Feds play hardball with BC on RCMP, because they can
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 by David Eby
It's a tough lesson to learn. The Federal Government says that B.C. can take what it is offering for policing and suck it up, or they're going to pack up their Mounties and go home.
The Province, for their part, has finally broken the silence about the negotiations around the 20-year policing agreement the BCCLA has been sounding the alarm on for more than a year, and suddenly announced that accountability measures are one of the key stumbling blocks.
For years too the BCCLA has been pointing out that 80% of our province is policed by a force that isn't accountable to anyone in the Province, doesn't follow provincial police accountability rules and mechanisms, and doesn't use provincial use of force standards. The BCCLA has been encouraging expansion of regional police, tribal police, and provincial policing responses.
The BCCLA is not unique in this respect, nor is such concern a partisan matter of interest, everyone from former Solicitor General and former West Vancouver Police Chief Kash Heed, a B.C. Liberal MLA, along with former Attorney General and former B.C. Liberal MLA Wally Oppal, have called for reform of how we police B.C.
In fact I understand that Heed, while Solicitor General, asked for a document costing out transition to a provincial police force, and had an audit done of the RCMP's performance. For his trouble, Heed seemed to attract a lot of RCMP attention, including the remarkable step of a search warrant executed at the West Van Police Department Headquarters without any charges being laid to date.
Too bad neither the audit nor the costing document has been made available to the public.
Too bad too that the subject matter of the negotiations of the contract with the RCMP have been secret as well until today, and even now the specific issues aren't clear. The Province apparently doesn't understand that NGOs aren't just a pain when they talk about accountability at the provincial level, but that they can also be a boon in supporting you at the negotiating table - you just have to be transparent about what's going on.
Now there's no plan for policing by anything other than the RCMP, nobody outside Cabinet knows what's been going on at the negotiating table, nobody knows how the RCMP have done in their performance on the contract, and nobody knows what the cost would be to transition to provincial or regional policing or just to reduce some of our dependence on the RCMP.
Could the deck be stacked any more in favour of the status quo for policing in BC?
The Province, for their part, has finally broken the silence about the negotiations around the 20-year policing agreement the BCCLA has been sounding the alarm on for more than a year, and suddenly announced that accountability measures are one of the key stumbling blocks.
For years too the BCCLA has been pointing out that 80% of our province is policed by a force that isn't accountable to anyone in the Province, doesn't follow provincial police accountability rules and mechanisms, and doesn't use provincial use of force standards. The BCCLA has been encouraging expansion of regional police, tribal police, and provincial policing responses.
The BCCLA is not unique in this respect, nor is such concern a partisan matter of interest, everyone from former Solicitor General and former West Vancouver Police Chief Kash Heed, a B.C. Liberal MLA, along with former Attorney General and former B.C. Liberal MLA Wally Oppal, have called for reform of how we police B.C.
In fact I understand that Heed, while Solicitor General, asked for a document costing out transition to a provincial police force, and had an audit done of the RCMP's performance. For his trouble, Heed seemed to attract a lot of RCMP attention, including the remarkable step of a search warrant executed at the West Van Police Department Headquarters without any charges being laid to date.
Too bad neither the audit nor the costing document has been made available to the public.
Too bad too that the subject matter of the negotiations of the contract with the RCMP have been secret as well until today, and even now the specific issues aren't clear. The Province apparently doesn't understand that NGOs aren't just a pain when they talk about accountability at the provincial level, but that they can also be a boon in supporting you at the negotiating table - you just have to be transparent about what's going on.
Now there's no plan for policing by anything other than the RCMP, nobody outside Cabinet knows what's been going on at the negotiating table, nobody knows how the RCMP have done in their performance on the contract, and nobody knows what the cost would be to transition to provincial or regional policing or just to reduce some of our dependence on the RCMP.
Could the deck be stacked any more in favour of the status quo for policing in BC?
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