Lawyer Bableen Rana Joins Doug McCallum’s Safe Surrey Team

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SURREY – Former MP Herb Dhaliwal’s constituency assistant Bableen Rana has joined Doug McCallum’s Safe Surrey slate as a Council candidate.

McCallum announced this week Rana and former Surrey Community Alliance head Doug Elford will be running for council seats with his Safe Surrey Coalition in Surrey’s election on October 20th.

Rana has been a lawyer for 17 years and is a Past President of the Surrey Newton Rotary Club.

When McCallum was first elected as mayor, Rana served on Surrey’s Parks and Recreation Commission. Her experience there solidified her passion for community service. She is running for council with the Safe Surrey Coalition because she knows Doug McCallum and believes in his integrity. She respects his passion, focus, and commitment to Surrey.

When asked what issue motivated her to run Rana said: “My first priority is having Surrey citizens feel safe and secure—on their streets and in their neighbourhoods. The RCMP has done its best; however; the citizens of Surrey need more and they deserve more. The rapid growth in the city has outgrown the police resources.The structure of the RCMP as aparamilitary force is no longer a good fit for Surrey. We need a Surrey Police force that clearly focuseson local concerns and gets results.”

McCallum says, “A lot of people have asked him to run because Surrey is headed in the wrong direction. We simply can’t afford 4 more years of Surrey First. We need to take strong action now to protect the future of the community we all share.”

The three main planks of Safe Surrey’s campaign are:starting Surrey’s own Police Force that will be much better able to deal with local issues, scrapping the second-rate LRT line in favour of Skytrain along the Fraser Highway, and pausing development to come up with smart community development guidelines that include affordable housing.

Seeing greener pastures with the “Money-Man McCallum’s Safe Surrey slate, Doug Elford abandoned his Surrey Community Alliance to the chagrin of many of his former running mates.

McCallum described Elford as a grassroots community activist with an established track record. He believes:”It’s time for strong principled leadership in Surrey and Doug McCallum will deliver that.

Surrey urgently needs to focus on housing affordability, homelessness, public safety & crime reduction, improved transit, and financial responsibility.

Now is the time to take strong action and address these issues.

This is why Doug McCallum is clearly the best choice for Mayor in 2018.”

“Surrey is at a crossroads, we can not afford to continue down the path of special favours for developers at the expense of affordable housing. There has also been too many closed-door meetings, overseas junkets, and ongoing financial mismanagement. This is the path that Tom Gill and Surrey First have been on since 2005.” say Elford.

Meanwhile, Elford’s former party members called an emergency meeting of the SCA candidates last Friday August 10th to announce that Elford had resigned as both President and candidate for City Council and that the campaign was being dissolved.

However, the press release sent out by the former Campaign Managers only cites funding as the major reason for dissolving the campaign.

“Funding has not been an issue just a few days before when we nominated Aronjit Lageri for School Board”, said Imtiaz Popat, former SCA Council Candidate.

Elford had told the candidates that he was approached by Doug McCallum to join him and asked if other candidates had been approached. In fact other candidates were approached but refused to “jump ship because we understand that some of the issues were we are raising such gang violence and homelessness  were ignored by Doug McCallum when he was mayor”, said Popat.

“But we are not giving up,” says Popat. We are looking at other options to continue our campaign and we confident we can raise the funds in the coming few weeks to run and effective campaign for City Council and School Board,” said Popat.