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Uproar at UBCM as Bond says feds threatening to pull 5,000 RCMP as talks break down

September 27th, 2011 · 9 Comments

The news exploded late Tuesday afternoon as AG Shirley Bond announced to a crowd of civic politicians at the Union of BC Municipalities that contract talks have stalled and that the feds are saying, “Sign the deal as is or we pull officers out.”

(Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts was probably first with the news. She tweeted about it and I re-tweeted that and then the snowballs started rolling from other directions as well.)

We haven’t heard the federal government side on this, so I’ll be waiting to see if there’s anything they can say to redeem their case. Certainly mayors I talked to were persuasive in how hard it is on them to try to run their cities when they can never be quite sure what kind of bill they’ll get for the RCMP or whether the officers that they raised taxes to pay for will be in the city when needed.

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