A previously secret consultant’s report into Surrey’s transition from the RCMP to a new municipal police force appears to back the mayor’s claim that the transition will pose significant and continuing extra costs for taxpayers in the B.C. city because so many extra officers will need to be hired.
The report, commissioned by the provincial government, was only available to Surrey city councillors last year if they signed nondisclosure statements promising not to discuss it publicly.
The provincial government is imposing the change on the city over the objections of Surrey’s current mayor and council. After being elected in 2022, they voted to reverse the previous council’s support for a new force.
But the report became public Wednesday after it was filed earlier this month in court as the two sides prepare for Surrey’s challenge to the provincial intervention.
Surrey will formally be policed by a new, municipal force as of November
The report, written by Deloitte and dated last April, concludes that by 2027, the new Surrey Police Service would cost $75-million more per year than the RCMP because of higher wages and the addition of 166 extra officers.
The report’s key conclusion is that “this costing analysis shows that retaining SPS appears to be the more costly for the city. The primary drivers of this are the staffing costs due to the inherent higher salary ranges for SPS across all ranks, as well as the 10% (federal) subsidy provided to RCMP.”
Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke, who called the report a “bombshell,” said the numbers vindicate her argument of the last several years that the costs for the new force are much higher than what the province has been acknowledging publicly.
“It is clear that the city and Surrey taxpayers have been misled,” said Ms. Locke at a news conference Wednesday. She guessed that the additional costs, if they become a reality, could result in a 15-per-cent tax increase in future years.
But B.C. Solicitor-General Mike Farnworth, who has been aggressively driving the transition to a municipal force ever since Ms. Locke and her council voted to stop it, called the mayor’s comments “absolutely disingenuous.”
He said the report makes it clear that the difference in costs between the two forces was estimated at about $30-million in the Deloitte report and there’s been no change in that.
He blasted the mayor for putting out the $75-million difference since it is based on hiring another 166 officers to get to that point, something that is not certain.
“To suggest that is the model and to suggest that is the basis for cost is simply completely utterly false,” he said.
The Deloitte report echoes some of the same numbers used by both sides in the debate. Both Surrey’s analysis and the Deloitte report peg the basic salary of RCMP officers at $84,000 a year while the SPS officers are averaged out at $93,600 a year, for example.
The province’s report also projected that the cost of the Surrey Police Service over the RCMP would be about $30- to $34-million more a year for the years 2025 to 2027 if both services were at the current 734 officers now working in Surrey.
That was the number that the province used when offering Surrey $150-million to cover the differential in the first five years.
But the costs would soar far above that if the Surrey Police Service was increased from 734 to 900 officers, a scenario that the report authors said the ministry had asked them to calculate, according to notes throughout the 56-page report.
“Nine hundred sworn officers were determined to be the required authorized strength to support Surrey under SPS as provided by the ministry,” the report noted several times, without any information about why that number was specified.
Ms. Locke has said many times that the numbers will have to increase because of an SPS requirement that there be two officers in every car. The RCMP allows for one officer in a car.
The contract for the SPS notes the employer and the union “agree to develop, implement and follow policy” for two-officer patrol cars, “considering operational requirements.”
But Mr. Farnworth said Wednesday that the policing model for the SPS will be the same as the one for the RCMP.
Frances Bula