Surrey Conservative MLA and former Surrey Mountie Elenore Sturko is slamming the provincial NDP government for earmarking a "pitiful" $5 million province-wide toward new policing technology and stepping up patrols to fight crime in downtown B.C.
"It's like putting up curtains when the house is burning down," she said.
"It's targeted enforcement, right, the kind of boost-and-bust operations that people in Surrey would commonly see police doing around the holidays targetting shoplifters and that type of thing," Sturko told the Now-Leader on Monday, "and it's not that those can't be effective programs but when we look at what the core of the issues are that we're dealing with in British Columbia, there's nothing to address the root cause."
The MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale and opposition public safety critic says $5 million is "basically a drop of water in a vast ocean of problems" like open drug use, theft, robbery, vandalism, public indecency and the "wielding of weapons now seen on the streets in nearly every city and town in B.C."
But Public Safety Minister and Solicitor General Garry Begg, NDP MLA for Surrey-Guildford, says "she's missing the fact that it is the beginning of us concentrating on areas in the province that are under siege by some groups.
"I think $5 million is nothing to scoff at. It's something the RCMP is going to apply across the province and I trust it will take the necessary steps to curb what we're seeing," he told the Now-Leader on Monday.
Asked if more money will be allocated for this from the provincial government, Begg replied that the provincial government and municipal governments "have to step up and help us help the community be able to meet pressing needs. I think all governments, including the Province, have to step up. Certainly the federal government. I know we're making a journey to Ottawa soon to discuss what we need in the provinces.
"This is one of the things that we've always pressed the federal government on. We have to attack this problem where it is and that requires everyone to cooperate, including the opposition," Begg said.
Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke and Councillor Rob Stutt – who like Sturko is also a former Mountie – met with federal Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Gary Anandasangaree in Ottawa on May 30, along with Surrey Liberal MPs Sukh Dhaliwal and Randeep Sarai, to discuss "recent crime trends" and "effective strategies and meaningful action."
Sturko said Williams Lake alone needs $5 million.
“While any investment in policing is positive, this is far too small of an investment in safety to achieve the results our province needs. You can have success with targeted enforcement, but $5 million is simply inadequate," Sturko said. “The problems that we are seeing in communities like Williams Lake originate with untreated mental illness, brain injury, and addiction. If we truly want long-term success, the mental health and addictions crisis must be addressed."
Lorne Doerkson, MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin, also weighed in.
“It is offensive to me to think that one dollar per head in B.C. is going to solve this entire problem,” Doerkson said. “Prolific offenders continue to be released onto the streets days, or even hours, after committing heinous crimes. We need a commitment from the NDP government to keep these repeat offenders incarcerated, or treat them, or both.”
Sturko said while the new $5 million program may work to discourage something like shoplifting, it also increases the number of reports to Crown counsel and the number of court cases "and we don’t have enough Crown prosecutors to do this work.”
“This initiative may not even result in prosecutions, because the courts don’t have enough prosecutors,” Sturko said, to which Begg replied, "It increases the number of reports to Crown counsel? Well. that's what police do, they write reports to Crown counsel in order to discourage criminal behaviour so that if it's increasing, that we do have Crown counsel in place who actually approve those reports to Crown counsel.
"I have not heard that there are any less Crown counsel and I'm sure Crown counsel would talk to us if they feel that ranks are being depleted, but I have not heard that," Begg said.
Sturko noted that the BC Crown Counsel Association recently filed a workload grievance against the BC Prosecution Service in the Interior "and we know that we have challenges here in the Lower Mainland as well.
"So having police create an influx of new reports to Crown counsel without the adequate resourcing of the prosecution service creates a situation where we may in fact see other long delays or charges stayed, or triaging of cases," she warned.
"And at the end of the day," Sturko added, "even once those individuals make it through the court process, if they're convicted, upon their release, they still will continue to potentially have things like untreated addiction, untreated mental illness, and perhaps even homelessness so a lot of the drivers that we're seeing in downtown cores across British Columbia are related to mental health, addiction and homelessness and brain injury.
"So $5 million for an entire province first of all is a pittance, woefully inadequate compared to the scale of the problem that we're seeing across the province and is not going to address the root cause of these problems so it will not provide long-lasting relief for communities."
Meantime, Sturko charged that since 2012 there's been "zero net" new Mounties added to B.C.'s base number of officers with the government filling only existing vacancies. Begg responded that recently the provincial government funded 250 provincial positions across the province and "250 RCMP members is a lot of members, and we've done that."
To that, Sturko retorted, "OK, he's full of crap.
"Yes, they hired those and you know what? The $230 million in Mounties only represents filling vacancies that have existed for a long time so they have these positions on paper but did not fund them and the funding, the $230 million over three years, actually is just unblocking the funding for those positions and bringing it up to the level that it has been since 2012 – so we've had the same number of police officers assigned if you will, under contract to British Columbia, as we did in 2012."
Sturko conceded there are more officers but it doesn't represent a change in the strength of the RCMP since 2012.
"So we've had a significant population growth, the severity of the complexity of the issues that we're dealing with here on the streets have significantly gone up so he's not wrong that they've brought in more Mounties. But this brings us just up to what our contract says that we should have and that's been the same amount of Mounties since 2012."
