LOCKE DOES NOT HAVE A MANDATE! READ ON …
THERE seems to be no limit to how low Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke can stoop!
She has clearly shown that she lacks dignity and class.
On Monday, she sank to a new low calling the Surrey Police Service “the NDP police service.”
She is clearly headed for a mental breakdown in her desperate bid to cling on to the RCMP that has lost all respect with a solid majority of Surrey-ites.
Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth was justifiably livid at her cheap comment. He told the media in Victoria: “There are hundreds of men and women right now on the ground in Surrey who are dedicated police officers, and for the Mayor of Surrey to denigrate that by trying to take some cheap political shot, I think is disrespectful to those men and women who put their life on the line every single day to protect the citizens of Surrey, whether they’re Surrey police service members or the RCMP.”
The RCMP are clearly inciting Locke as they are more than desperate to hang on to Surrey even though they are clearly not welcome there anymore. Do they want to serve people who would have lost even the little respect they still have for them?
AS Locke keeps repeating that she won a mandate to keep the RCMP, let’s look at the REAL facts.
Let me repeat once again, the TRUE facts that I have consistently been pointing out:
* Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum and seven of his Safe Surrey Coalition members won the election fair and square over five years ago 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 (Linda Annis) from Surrey First (as well as the present mayor Brenda Locke), voted to ditch the RCMP at the very first Council meeting.
* Among the tactics that the pro-RCMP forces started resorting to was the call for a referendum on the change in policing. However, legally, only the City could authorize such a referendum – not the Province or the federal government. So the RCMP’s stooges finally organized a joke of a referendum. The result? The referendum inspired and paid for by the RCMP’s National Police Federation could not even garner as many votes as McCallum won as mayor! The Surrey Police Union said it was pleased to see that at least 88% of registered voters in Surrey did not sign it. The National Police Federation paid more than $104,000 of the total of $118,264 that was used to carry out the so-called referendum, better known as the Surrey Police Vote initiative. In other words, the real people forked out just over $14,000, according to financial documents filed to Elections BC.
* Meanwhile, 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 – Jinny Sims (Surrey-Panorama), Rachna Singh (Surrey-Green Timbers), Jagrup Brar (Surrey-Fleetwood), Harry Bains (Surrey-Newton), Bruce Ralston (Surrey-Whalley) and Garry Begg (Surrey-Guildford) – but also booted out 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 election. That made the new BC Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon assure Punjabi journalists at a press meeting that he supported the municipal police transition. Only recently, Falcon suddenly decided to start opposing the transition — which has only further damaged his credibility and made him lose all respect among South Asians.
* As The VOICE has pointed out time and time again, McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition would have won the municipal election last year but for the RCMP harassment of charging McCallum with public mischief – whereas the RCMP did nothing to charge their supporters with criminal harassment as they heaped abuse on McCallum, his SSC councillors and supporters day and night. The judge ruled in McCallum’s favour. Interestingly, a retired RCMP sergeant wrote this before the verdict: “I also find it amazing that the RCMP thought it would be prudent, or ethical, to investigate this matter, knowing that the alleged victim of public mischief was in fact part of a group that was funded by the RCMP union.” He added: “Knowing what we know about the affect of bias and prejudice on the investigative process, would it have been wise to have another police agency investigate this?” But, of course, the RCMP has never hesitated to play it dirty and I have exposed them several times since the 1990s.
* In any case, despite all the RCMP’s dirty tricks, Locke won last year by FEWER THAN 1,000 VOTES!
IS THAT A MANDATE?!
WHAT is even more shameful and appalling is her UNETHICAL behaviour in connection to the Surrey City Council vote to retain the RCMP.
In June, The VOICE reported that The Globe and Mail’s Francis Bula in an article titled “Surrey mayor declined meetings with Surrey Police while reinstating RCMP,” exposed the conspiracy between Mayor Brenda Locke and the RCMP to sabotage the Surrey Police Service and hoodwink the BC Government.
In spite of knowing that Surrey Connect Councillor Rob Stutt, a former Mountie, was in a clear conflict of interest because his son was a Surrey RCMP constable, Locke and her party councillors with the full knowledge of the RCMP conspired to keep the matter about Stutt’s son a secret as the Surrey Council voted to keep the RCMP as the City’s police force and stop the municipal policing transition. (Talk of trusting Mounties, eh!)
As a journalist put it: “Had Stutt not voted on Nov. 14, the Dec. 9 vote would not have come before council, nor would the June 15 in-camera vote have happened, as the Nov. 14 vote would have failed on a 4-4 tie.”
The RCMP did their best to try and transfer Stutt’s son out of Surrey as fast as they could. How many officers have gotten transfers out of Surrey on their requests?
Thanks to a freedom-of-information request for Locke’s calendar from October 16 to May 10, Bula found that the mayor had her first meeting with Surrey’s main RCMP detachment on October 27, 2022. That was just 12 days after she was elected and before she was sworn in on November 7.
“On Nov. 4, there was an in-person meeting with the head of the RCMP in B.C., Dwayne McDonald, and Surrey’s chief RCMP officer, Brian Edwards, then a regular series of in-person or phone meetings, mostly with Assistant Commissioner Edwards,” Bula reported.
On December 2, McDonald and Edwards as well as city manager Vince Lalonde and Stutt had a meeting with Locke.
Locke met with then-RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki in Ottawa on December 6.
AFTER ALL THIS, CAN LOCKE BE TRUSTED AS MAYOR?
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