A “Special Meeting” or a “Coup d’etat”

Posted on by Pete Cross
Julius Caesar being stabbed by multiple Roman senators in a chaotic and violent scene

Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the Ides of March in 44 BC, by a group of Roman Senators who felt that a pre-emptive strike was necessary in defence of the Roman Republic, asserting that Caesar’s lifelong political authority threatened their political authority. Flash forward to 2026 and replace the theatre of Pompey in Rome with the Police Board in Surrey and you have a broad analogy of the recent firing of police Chief Norm Lepinsky. The Caesar assassination was carried out by a group of Senators, such as Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. Replace them with Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke playing Brutus, and maybe Councillor and former RCMP officer Rob Stutt as Longinus.

That being said, I will admit that it is a bit of stretch to compare the multi-pensioned Lepinski to Caesar, but it is quite clear that the “constructive dismissal” of him, where he was given two days to either resign or be fired was clearly a stab in the back orchestrated by a city council and the Police Board. Despite what the Mayor says, the orchestration of the firing seems to draw a straight line and point to Locke herself. It would also seem that the only plausible motive was clear political revenge and for the record no other explanation has been offered. It will be a costly move for the citizens of Surrey as one must remember that being terminated “without cause” means that by definition it was therefore unrelated to any serious misconduct. It is a requirement under those circumstances that the Board provide at least 3-12 months notice for this termination; which also was not done. The firing of course was conducted in a “special session” and therefore away from public eyes and also just happened when the Chair of the Board Harley Chappell was unable to attend. Chappell was clearly blind sided and was not happy. He went public with his feelings, then resigned, only to be followed by a second councillor James Carwana, who was also upset about the process that led to the firing.

This is indeed a depressing police story and it is both a reflection of the sad state of police management in this country, especially in the RCMP, as well as an exposure of the level of politicization that has become part of policing and has now firmly taken root. Before going further, I will apologize to those readers outside B.C. who may have not been following along with the political/police shenanigans that has been ongoing for years now in Surrey. To catch you up the Surrey Detachment was the largest RCMP Canadian detachment in Canada and it is in the process of being removed and replaced by a municipal police force, the Surrey Police Services. The bumpy and frustrated transition is in its third year now. ( I have written previous blogs of the ongoing tumult within Surrey and the events leading up to this latest development)

In short, it has become a political and logistical mess. The transition battle which has been heartily fought by the local RCMP Senior management and the current Mayor Brenda Locke as they teamed up to fight the removal of the RCMP. The RCMP officers who have been prominent in the fight I have been told by sources, included; now Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald who is the current Commander for E Division, the former head of Surrey Detachment Brian Edwards (more about him to follow), and the likes of former A/Commissioner Manny Mann and Chief Superintendent Sean Gill who was then also of Surrey detachment. I am told that from the beginning this group were the cheerleaders for Mayor Locke and her Surrey Connect Party in the last Surrey municipal election. In that campaign Locke ran on a promise to reverse the decision to switch to a municipal detachment. Keep these names in mind because if we stick to the analogy these individuals would be playing the Senators roles in the Roman times. During that election, Locke was running against Doug McCallum, which is also important to remember as we tell this story.

Locke was elected in October 2022 with 27% of the vote, 1% greater than Doug McCallum who remains her arch nemesis and is also running in the next election. A month later in November 2022, Surrey City Council voted 5-4 to stop the Municipal force in its tracks, even though the transition had already started in 2018 and the transition process had already cost over $100 million in “sunk” costs.

Enter the other player in this story; former RCMP officer Rob Stutt who ran for City Council under the Locke banner and joined her in the fight to retain the RCMP. In the 5-4 vote, he cast the deciding vote for the return of the RCMP. There was a problem though. Mr. Stutt’s wife and son worked for the RCMP in Surrey (his daughter at the time of this writing now also works for the Surrey RCMP). Clearly a conflict of interest, but one apparently that former officer Rob Stutt did not see. So a complaint was filed at the time by the Surrey Police union over Stutt’s clear conflict of interest; and in the end the Ethics Commissioner confirmed that he had in fact contravened Section 21 of the City’s code of conduct. The punishment was that in the future Mr. Stutt needed to be “mindful of conflict of interest” (by the way the Surrey Ethics Commissioner was selected by a Committee of Council which included Mayor Locke). Ironically, Rob Stutt in his election platform had listed as his “Key Projects” that he was involved with: “No. 1 retaining the RCMP”, No. 2 Ethics and Integrity and No. 3 Accountable Development”. (In terms of full disclosure, I worked with Rob in the Surrey Serious Crime Section for a number of years and I find it difficult to believe he did not understand the concept of a conflict of interest –then again I am having trouble recognizing this former cop now turned politician).

After this vote, the provincial government reassessed, but in the end once again sided with the formation of the Municipal force, and ordered the City to go along, promising them further monies to wash away the bad taste in the mouth of grumpy Brenda and her council. Over the next couple of years, Locke and her disciples felt that it would be better to continue the fight then give in, so there were constant eruptions between Ms. Locke and the SPS. There were police budget cuts, complaints of Lepinski not being overly concerned about asian extortion police shootings in the south east asian community (Locke calling for a national inquiry); complaints of how Lepinski was allocating police resources, and ordering Lepinski to move faster with the takeover of the Cloverdale area of Surrey. At the street operatoinal level the discontentment and bad feelings began to grow, often boiling over between the Mounties and the new SPS. On the other side of the fence, other sources tell me that some of the hires by the new agency, borne out of desperation to fill the numbers are lacking both in experience and professionalism. People are saying that a lot of their hires were based on connections and friendships driven by “double dipping”and less on investigative capability leaving widening gaps in operational abilities. For his part Lepinski, the politician seems to have over promised the speed and capabilities of the transition.

But the saga does not stop there. Ms. Locke seemed to remain fixated on the need for political control of the police department.

Mayor Locke then appointed the previously reported on Brian Edwards of the Surrey RCMP to a new position in the city of Surrey; one she created, to head the new Public Safety Department. This meant that the SPS and Chief Lepinski and the Fire Chief would now report to Edwards, a person who actively campaigned with the RCMP to get rid of the Surrey Police Service. The first shot in the planned coup seems to have begun.

Despite all this, on November 29, 2024, the SPS became the official police of jurisdiction for the City of Surrey.

Two years later in March 2026, a shake up of the Police Board occurs and the Provincial government in “consultation with the Mayor” Brenda Locke announces some board members being replaced with new members. Locke no longer would be the Chair of the police board, but one of the few members retained for the new Board was Rob Stutt.

A month and a half later, on May 11, 2026 the Mayor issues a statement that she was against Lepinski removing resources from the eight member gang unit to the Cloverdale area of Surrey, saying that disagreed strongly with her police Chief.

May 29, 2026 the Police Board now being chaired by Rob Stutt due to the temporary absence of Police Board Chair Chappell, calls for a “special meeting” to be held in camera, in other words behind closed doors and not to be observed by the public.

On June 1st Lepinski returns from vacation and is fired as a result of that meeting, or asked to resign within two days. Mayor Locke in a scene out of Goodfellas where an alibi is needed, says that she was “out of town” and stressed how the decision that was made was made by an “independent police board” that she “didn’t even know for sure” that he had been fired. Unfortunately for the Board the drama that unfolded drew the ire of the general public, became a topic on local radio, and various interests began to chime in, most of whom smelled something fishy about the whole process.

Mayor Locke by the way is headed to an election of October 2026. The afore mentioned Doug McCallum has once again entered the Mayoral race and on June 10th, in a press conference asserts the obvious– that “political pressure drove the decision” to remove Lepinski. He files a formal complaint with the Provincial government. He asserts that the Police Act was violated, and points the finger directly at Rob Stutt. Premier Eby and his government now say that they weren’t involved but that the “Board followed the legal procedures” and they didn’t really want to get involved anymore; despite being directly involved in all of it since the very beginning.

The city and the Police Board needed to do damage control.

On June 17th, 2026 the Board held a meeting that was open to the public and things predictably got heated. The police board aimed to try and stymie the backlash and passed a”Directive” which aimed to curtail any comments coming from the SPS and its executives. It directed from that point forward the SPS could not publicly criticize, have personal opinions, engage in speculative commentary or undermine the role of the Board. The directive passed, led by the new Board chair Perm Jawanda who when asked about the firing of Lepinski stated that he was replaced because of “where they were headed they needed a different leader”. Also in the meeting a former Board member stood up and accused Stutt and the new Board of improper behaviour and said that they should all resign. They called her out of order and adjourned the meeting.

The whole embarassment is captured on video.

I have reached out to Rob Stutt for comment, however his email is no longer valid. It is likely that he is unable to comment at this time, as I am sure the lawyers for the City are trying to get a Non-disclosure agreement in front of Lepinski and avoid the risk of being involved in a wrongful dismissal suit.

The new chair of the police board, Perm Jawanda for her part has said that “I don’t see the political influence”. Much like Rob Stutt not seeing the conflict of interest. All involved have to be assuming that most of us are stupid, and that the voters of Surrey will forget before October 2026.

As the saga plays out in the press the Board promises that a quick replacement will be found. One of the front runners, I am told, and believe it or not, now seems to be none other than Dwayne McDonald of the RCMP. So Mr. Edwards and Mr. McDonald could be reunited once again. If that happens, the coup would then be complete and Locke will have her faithful servants standing with her prior to the election. I am being told that the current group of Deputies in the SPS are not interested in the Chief’s job after watching all the political machinations with Locke and crew over the last couple of years. I was also told that Deputy Howard Chow of the Vancouver City Police was a candidate but is also not interested.

The fact that this lunacy was and continues to be demonstrated in what was the RCMP’s largest municipal detachment in Canada makes this historically sad. As a former long standing member of the RCMP I am embarrassed by the lack of ethics or principles on the part of the senior Mounties. However I was not a fan of the choice of Lepinski either. Admittedly, in the end I was in favour of the transition, because I thought the SPS were needed in that fast growing city, and they needed to get away from the Ottawa controlled bureaucracy of the RCMP. However, my confidence has been shaken by some of the personnel hired for the Surrey Police Service who were often political and friend choices, sometimes based on desperation and not based on a track record. Now with the firing of the Chief in this underhanded fashion and if Locke and her crew get their way, it seems that the Surrey Police Service, possibly led by the double dipping Mounties who once hated them, are now destined for a very rocky road in the coming years. Despite the directive to silence any discontent, the members on both sides are going to continue to talk, albeit under their breath. It could get very uncomfortable.

At the very least, even though there are central privacy issues in the firing, the citizens of Surrey have a right to know what happened, what and who promoted the firing of Lepinski, and how much it is going to cost in the end. And they should be told before the next municipal election. These problems are not the fault of the uniform officers on either side of the debate, the problem originates and has been exacerbated by short sighted regional politics, a lack of ethics and integrity and unprincipled senior police management. And, like a lot of coups, we can only hope that it may be short lived.

Small Dutch boy needed…

Posted on by Pete Cross

There are a lot of analogies that would seem to fit the current state of bedlam in Surrey, that bastion of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police efforts in municipal policing, their veritable flagship of contract policing. Mary Mapes Dodge in her story of “Hans Brinker; or the Silver Skates” wrote about the little Dutch boy who saved his country from disaster, by plugging a finger in the dike until help arrived the next day. It seems to be a fitting description of Surrey and the RCMP– in light of the back and forth bureaucratic political maelstrom now taking place in that fair city while also reflecting the current overall state of Canada’s national police force.

Of course in this metaphorical dike there is more than a single hole, there are many, all of which are being plugged by the fingers of the likes of Assistant Commissioner Brian Edwards, Assistant Commissioner Manny Mann, and Chief Superintendent Sean Gill. Playing the Dutch Queen, is the the illustrious and apparent policing expert Brenda Locke who is of course, now the mayor of Surrey with her 28% of the popular vote versus 27.3% of the popular vote for Doug McCallum.

Her lacklustre .7% win did not deter her from giving the speech about the “people have spoken”. Brenda Locke to keep her promise is willing to pay out over $100 million of taxpayer dollars to go back to the status quo of keeping the Mounties. (Did we mention that she used to be a party supporter of McCallum when he originally made it an election issue for a separate police force). She fell out of McCallum’s favour though and then switched her position. This all seems to be more about political revenge than thought out policy. In any event it has come about that on November 29th, Locke and her new group of councillors voting 5-4, have now endorsed the “framework for a development of a plan” to undo what has been done. This was after a presentation by A/Comm Edwards to the City council wherein he talked about what a great job the Mounties are doing and will continue to do when they get rid of those nasty Surrey Police Service upstarts, which by the way are now a few hundred members strong. A “Project Team” will oversee a development of this plan, that will need to be submitted to city council by December 12, 2022– which in turn would need to be forwarded to the BC Solicitor General and the Public Safety Minister for approval. Of course new Premier Eby will have a final say, one way or another.

One must keep in mind that the transition to a City Police Service has already been approved by all three levels of government.

For the BC Police Services and the Ministers to reverse that original McCallum majority government led initiative, one would think will take some real persuasion. Locke must realize that it is a high hill to climb so she has tried to stack her Project Team by hiring Dr. Peter German (clearly someone who has the ear of Premier Eby who had hired German when he was looking into money laundering and the casinos) and Tonia Enger (a self-declared “contract policing expert”). Both of course are former RCMP officers of lengthy service, and one would have to assume that their report will now have to be supportive of a return to the RCMP, and somehow also make it seem logical. Expect to see the money issue down-played.

The RCMP and their union, the National Police Federation, have been strident and vocal supporters of Locke to oppose McCallum, the Darth Vader of Surrey politics. I have been told on good authority that at the election headquarters for Locke on the night of the vote, Edwards, Mann and Gill were there in full glory, exhorting and cheering on their new mayoral hero. So much for police being politically impartial.

Then there was the curious case of public mischief brought against the Mayor, of which he was acquitted, much to the Mountie chagrin. What was curious about the case was that McCallum made a complaint of assault, and within a few days, he himself was charged with public mischief. The whole case should never have gone forward, but that aside, there is something highly suspicious about the Mounties bringing charges against McCallum in the first place, and in such a quick turnaround. Now, with little doubt, the City will also have to pick up McCallum’s very pricey legal bills.

There is also a ground level war going on between the Mounties and those that wish to replace them. The Mountie union for their part, will also be sending a report to the government with their view of the situation. The NPF spokesman, Ryan Buhrig, made an interesting comment to the press, in that he stated that seven of the fourteen “shifts” were currently “below minimum staffing levels”. Is this to blame on the transition, or is he admitting that the RCMP is currently not able to meet the contract needs? There is little doubt that these shifts were “below minimum” long before the Surrey Police Service came into existence.

I have by now heard from uniform officers from both sides. The RCMP officers I have spoken with make no bones about the fact that they don’t like the SPS officers, and the SPS officers in turn have complained about the brutal way they have been treated. Safe to say, the situation, morale wise is not good. I heard on high authority that the government at one time seriously considered making a formal complaint to the Public Complaints commission about the actions of some of the RCMP top management in their efforts to block the SPS. Their brief consideration was that the level of obstruction amounted to a form of “corruption”. They did not follow up for obvious political reasons.

If one wants to judge what the best course of action would be, there is a clear need to step back from the infantile actions of the politicians and senior police managers. One needs to look at this from the practical viewpoint and step away from the misinformation campaigns and the biased and often ignorant rhetoric. Let’s even forget about the monies spent, the monies about to be spent, or the monies about to be lost. The most basic decision and central question is whether or not the RCMP are even still capable of municipal and contract policing.

In the rest of the country, in academic circles, and even in the Federal RCMP rarefied air of Ottawa there is a very different dialogue going on. If contract policing is the dike then the holes in the dike, the holes in the organizational structure, are becoming increasingly apparent and they are numerous. The solution that is being discussed, proffered and debated is whether or not the time has come to let the dike break and in effect let the RCMP to get out of “contract policing”.

The most recent example is in an essay by Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell. Lynch is a former clerk of the Privy Council Office, and is now with BMO Financial; Mitchell is an adjunct professor at Carleton University. The paper got the attention of the Globe and Mail and is adding to the further discussion of this possibility. In the paper they argue that the problems of the RCMP are large in scope and that “they are inherently structural, requiring fundamental change to re-shape”. The Mountie “jumble of accountabilities” is supported by an “organizational model that fails them” and that they are “poorly positioned to discharge their responsibilities”.

Of course this is just the latest, in 2007 the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP, stated that there was a requirement for a “much higher degree of managerial competence and sophistication than that which is currently found in the RCMP”. The Bastarache report said that the “culture is toxic, misogynistic, and homophobic”. In July 2022 an all party committee of the BC Legislature was tasked with reviewing the Police Act for the Province, stated that “we need to end contract policing”. In an associated poll, 39% of the people agreed with replacing the RCMP, 38% opposed and 23% were undecided.

Further along this year we have witnessed the Portapique inquiry, which showed that the managers of H Division, at the senior levels were in-fighting with their municipal agencies. Lynch and Mitchell also believed that the Emergencies Act inquiry in the end “portrays an indecisive federal police force”. It demonstrated that the very top of the organization is fraught with miscommunication and that they have become a fully integrated “political” police force, more interested in playing the political game than the operational game. Again, none of these latest revelations are good and the tarnish is not going to wear off soon.

On a lower level, when it comes to the more basic issues and the ability to staff their contracts, I am being told that the Federal positions in British Columbia are now almost 50% vacant, while the other Provincial units are approaching 30% vacancy rates. There is a lack of recruitment and the RCMP is now having trouble enticing anyone to a career and therefore an inability to staff positions. This is not new, this organization has been failing in this regard for many many years. As a result ideas are being floated in British Columbia, Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan for leaving the RCMP contracts altogether.

The Eby government has now had to provide an additional $230 million to the RCMP to assist in “fully staffing” rural policing as part of his “Safer Communities Act Plan”. This would seem to go to the very heart of the issue of not being able to fulfill the current contract.

It is also impossible to argue that the RCMP is any “cheaper” than a municipal police force, as it is a myth that the 10% discount given to the RCMP is a game changer. This is wholly swallowed up with the extra manpower demands which come about due to Federal commitments at a cost to the municipal and provincial policing needs.

There is historic irony. The British Columbia Provincial Police were disbanded on August 15, 1950, a move that was made for two primary reasons. One, was the hope that by doing so, if they brought in the RCMP they wouldn’t unionize; and secondly, they wanted to put a better fight against Communism. It would seem that on both of those issues the fight is over.

The current structure of the RCMP is damaged, in need of severe repairs. As a retired RCMP who preferred contract and the criminal work over the Federal, it is indeed bittersweet to watch the current machinations in Surrey. It is difficult to watch the demise of the RCMP in its present form, but if you don’t think it is happening you are not watching. The organization will not disappear, but I suspect we will not recognize it 20 years from now. It was good while it lasted, but policing is evolving, the past is the past and evolution is necessary to keep up with the quickly changing times. In Surrey, there is a futile attempt underway to argue that all would be good if one were to return to the RCMP. But it is a dishonest argument.

Who knows or would even dare to guess where this group of politicians will lead us. If the government gives in to the misguided sentiment of Brenda Locke and her cohorts, the only known thing for sure that the Surrey taxpayers are going to be on the hook for a rather imposing tax bill. All to return to an organization whose time is now completely taken up in plugging the holes, trying to hold back the flood waters against structural and inevitable change.

Photo by bertknot Courtesy of Flickr Commons – Some rights Reserved