At a public meeting for the Sarnia Police’s next strategic plan, the civilian board tasked with police oversight was asked by The Sarnia Journal to account for data from its own reports showing a record-high violent crime rate alongside a multi-million-dollar budget increase.
At a public meeting for the Sarnia Police's next strategic plan, the civilian board tasked with police oversight was asked by The Sarnia Journal to account for data from its own reports showing a record-high violent crime rate alongside a multi-million-dollar budget increase. In response, board members pivoted from fiscal specifics to personal anecdotes, shifted responsibility to other levels of government, and ultimately stated their opposition to reallocating funds toward community-based care.
According to its public mandate, the Sarnia Police Services Board is the civilian body legally responsible for ensuring the “provision of adequate and effective police services” in the city. The board’s duties, set out in the provincial Community Safety and Policing Act, include determining “objectives and priorities for the police service” after public consultation, managing the multi-million-dollar police budget, and overseeing the actions of the Chief of Police. The September 9 town hall was intended to be a key part of this process—a forum where public input would help shape those priorities. However, the board’s performance during the meeting raises serious questions about its commitment to this mandate.
Taking the opportunity to ask questions, we asked:
“We've analyzed your public reports, and they reveal a profound disconnect between the crisis our community is facing and how this Police Service actually uses its rapidly growing budget… Your response has been a six-million-dollar budget increase, funding for tactical equipment, and making your primary goal a new multi-million-dollar headquarters. You're not spending millions on tools for de-escalation or social support. You're spending it on proprietary systems for surveillance and for control. So, while you publicly promote the MHEART program as a compassionate response, your budget shows the real priorities are a new building and a multi-million-dollar surveillance strategy with no transparent funding line for the community care you claim to value. How can this board justify prioritizing new buildings and a multi-million-dollar surveillance strategy over transparent, direct funding for the non-police, community-based care that your own data shows is the actual crisis you're facing?”
Board Chair Paul Wiersma responded first, stating, “I don't know if we were prepared to, uh, to answer specific questions this evening.” He then pivoted from the question about current spending priorities to a justification for a new police headquarters before directly rejecting the call for different priorities. “I appreciate that you feel that we should allocate more resources into areas… more into a social area,” Wiersma said. “We disagree.”
Board member Kelly Ash followed, reframing the question about the budget as a personal attack on the board’s empathy. “You've made a lot of assumptions of the board members,” she said. “You don't know any of us… You don't know my story.” Ash did not address the data presented, but instead invoked a violent incident from the previous year. “We had an officer stabbed last year by a mental health crisis. Do you remember that?” she asked. “Should we have sent a social worker in there… who would not have survived that attack?”
Councillor Chrissy McRoberts echoed this pattern, insisting the board’s perspective came from “being there” and “seeing what the public doesn’t,” a claim that elevated the board’s private experience over the verifiable, public data under discussion.
The strategy of deflecting fiscal responsibility was continued by Councillor Ann Marie Gillis, who, after being reminded that the board votes on how millions of local tax dollars are spent, retorted, “We wish we could be social workers… we don't have the provincial money or the training to be social workers.”
Later in the meeting, we posed a second, more specific question:
“Your 2024 budget shows that you spent $1.78 million on technology and communications—more than half a million dollars over budget in that area alone. At that same time, your own report shows Sarnia's violent crime severity index skyrocketed 24%. Can you name one specific, evidence-based way that your $1.78 million investment in a surveillance strategy has made this community safer when your own statistics show a catastrophic 24% increase in violent crime, or is this just a case of throwing more public money into a failed approach because you've already invested so much in it?”
In response, the board pointed to a “Good News!” slide and ignored the question.
The meeting, billed as an exercise in setting public “objectives and priorities,” concluded without the board ever directly addressing statistical evidence that the service is failing to keep the community safe. The pattern of response—pivoting from data to anecdotes, deflecting fiscal responsibility, and appealing to insider knowledge—raises questions about the function of civilian oversight in Sarnia and whether the board’s primary role is to ensure accountability or to insulate the police service from it.
