Thoughts on BC Politics and More

The BC NDP government has failed to address extortion in British Columbia with the urgency it has demanded from day one, say Conservative Interim Leader Trevor Halford and Steve Kooner Critic for Attorney General, responding to Premier David Eby’s announcement of a new provincial advisory group. “Communities have been calling for action for nearly a year,” said Halford. “Business owners, families, and workers have been living in fear while the NDP failed to provide the resources necessary to confront these brazen acts of violence.” Halford noted that it took the City of Surrey publicly calling on the federal government to declare a federal emergency before the NDP finally moved to get more boots on the ground. “Leadership is not reacting after the damage is already done, it’s preventing harm before communities are pushed to the breaking point,” he said. The Premier has now committed to ‘listening’ to the community, but Halford said that commitment comes far too late. “They should have ...

The head of a national team set up to support police departments investigating cases of extortion in cities across Canada said Surrey’s municipal police force is working well with the RCMP, but could not comment on why significant arrests have been made in Ontario and Alberta and not BC. RCMP Supt. Adam MacIntosh said there is a high level of “competence and cooperation” between SPS and RCMP officers investigating the series of extortions targeting South Asian businesses. His team was created in the fall of 2023 to increase coordination between police departments in Canadian cities, such as Brampton, Edmonton and Surrey, which were all seeing a rise in extortion cases at that time. Since then, police in Brampton and Edmonton have made arrests, while the attacks in Surrey appear to be ramping up again ... CLICK HERE for the full story

British Columbia is restricting the use of cellphones in schools and targeting social media companies in an attempt to reduce the harm they cause to children, which Premier David Eby likened to the damage from tobacco and opioids.  Eby said Friday the province would launch services to remove predatory images from the internet used for cyberbullying and extortion, as well as introduce legislation in the spring to allow BC to sue social media companies for costs relating to “population-level” harms ... CLICK HERE for the full story