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How parking became a 'hot button issue' for two RCMP detachments in British Columbia

'For those who must drive to work, the question of where one can park, and what one must pay to park there, can be of significant importance'

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OTTAWA — “Parking is a hot button issue,” begin two judgments that detail a years-long battle at two RCMP detachments in British Columbia that involves the EPIC committee, the “two hour walk” and lots and lots of parking tickets.

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“For those who must drive to work, the question of where one can park, and what one must pay to park there, can be of significant importance,” wrote David Orfald, as he succinctly distilled the parking dilemma facing millions of Canadians.

In two judgments spanning more than 30 pages each, Orfald detailed what he heard in the two cases: the scramble, the rush by employees when they saw parking spots open up; the EPIC, the committee that tried – and failed — to solve the parking nightmare; and how the Whistler Olympics upended RCMP parking practices in the B.C. town.

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The history of parking at the RCMP detachments in Whistler and Victoria came before Orfald — who sits on the Federal Public Sector Labour Relations Employment Board — as part of two separate complaints that questioned whether new parking measures were anti-union at a time when police members were unionizing.

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The case pitted RCMP management against the police members’ new union, the National Police Federation.

At the RCMP’s Island District Headquarters (IDHQ), headquartered in Victoria, employees have had to “scramble” for parking for years. Literally.

“As the IDHQ parking lot was not nearly large enough to accommodate every vehicle, individuals working at IDHQ had to compete for parking spots in the first-come, first-parked system referred to locally as scramble parking,” Orfald wrote.

Those who weren’t lucky enough to find a spot in the parking lot during the day would have to park in surrounding streets, where free parking was limited to two hours. They would then be forced to do the “two hour walk”, which is members’ moniker for the practice of moving their car to avoid being ticketed by Victoria by-law officers.

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In some cases, employees parked in the street would keep an eye out of their windows to see if a parking lot spot freed up when a police car went out on patrol. When that happened, they would rush to their cars and go take the newly empty spot.

But that led to another issue for the RCMP, testified Chief Superintendent Sean Sullivan who began at IDHQ in 2017 and “quickly learned about the problems with the parking situation.”

When the police cars would come back, there would sometimes be no more room left in the parking lot. In those cases, Mounties would park their patrol cars in the streets for over two hours.

But that eventually led to a new — and costly — issue to local RCMP.

“Sullivan explained that at one stage, the City of Victoria by-law officers did not ticket marked RCMP vehicles or would void the tickets. However, they stopped that practice and were very active in the neighbourhood, resulting in the frequent ticketing of police vehicles,” Orfald said.

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“While managers used to cover the cost of the tickets, at some point, RCMP Corporate took the position that the member who parked a vehicle had to pay any parking tickets,” he continued, adding that the fine was between $20 and $40.

To address the growing number of parking issues in his detachment, Sullivan created the EPIC — the IDHQ Employee Parking Integration Committee — in February 2018.

For seven months, EPIC worked at finding parking solutions. For example, the committee surveyed employees, which “generated several pages of employee comments and concern.”

EPIC also looked at renting space in other parking lots, improving bike, motorcycle and transit access to the building, or even getting an exemption from tickets with the City of Victoria.

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All “to no avail”, Sullivan testified. The EPIC “hit a wall.”

Ultimately, RCMP brass devised a new parking plan in the spring on 2019 that ensured that all police cars had a parking spot in the lot, but ultimately reducing the number of free spaces available to employees. But was this anti-union?

Though the move represented a change to working conditions during a unionization process — which is generally forbidden by Canadian labour laws ­— Orfald decided that the process was business-as-usual.

“Employees did not enjoy a clear right to free parking in the IDHQ lot before the freeze took effect. This is underlined by the very name of the arrangement: scramble parking,” Orfald wrote.

“Before the freeze, employees had to jockey for limited parking spots in the morning and as the day proceeded. After the freeze, this situation persists, with only a few more constraints.”

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At the Whistler RCMP detachment, parking issues began during the 2010 Olympics, when parking became an increasingly hot commodity for the growing resort town.

For years, Whistler Mounties were allowed to park for free in leftover spaces in municipal lots adjacent to their office building.

But after the Olympics, most of those lots became paid parking as the municipality was facing a growing crunch in public parking.

It took until a general review of parking use in 2016 for Whistler’s General Manager, Norm McPhail, to realize that RCMP employees were still parking in some lots for free.

Orfald says McPhail expressed his “surprise” at the arrangement, both because his office had never approved it and because the municipality had denied all similar requests for free parking by other government departments.

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In 2017, after some attempts by RCMP management to negotiate a new deal, McPhail formally announced to police brass that the free ride was over and that Mounties would henceforth need to pay $30 to $60 per month for parking.

“I am not sure of the expectations that have been created among RCMP members to date and do see that this may be a controversial issue for some,” McPhail conceded in an email to RCMP management at Whistler.

The RCMP passed the message on to employees, who saw it as an anti-union tactic since the National Police Federation had just applied for certification.

But since the decision wasn’t the employers’, but rather the municipality’s, that argument simply does not hold water, Orfald decided.

“It is clear that the members had developed an expectation that free parking was a part of their terms and conditions of employment. Was it therefore reasonable for them to expect that it would continue? I am not convinced it was,” Orfald explained in his second decision.

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“The evidence is clear that the parking situation in Whistler became more and more challenging, starting with the Olympics and continuing as the Village grew. In short, parking was a hot button issue not only for the members but also for the community.”

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter:

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