The voters of Surrey have spoken, and former city councillor Brenda Locke has unseated incumbent Mayor Doug McCallum, Global News projects.
The decision caps a race that saw nearly half a dozen high-profile candidates put their names forward, including several federal and provincial politicians with roots in Surrey.
In the end, it came down to a tight three-way race between McCallum, Locke and Gordie Hogg, the former mayor of White Rock and a former MLA and MP for South Surrey.
Locke, who was elected to council in 2018 as a part of McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition, quit the party in 2019 claiming dysfunction on council and conflict over McCallum’s plan to drop the Surrey RCMP for a municipal police force.
One of her key election promises has been to scrap that transition, which she claims will save the city more than half a billion dollars.
That move is already significantly underway, and Locke’s election now leaves a major question mark about the future of policing in the city.
“First of all, we need to keep the Surrey RCMP right here in Surrey,” Locke told cheering supporters Saturday night.
“The RCMP are the police of jurisdiction in Surrey and they will remain the police of jurisdiction in the City of Surrey,” she told Global News in a subsequent interview.
Locke said the transition process was not too far along to stop. She said the city would “figure out something” for the 150 Surrey Police Service officers who have come online already and “will not let them down.”
“I’ve talked to the federal minister about it,” she said.
You know, they they can go back to their original jurisdiction if they choose to, or the RCMP can ladder them in and they have a shortened program. We can look at that.
McCallum conceded the race in a brief speech to his supporters early in the evening.
“I’ve worked hard for this city and maybe it’s time for me maybe to put my feet up and really enjoy life,” he said.
He later briefly revoked his concession, when it appeared with one polling station left to count he could close the gap with Locke, only to re-concede late in the evening.
Much of the campaign in Surrey has focused on accountability and toxicity at city hall. Incidents of citizens being banned from the building or cut off at public meetings, as well as a city ban on the public putting political signs on their lawns, have all made recent headlines.
McCallum is also facing a criminal charge of public mischief over his allegations hat an opponent of the police transition ran his foot over in a supermarket parking lot. That case is set to be heard at the end of the month.
All of the candidates save for McCallum campaigned on new accountability measures.
Locke has pledged to advocate for municipal recall legislation, and to reinstate the city’s ethics commissioner. That office’s work has been on hold since April, when a majority on council led by McCallum voted to freeze its work until after the election.
Speaking on Global News’ Decision 2022 election special, former Liberal cabinet minister Mary Polak drew a parallel between Locke’s victory and former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts’ 2005 victory — also against McCallum.
“When you cut away the issues that we’ve talked about around crime, housing, et cetera — really in Surrey what people were talking about was chaos at city hall, scandal in the mayor’s office and lack of transparency there,” she said.
“And now here’s Brenda. She has the chance to do what Dianne did: Create a pathway for herself as a reformer.”
Former Surrey mayor Linda Hepner, who was at Locke’s campaign headquarters, told Global News it was clear that voters wanted a shake up.
“I think even at the early polls, the numbers that came out told me people were looking for change, and I think tonight those numbers speak for themselves,” she said.
Saturday’s results proved disappointing for two other high-profile candidates.
With the majority of polling stations reporting, NDP MLA Jinny Simms and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal sat in a distant fourth and fifth.
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