The possibility of a provincial police force has the NDP raising concerns about the potential financial costs for municipalities.
Kyle Kasawski, the NDP’s Municipal Affairs Critic, says it’s a “costly idea” that the UCP didn’t campaign on during the last provincial election.
“They said they weren’t going to look at a provincial police force and municipalities were glad about that because over 70 municipalities have said that they don’t want to focus on a provincial police force. The priorities for them are safety and protection of their citizens and they think they can do that with their existing police forces or the RCMP that they contract services to.”
Kasawski says a provincial police force could see millions in costs downloaded onto municipal budgets and local property taxpayers.
A report released by the NDP show the total cost for a provincial police force being more than $366 million, without including the loss of over $1 billion dollars from the feds for the RCMP.
Kasawski adds that while there are a lot of priorities in the province, a provincial police force is not one of them.
“Affordability is a big challenge for people in Alberta so I think we can be working on that. Housing is a challenge for a growing province like ours and then we have vulnerable people that need help and I think we need to make sure that we have services for them in this province that help keep our streets safe, our communities protected and everybody feeling that they have the high quality of life that they want in this province.”
You can listen to the full interview below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
