In 2008 the federal Conservative government announced that they were providing funding to provinces to hire additional municipal and provincial police officers. This was a welcome announcement for Manitoba where violent crime rates are among the highest in the country and the hiring of new officers was viewed as important to creating safer communities.
Province’s across Canada received funding with Manitoba’s portion being $14.4 million. The provincial NDP government at the time of the announcement in 2008 said the money would be used to hire 30 new police officers.
About a year after the commitment, Manitoba police forces started to ask when the new officers that were promised by the province from the federal funding would be coming. They received no response. Last year, two years after the federal government provided the $14.4 million in funding to the province to hire the new officers, I asked the NDP Minister of Justice where the money had gone. He had no answer.
This past week, the mystery of the missing federal money for police officers was solved when the NDP announced that they would be hiring new police officers for Manitoba using the federal cash they had received three years ago. Apparently, the NDP government had simply been sitting on this cash for more than three years waiting to make a pre-election announcement on the hiring of police.
The NDP have been making a number of pre-election announcements over the past several weeks in a desperate attempt to hold on to government after the election this October. But there is something particularly disturbing about a government that is willing to sit on $14.4 million in federal money designated for the hiring of police officers for over three years simply to try to gain political points.
Had that money been allocated three years ago when it was given, 30 police officers would have long been hired, trained and already working in our communities to reduce violent crime and protect our communities from drug dealers and other criminals. Instead, Premier Greg Selinger and the NDP deprived our provincial police forces of those much needed funds so that they could wait until closer to an election. They put politics ahead of public safety.
Manitoba already has the highest rate per capita of victims of violent crime in Canada. Those officers were needed in our communities three years ago when the money was provided by the federal government. Instead, the NDP sat on the money and put politics ahead of policing. It’s the desperate act of a government that is putting its interests ahead of the interests of Manitobans.
