The rare political alignment against the Sarnia Police Service’s budget expansion

If you had told me a year ago that Mike Bradley, Bill Dennis, and I would ever find ourselves on the same page, I would have laughed. Our history is a public record of friction.

If you had told me a year ago that Mike Bradley, Councillor Bill Dennis, and I would ever find ourselves on the same page, I wouldn’t have believed you. Our history is a public record of friction. I’ve spent years clashing with Bradley over the visionless way he runs City Hall, and Dennis and I have gone head-to-head on everything from housing to social media trolling.

They are at each other's throats almost every meeting, unable to see eye-to-eye on anything. But something has happened at 555 Christina St. N. that has achieved the impossible: it has united the most polarized voices in our city. When a 38-year mayor, a vocal populist like Bill, and someone like me all look at the Sarnia Police Service's demand for a $100 million police fortress and say no, it should be a massive red flag for every resident.

We are all seeing the same thing: a chief from a big city, a budget that refuses to stop ballooning, and a police board that has lost its mandate. It increasingly feels less like a budget debate and more like a takeover. For too long, we have allowed an imported influence to dictate the terms of our safety, asking us to ignore the collective wisdom of people who have lived and served here for decades in favour of a philosophy brought in from Halton.

Why should we stop trusting the representatives this community has been electing for years and instead let a police chief ram through a building project using paperwork and lawyers? This is a pattern we see across the country: police departments using media releases to manufacture a narrative of "heroism versus violation" to justify bigger and bigger bills.

When the Chief talks about a "revolving door" in our courts, he isn’t describing a failure of justice; he is performing for the cameras to secure more funding. It is "copaganda" at its most transparent—showing us seized candy bars and socks as proof of "work" while the overdose crisis kills two of our neighbours every single month.

This building isn’t about safety. It is a monument to a model that is already failing us. True safety does not come from thicker walls, closer firing ranges, or more surveillance. It comes from rootedness—from people deciding to stay, to invest in their own blocks, and to look out for one another without an institutional middleman.

There is no amount of policing that will ever keep us safe, and there is no building the police can build for themselves that will help officers show up in this community with humanity. When Mike Bradley and Bill Dennis—men who usually disagree on everything—are both flabbergasted by the police board’s overreach, it is a diagnostic sign that the system is broken beyond repair.

The Chief and the board are now operating without the consent of the people or their representatives. Sarnia’s future does not have to be written by the same people who wrote its past. We are choosing a city that says "yes" to its people instead of "yes" to more debt and iron bars. The madness has to end. It is time for Sarnia to lead itself.