B.C. had a provincial police force once before. Why did it vanish?

Standing before the B.C. Legislature on March 27, 1950, then-attorney general Gordon Wismer launched a passionate argument for replacing the provincial police force with the RCMP.

Bringing in the Mounties would make policing more efficient, boost national security and save the provincial government more than $1 million, he said. Police officers themselves, he insisted, didn't have reason to worry they would end up with better training, better pay and better pensions with the RCMP.

One newspaper columnist said it was Wismer's "finest, most determined" defence of a government plan to date. But many, including police officers themselves, were still bewildered when the B.C. Provincial Police wasabruptly shut downthat August.

More than 70 years later, the issue of who is best suited to police B.C. reachedthe legislature again on Thursday. A committee of MLAshad agreed, unanimous across party lines, that the province should ditchthe RCMP and re-establisha provincial police force.

Decision to switch to RCMP

The B.C. Provincial Police (BCPP), created at Fort Langley in 1858 to police the new colony of British Columbia,had more than 520 officers in 123 police departments across the province when it was dissolved at midnight on Aug. 15, 1950.

The change did not go over entirely well. At least 11officers resigned, rather than move to theRCMP. Dozens ofmunicipalities from Vancouver Island to the Kootenays who felt excluded from negotiationswrote scathing letters to MLAs for their "secrecy."

In one newspaper editorial, readers demandedthe "common courtesy" of a betterexplanation for the decision.

"[The province had] not one iota of a mandate from the electors to hand the scheme in the way it was, without discussing the full pros and cons in the legislature," read the letterin the Times Colonist.

"That all this is being swept away almost overnight without any sanction from the people of British Columbia on strength of a blanket bill rammed through a too trusting legislature seems incredible."

Don N. Brown, a Second World Warveteran who spent three years with the BCPPbefore its dissolution, was determined to find outwhy the province had shut down the force.He was among the officers who transferred to the RCMP and retired as a superintendent after 27 years.

In his book, published in 2000, Brownoutlined a number of theories he'd researched: the province mistakenly believed the RCMP would be cheaper, politiciansworried theBCPP wouldunionize, the force was losing members to the military orthe federal government wanted police in B.C. to help stop communism.

Brown didn't buy any of them.

"Despite the excuses ... there is absolutely no meaningful reason for the disestablishment of a police force recognized by all as courageous, compassionate and well experienced in the policing of not only the rugged wilderness of British Columbia, but also a recognized police force in the policing of large, populatedurban areas," wrote Brown, who died in 2009.

In his final pages, Brown recommendedB.C. restart a provincial police force.

"I think that it would be an impossibility to reconstruct a provincial police force similar in nature to that which was destroyed in 1950. It is a different world to what it was then," Brown wrote. "[But] this would be the ideal."

Every few years since, politicians have spoken up to say the same but each time,the debatefaded away.

Wally Oppal, a former B.C. Supreme Court justice and attorney general, has supported the notion of a single province-wide police agencysince the mid-1990s. Regardless of whetherB.C. stays with RCMP or returns to a provincial policing model, he said, public trust in the process and the product will be keyif reform is going to succeed inthe modern age.

"Police agencies, or any other kind of agency, they're going to have any kind of credibility, there has to be some kind of local accountability," Oppal said Thursday.

"The days of governments on high making decisions without any kind of participation from local community, and particularly the Indigenous communities, really, those days are gone."