Justice Wallace Craig on North Shore Policing
TIME TO DECIDE ON POLICING
January 9, 2007
MAKE 2008 a year in which you have your say on the thorny issue of North Shore policing.
Let’s get our three mayors and their fellow councillors out of the wallow of patchwork policing before the municipal elections this autumn.
Before summer days are upon us we must arm-twist municipal incumbents and aspirants alike into declaring whether they will create a civilian constabulary to police the North Shore. And while we’re doing that, our local MLA’s should stand and be counted on the issue.
We need to ferret out the standpoint of each candidate and make sure it is not just a parroting of opinions of senior bureaucrats or the supposed wisdom of outside experts.
Voting is not enough!
With this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we can produce a collective and democratic decision on policing. In this year you have an opportunity to familiarize yourselves with RCMP paramilitary policing and compare it with local civilian policing. Use shrewd common sense, make your mind up and tell candidates what kind of policing your prefer. If they are uninterested or fail to respond, then go at them with the intensity of a sheep-herding border collie.
We British Columbians, living out our lives in the City and District of North Vancouver, are entitled to be served by an independent North Shore police department in which every constable is our employee and subject to the provincial Police Act.
Beyond that it is time to end the decades-old game of make-believe that “E” division of the RCMP is an actual and controllable British Columbia Provincial Police force.
The British North America Act requires that Administration of Justice be carried out by provincial governments. Administration of Justice includes policing. Yet on a day in 1950 political expediency trumped constitutionality as our provincial government handed over provincial policing to an Ottawa controlled division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This constitutional impropriety is still with us. If the overall contract with “E” division of the RCMP is renewed in 2012 for another 20 years it will be more than deceitful and misleading, it will be a pernicious act of ministerial misfeasance.
The past year will not slip quietly away. It was a time of intense exposure of outrageous misadventures and weaknesses in our once legendary national police force, now blundering and top-heavy with bureaucrats in uniform. A musty old paramilitary police force so institutionalized that it has been judged incapable of producing a commissioner from within its highest ranks and is now actually saddled with a civil-servant commissioner. Yet at street level in the City and District of North Vancouver, dedicated RCMP constables go about performing their duties with abilities and skills equal to constables employed by the District of West Vancouver.
A North Shore decision to create a civilian police department will certainly reverberate in other urban communities and trigger the implementation of other civilian police departments. That may force our provincial government to end contracting-out of provincial policing and by 2012 to bring back a British Columbia provincial police force to provide rural policing.
I believe that the decision over policing on the North Shore has ramifications beyond our little hillside. It will catch the attention of the federal government and may well cause the minister in charge of the RCMP to withdraw the force from engagement in urban policing and dedicate it to a less visible role enforcing federal laws.
But for us on the hillside it is a grass-roots opportunity to bring change. You can participate in making a decision on a black and white choice: to continue with patchwork policing; or be gutsy and go with one police force from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay, one chief constable, a minimal command structure, all officers working out of the police station at 14th Street and St. Georges Avenue in the City of North Vancouver, all of them bound to comply with the provincial Police Act and its complaint process and the governing presence of a North Shore police board.
This is my eighth column on policing. All of them are posted on my website http://www.realjustice.ca/. During the coming months I will write occasionally about police boards, the Justice Institute of British Columbia, the complaint process, and particularly on the cost of policing the North Shore. Contact Judicial Gadfly at wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca or by posting your comment directly on the Writer’s Corner of http://www.realjustice.ca/. This column was published January 9, 2007 by the North Shore News.
January 9, 2007
MAKE 2008 a year in which you have your say on the thorny issue of North Shore policing.
Let’s get our three mayors and their fellow councillors out of the wallow of patchwork policing before the municipal elections this autumn.
Before summer days are upon us we must arm-twist municipal incumbents and aspirants alike into declaring whether they will create a civilian constabulary to police the North Shore. And while we’re doing that, our local MLA’s should stand and be counted on the issue.
We need to ferret out the standpoint of each candidate and make sure it is not just a parroting of opinions of senior bureaucrats or the supposed wisdom of outside experts.
Voting is not enough!
With this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we can produce a collective and democratic decision on policing. In this year you have an opportunity to familiarize yourselves with RCMP paramilitary policing and compare it with local civilian policing. Use shrewd common sense, make your mind up and tell candidates what kind of policing your prefer. If they are uninterested or fail to respond, then go at them with the intensity of a sheep-herding border collie.
We British Columbians, living out our lives in the City and District of North Vancouver, are entitled to be served by an independent North Shore police department in which every constable is our employee and subject to the provincial Police Act.
Beyond that it is time to end the decades-old game of make-believe that “E” division of the RCMP is an actual and controllable British Columbia Provincial Police force.
The British North America Act requires that Administration of Justice be carried out by provincial governments. Administration of Justice includes policing. Yet on a day in 1950 political expediency trumped constitutionality as our provincial government handed over provincial policing to an Ottawa controlled division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This constitutional impropriety is still with us. If the overall contract with “E” division of the RCMP is renewed in 2012 for another 20 years it will be more than deceitful and misleading, it will be a pernicious act of ministerial misfeasance.
The past year will not slip quietly away. It was a time of intense exposure of outrageous misadventures and weaknesses in our once legendary national police force, now blundering and top-heavy with bureaucrats in uniform. A musty old paramilitary police force so institutionalized that it has been judged incapable of producing a commissioner from within its highest ranks and is now actually saddled with a civil-servant commissioner. Yet at street level in the City and District of North Vancouver, dedicated RCMP constables go about performing their duties with abilities and skills equal to constables employed by the District of West Vancouver.
A North Shore decision to create a civilian police department will certainly reverberate in other urban communities and trigger the implementation of other civilian police departments. That may force our provincial government to end contracting-out of provincial policing and by 2012 to bring back a British Columbia provincial police force to provide rural policing.
I believe that the decision over policing on the North Shore has ramifications beyond our little hillside. It will catch the attention of the federal government and may well cause the minister in charge of the RCMP to withdraw the force from engagement in urban policing and dedicate it to a less visible role enforcing federal laws.
But for us on the hillside it is a grass-roots opportunity to bring change. You can participate in making a decision on a black and white choice: to continue with patchwork policing; or be gutsy and go with one police force from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay, one chief constable, a minimal command structure, all officers working out of the police station at 14th Street and St. Georges Avenue in the City of North Vancouver, all of them bound to comply with the provincial Police Act and its complaint process and the governing presence of a North Shore police board.
This is my eighth column on policing. All of them are posted on my website http://www.realjustice.ca/. During the coming months I will write occasionally about police boards, the Justice Institute of British Columbia, the complaint process, and particularly on the cost of policing the North Shore. Contact Judicial Gadfly at wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca or by posting your comment directly on the Writer’s Corner of http://www.realjustice.ca/. This column was published January 9, 2007 by the North Shore News.
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