Duncan’s city council wants E-Comm 911 police dispatch services to provide the city with detailed financial information about the multi-municipality agency that provides emergency communications operations for British Columbia.
Council voted on May 23 that the information be provided at a special council meeting in which council, albeit reluctantly, agreed to enter into an agreement with E-Comm for the provision of RCMP dispatch services that will cost the municipality approximately $331,000 annually.
CAO Peter de Verteuil said the financial implications of this agreement for the city in 2025 are $248,000, and the city intends to pay for that from its police operating reserves.
“But in 2026, that number is estimated to be $331,000 which will require a significant tax increase unless we do some further phasing in with the use of reserve funds or other approaches,” he said.
The Municipality of North Cowichan, which is much larger than Duncan and is also required to pay for the service for the first time, has estimated that the costs to the municipality will be approximately $884,000 per year.
In 2019, the funding responsibilities of E-Comm were transferred from the province to 10 South Island municipalities, including Duncan, North Cowichan, and Ladysmith.
The funding for the service was split between the province (70 per cent) and the federal government (30 per cent), but the responsibility for costs associated with police dispatch transitioned to the South Island municipalities as a result of a change in the service provider from the RCMP to E-Comm.
Currently, senior levels of government are still paying the costs of the service to all other municipalities in B.C.
Since receiving the news of the downloading of 100 per cent of the costs of the service, the impacted local governments have been actively opposing it and asked the province for a review of the issue.
While having these discussions, the province has provided bridge funding since 2019.
But the provincial funding ended in April, 2025, and the 10 municipalities were given a deadline of May 31, 2025, to sign a contract with E-Comm.
It’s estimated the cost annually that the impacted municipalities will have to pay totals almost $5.4 million.
Coun. Carol Newington said that, as the municipality is now a stakeholder in E-Comm, council should be allowed to see its financial information.
“It was pointed out that E-Comm is supposed to operate as a non-profit so, as we do when we give grants to non-profit organizations, we should ask to see the finances for it,” she said.
"To me, this is the same sort of thing. This is a grant we’re giving them and, therefore, we would like to see the financial statements of E-Comm.”
Coun. Tom Duncan asked if there is any possibility of working with the other nine municipalities who now have to pay for the service to come up with an alternative and cheaper option to provide the service.
“With the amount of money that we’re talking about here, we (the 10 municipalities) should be able to set up our own service,” he said.
De Verteuil replied that it’s too early for him to say at this point.
He said there’s a lot that goes into setting up a dispatch service, including security requirements, clearances, staffing levels and oversight.
“It’s not a small undertaking to have a dispatch centre, and we would do so only after a significant investigations into the pros and cons, but we’ll be working on those and bringing those to you at a later date,” de Verteuil said.
"It’s not a hard sell to the other municipalities to look at other options and we’ve been talking about that at some level, but the number of other options seemed bleak until fairly recently, but they’re not slam dunks that we’re going to end up with another viable option. As much as its seems like ($5.34 million) is a lot, when it comes to staffing levels necessary and whatnot, we don’t know whether that will ultimately pan out.”
