making the police transition the hot issue in the city in the 2020 election.
- Last November the failure of the Surrey Police Vote initiative that wanted to Keep the RCMP in Surrey showed how hopeless that cause was right from the start. And its organizers were disgraced and humiliated when it was revealed that the RCMP’s National Police Federation had donated more than $104,000 of the total of $118,264 that the campaign received, according to financial documents filed to Elections BC. The real people of Surrey forked out just over $14,000. Some popular support, indeed!
AND now, Keep The RCMP In Surrey (KTRIS) is (no surprise, of course!) officially endorsing Surrey Connect mayoral candidate Brenda Locke and her team who support the RCMP that is being steadily replaced by the new Surrey Police Service – although there is NO WAY that this transitioning process can be reversed.
ALSO, the fact is that Locke has a long history of being a political loser.
She got only about 13,600 votes when she ran for Surrey Council in 2014 – she was No. 17. She was defeated by not only the successful Surrey First candidates but also candidates like Rina Gill, Kal Dosanjh, Narima Dela Cruz and others.
In the last municipal election, as everybody knows, she won only by joining McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition team and ended up getting more than 40,000 votes.
Earlier, the only time that Locke won was in 2001 as a Liberal candidate in Surrey-Green Timbers when the NDP was at an all-time low and Gordon Campbell’s Liberals won 77 of the 79 Assembly seats.
Locke, who defeated incumbent NDP MLA Sue Hammell by less than 2,000 votes in 2001, lost to Hammell in the 2005 election by more than 5,000 votes.
Locke later ran as the federal Liberal Party candidate in Fleetwood—Port Kells in the 2006 and the 2008 federal elections, but lost both times to Conservative incumbent Nina Grewal.
In other words, Locke wins ONLY under super friendly circumstances – once riding the Campbell wave and the second time riding the McCallum wave.
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