The District of North Vancouver won’t be ratifying the new RCMP deal until it gets answers from the Justice Ministry, despite a looming deadline.
Mayor Richard Walton says a special council committee waded through the RCMP deal and came up with questions about potential costs.
“Exactly what the cost and the allocations are going to be for the various communities for the new Green Timbers facility out in Surrey is a concern that all of us have there is certainly the issue of costs relating to potential future unionization of the RCMP those ones potentially have significant costs in the future.”
Walton says also a concern is RCMP pensions and benefits.
He says those costs make the recent RCMP wage hike controversy look “minor.”
Walton says taxpayers expect council to know what the costs of a contract are before signing on and the district simply isn’t there yet.
Walton said “Our concerns haven’t changed even if the contract wording you know can’t be changed given that some communities have already signed it. We stil before we go ahead and sign the contract for our community we at least have to have some kind of comfort that these questions have been considered and we need to get some kind of confidence that we can control the costs going forward.”
Despite the extended deadline to ratify looming at months end Walton says they won’t sign on until answers arrive from the Justice ministry.
He said “If we haven’t got the answers back within two weeks no we won’t be signing at that point. But we aren’t saying we aren’t continuing with the RCMP or not signing but you can’t just provide an ultimatum and then not provide answers back to questions which are extremely legitimate I mean we are serving the public and they expect us that if we are going to enter into a significant contract they expect us to sign that contract knowing what the cost implications are and we are not there yet.”
He says also a concern is the contracts companion document has yet to arrive.
The deadline to ratify the deal, which was extended by a month, is May 31st.
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