CKNW Editorial
for July 1, 1999

Let me, with your kind permission, repeat Mair’s Axiom I, to be found in that marvelous best seller, Canada:Is Anyone Listening?, $27.95 published by Key Porter. It goes like this – you make a serious mistake thinking that people in charge know what the hell they’re doing.

Take the Mayor and the Police Board.

Two years ago, after a substantial search, the Police Board hired Bruce Chambers to be Vancouver’s new police chief. They gave him two basic terms of reference - he was to reduce crime and he was to bring policing to the community. Last week Mayor Philip Owen acknowledged that Mr Chambers had indeed accomplished those two things. Yet the mayor and the board tied the can to Mr Chambers and must pay him $140,000 for doing nothing and also pay another police chief presumably the same amount.

And what was it about the police chief that brought all this on his head?

Why it was his leadership “style”. Can you imagine that? A man is hired to do two very tough things, does them to the complete satisfaction of his employer and is canned because of his “leadership style”!

Well, since Mayor Owen gives no evidence of what this means – he doesn’t even give us a couple of “for instances”, let us speculate a bit about what this style was all about.

Mr Chambers came from Thunder Bay. Now that happens to be outside Vancouver … indeed it’s outside BC as well … hell, let’s spit it out, the damn place is in Ontario! And the old boy network at the cop shop were angry at that. They wanted one of their own selected. And even before Chambers came to Vancouver, he was hit with a wad of hate mail one suspects from this very same old boy network.

Chief Chambers did something the old boys didn’t like – he changed the way of policing from the old way where the cop played king of the castle and arrested or warned as he saw fit to a system where the police reached out to community groups and worked with those communities in a meaningful way. That would never do and the chaps fought back.

The first thing they did was tell any who would listen how Chambers was bolloxing everything up. Why he had paid two much overtime for one thing.

Then they leaked to their pals in the police media – the boys and girls who get leaked stories in exchange for making the cops always look good – that the Chief had been stopped in a road block. And this was very embarrassing to the chief. Now, let not any speculate as to how many other policemen have been caught in roadblocks or, perhaps more importantly should have – this was a dandy way to discredit the Chief so the media schmoozes got this little goody leaked to them.

Now it’s interesting to note that in giving his reasons for firing Mr Chambers, Mayor Owen didn’t refer to either the overtime or the roadblock issue. One can only assume from that that the Mayor and Board didn’t regard these matters as critical.

The police chief had plenty of support in the police force as my mail will attest. The younger constables for the most part supported Mr Chambers modern methods of community policing.

But Chambers is gone because the old boys wanted him gone which tells us one very important thing, doesn’t it? The Mayor and the Police Board don’t run the police force, the old boy network of the police force does.

When they hire the next police chief, if they dare go outside the force which they probably won’t … but if they do go outside they should, in fairness, advise the poor bloke that it isn’t the mayor and the police board he must satisfy but that it’s the old boys down at the cop who shop run the show.

Finally, a very happy birthday to Canada. Our 132^nd. Today we overlook the fact that we have a bankruptcy of leadership in the country, a political system which doesn’t work and a huge unresolved national question. We rightly give thanks for what we have experienced and what we have been. And we express our fond hopes for the future.

If, however, we use national birthdays as we did in our centenary year to paper over these problems one year we won’t have a birthday.

I hope we use this day as a day of resolution … resolution that we will have the courage and insist that our politicians have the courage to at least start to seriously talk about the changes we need and, then the courage to implement them.