Central Saanich

Or they might just vote Green 'cause they voted Green last time, and it's chaos right now, and they're worrying about a municipal election in North Saanich, municipal election in Sydney, where their mayor got, uh, acclaimed.

And in Central Saanich, Ryan Windsor actually isn't running again.

I guess he's, um, right now aiming to throw his hat into the ring provincially.

So that race will be interesting as well.

So my understanding is that Saanich will have recruits in the January class.

Central Saanich, I'm not sure about them.

You know, they obviously because of their size, they don't put through many recruits at once.

They have one recruit who I understand went to the Justice Institute in New West for this round because they had long since planned that and established housing and whatnot there.

But that wasn't the only issue that we were watching Sydney for last night.

Some of you may recall Central Saanich with its relocation of its civic facility.

Remember the rec center? It was going to be 10,000 feet.

It's going to be about $14 million.

And they needed consent from their neighbors in both Sydney and North Saanich to be able to borrow the money to build that facility.

Oh, the consent issue came before Sydney Council last night.

And once again, Sydney, well, I don't want to spoil it, but you're going to hear clips as to what happened last night and why there might be some frustration, and that's speculative on my part, in Central Saanich after the outcome.

We'll talk about why right after this.

We've had assistance from all of the, uh, South Island municipal agencies.

And in January, in fact, for our January class, we anticipate that there will be more participation from other South Island agencies like Saanich and Central Saanich, for example.

And, and you mentioned an Oak Bay one.

And new classes-

And they'll type those two numbers into a calculator and they'll say, wow, Victoria is one of the most over-policed jurisdictions in Canada.

We heard that any number of times.

Of course, what that is missing is that thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people who the census says don't live in Victoria, but live in places like Saanich, live in places like Langford, live in places like Colwood, Central Saanich, Sydney, et cetera, et cetera, find themselves within Vic PD's jurisdiction in an average day.

And so the effective population that Vic PD is responsible for ensuring public safety regarding is much, much larger than what the census data says.

Yeah, I mean, Jeff, I can certainly speak to, you know, before we even talk about a provincial police force, let's talk about policing on the South Island.

You know, we have Vic PD, we've got Saanich, Central Saanich, Oak Bay, and we're all policing up against each other in a relatively small area.

It makes no sense like from an outsider coming in and I know we've been talking about this for 50 years in this province.

There's no greater example of the need for amalgamation than on the South Island here on Vancouver Island and I know you know going all the way back to Opal's report.

Municipal Council's back in action this evening, just under eight hours from now.

We will see Langford, Central Saanich, Sydney, View Royal.

Let's see who else is on the agenda for this evening that we're going to be monitoring.

and Oak Bay all have scheduled council meetings this evening with a number of issues.

So there's not going to be municipal council meetings that I can see scheduled for Monday.

They are moved to Tuesday in Oak Bay, Sydney, Central Saanich and Langford by the looks of it.

Langford, on its agenda for Tuesday, has the fire bylaws, you know, the ones from 1989.

That still hasn't been adopted yet, the updated versions.