St. ALBERT – A provincial plan to dump the RCMP and replace it with a provincial police force could mean a whopping property tax increase for residents of St. Albert and other smaller Alberta communities, Marie Renaud, the MLA representing most of the city warned in a statement Monday.
Plenty of Albertans suspected that already, but Premier Danielle Smith’s government has been determined to press ahead with the scheme anyway because it’s a key part of its sovereignty-association agenda that seems to have been ginned up at least in part as a way to attack Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Government in Ottawa.
But by pointing out that that a plan launched in Surrey, B.C., in 2018 to replace the Mounties with a municipal force would have resulted in the need for property taxes in the Vancouver-area bedroom city to rise by 55 per cent, Renaud pulled the fire alarm on one of the United Conservative Party (UCP)’s signature policies.
Officials in the B.C. city concluded that when fully implemented a municipal police force would have cost $37.2 million more each year than keeping the RCMP – an increase of 21.3 per cent that would have led to the 55-per-cent property tax increase.
“In communities like St. Albert,” Renaud’s news release Tuesday noted, “a 55 per cent tax increase would mean an extra $2,784 per year for the average household.”
MLA Renaud, a New Democrat, certainly didn’t say this, but as a resident of St. Albert I can tell you this is a community where the prospect of a property tax increase of more than two or three per cent was enough to have city council seriously consider slashing the public library’s budget by a third.
I reckon that the possibility of a 55-per-cent property tax increase for any reason in this suburban city of 70,000 northwest of Edmonton would result in something approaching mass hysteria, especially in light of the high anxiety already being experienced by many homeowners because of rising interest rates.
In fairness, the plan accepted by Surrey City Council in 2018 to replace the RCMP would have been a much more complicated transition than in St. Albert. With a population approaching 600,000, B.C.’s second-largest city is more than eight times as big as St. Albert. And the transition was already under way with some Surrey Police Service officers hired.
Several years of news coverage about the project, moreover, makes it pretty clear the B.C. city has long been divided about the best way to ensure effective police services. with strikingly different narratives told by each side.
The plan was championed by a previous mayor. The current mayor campaigned against it and won in the October 15, 2022, B.C. municipal election. Surrey’s new city council voted in November to scuttle the plan and stick with the Mounties.
Meanwhile, in quiet little St. Albert, the only person I’ve ever personally heard advocate dumping the RCMP was an Edmonton Police Service officer who lived here, along with quite a few of his colleagues, who had some spicy observations about the Mounties that may not have been entirely fair.
Be that as it may, his most substantive argument ran along the same lines as those of the advocates of a Surrey force: RCMP services may cost less, but you don’t get quite as many cops.
Of course, unlike Surrey, vandalism to a bus shelter is a major crime in St. Albert.
“The UCP likes to point to Surrey as an example for scrapping the RCMP,” Renaud said. “But we can see from this real-world example that it will cost Albertans more at a time when they’re already struggling to make ends meet.”
She noted that “Albertans are already paying more for utilities, car insurance, tuition, and student debt under the UCP.”
An Alberta Government report in 2021 found transitioning to an Alberta provincial police force alone would cost $366 million. Plus, Alberta would be on the hook for another $170 million a year in annual funding Ottawa provides for the RCMP.
The Alberta report also made the claim – which Renaud dismisses as “dubious” – that it would cost $7 million a year less to administer a provincial service.
However, said Renaud’s news release, “if the example of Surrey is applied to Alberta, a 21 per cent increase to the cost of operating a provincial police force means Albertans would have to pay an extra $157 million per year for the police force, along with the transition costs and loss of federal funding.”
Renaud also noted that in 2020 Red Deer officials concluded that replacing the RCMP with a municipal force would cost that Central Alberta city of about 100,000 an additional $13.5 million a year, excluding start-up costs. Red Deer City Council rejected the plan because of its potential impact on property taxes.
It will be interesting to see what Dale Nally, the UCP MLA for Morinville-St. Albert, has to say about this, if anything.
Given the sensitivity about tax increases in this place, he might be wise to steer clear of the topic entirely.
The NDP, led by Opposition Leader and former premier Rachel Notley, has vowed to drop the provincial police scheme if elected.
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