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HUMBOLDT BUS CRASH SURVIVOR SKATES AGAIN IN SURREY
Police transition
Surrey NDP MLAs frosty about taking cop referendum concept to cabinet Tom Zytaruk tom.zytaruk@surreynowleader.com
Layne Matechuk smiles during a break from skating at Excellent Ice arena in Surrey last Thursday (Nov. 18). The former Humboldt Broncos junior hockey player, 21, is taking part in a 14-week program through Surrey Neuroplasticity Clinic to help him play recreational hockey one day. “I feel like I’m getting back to how I used to be playing hockey,” said Matechuk, who was seriously injured in the Saskatchewan team’s catastrophic bus crash in April 2018, when 10 of his teammates were killed, among others. See story on page A3. (Photo: Tom Zillich)
Surrey’s NDP MLAs are not raring to lobby the provincial government cabinet to call a regional referendum on Surrey’s policing transition. Last week, Elections BC announced that an initiative petition calling for a referendum on the issue failed. The Surrey Police Vote Citizens Initiative Campaign collected 42,942 signatures from Surrey residents who want a referendum held on the transition. That’s just 2,622 shy of the 45,564 votes Mayor Doug McCallum, champion of the controversial policing switchover, received in the 2018 civic election. But Elections BC determined it failed because under the Recall and Initiative Act a petition must gather signatures from at least 10 per cent of the registered voters in each of the province’s 87 electoral districts to succeed. Still, the petitioners hope cabinet will call a regional referendum under the B.C. Referendum Act , given the large number of signatures collected in Surrey, which
was well over the 10 per cent threshold locally. Bill Tieleman, a strategist for that petition campaign notes that the provincial government under the Referendum Act has the power through cabinet to order a referendum on Surrey policing at any point in time. “And so we will continue to push the provincial government to hold a referendum so that Surrey voters can have a democratic decision on whether they want to retain the RCMP or go to the proposed Surrey Police Service.” He said his group has made an official presentation to the government seeking a regional referendum, “which we’re not releasing publicly at this point but we will be looking forward to an official response, we don’t have that yet.” While Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum says it’s “clearly time to move on,” Coun. Brenda Locke maintains the fight is still “absolutely game on” and it’s time for Surrey’s NDP MLAs “to take heat.” Continued on A9