It was hard to predict the outcome of the Surrey election.
In the end, it was a landslide near-sweep for the Safe Surrey Coalition, the group of candidates led by former Surrey mayor Doug McCallum. With McCallum becoming mayor-elect with 41% of the vote and 7 out of 8 candidates being voted into council, it is clear that the voters of Surrey connected with something in the platform that the other candidates just were not offering.
Some theorize that McCallum was voted in due to “strategic” voting or the idea that Bruce Hayne’s departure from the Surrey First party “split the vote” against McCallum. That’s entirely possible, if every single vote that went to Bruce Hayne went to Tom Gill instead, he would have won by 10%. Word on the street (okay, on Twitter) was that many who didn’t “want” to vote for McCallum, did so strategically to prevent a Tom Gill leadership.
It seems that crime is on the mind of Surrey voters as the only non-Safe Surrey Coalition to be voted a seat on council is Linda Annis, who is executive director of CrimeStoppers and would be therefore reasonably be expected to have insight into the public safety issues facing Surrey.
McCallum took our civic priorities (transit and public safety) and broke them down into absolutes and soundbites. First of all, that SkyTrain is good, LRT is for losers (well… no one said “losers”, but I heard “second-rate” often). McCallum’s camp grabbed onto the die-hard SkyTrain supporters and polarized this issue, promising to turf the long-awaited, federally funded rapid transit system that had been negotiated and planned for Surrey and replace it with what this region knows – SkyTrain.
The second issue that mobilized voters was public safety. Safe Surrey proposed a municipal police force to deal with the increasingly brazen gang violence that has been plaguing the Lower Mainland and Surrey. McCallum said again and again, that the Surrey RCMP officers typically did not work in Surrey long enough to form connections with the community nor were they trained in urban policing. A local force would be more effective in our large city.
Clearly, these issues and their proposed solutions resonated with voters, and they believe that Doug McCallum and his team will bring these changes to our city. While a big change has taken place literally overnight, time will tell how this team implements the election promises and how current initiatives the previous councils has implemented will fare under the new council.
-Jen Robbins