Transit police in Metro Vancouver say three teenage girls have been charged for two violent assaults that happened on public transit in Surrey in July.
They say around 9 P-M on July 11th, the group attacked a 16-year-old at a SkyTrain station and later beat an 18-year-old woman on a bus following a verbal assault.
Police say officers were called to the scene, where three suspects -- who were ages 13, 15 and 17 -- were identified.
They say the teens have since been charged with assault.
The Mounties say police and firefighters responded Wednesday evening to a report of a structure fire on a vacant property along Gunn Avenue and found several buildings on fire, with indications that the blazes had been set intentionally. They say police responded to flames on a different property along the same road yesterday and again found they appeared to have been sparked intentionally.
COVID-19 cases are on the rise in British Columbia, with the BC Centre for Disease Control reporting hospitalizations have increased 58 per cent in the past two weeks. The centre says in its latest update that deaths due to COVID-19 are also trending upwards, with 24 fatalities in the last week of September, compared to nine in the second week of August.
The count by the Homelessness Services Association of B-C was done on March 7th and 8th -- and identified just under five thousand people in 11 communities, up from the roughly 36-hundred identified in the March 2020 count.
Business leaders in Surrey are pleading with the province to provide a clear plan as the city grapples with the next stage of implementing a new police force. The Surrey Board of Trade has sent a letter to Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth saying the city needs a solid policing strategy with adequate wraparound support services and infrastructure as it juggles the costs of the outgoing R-C-M-P and incoming Surrey Police Service.
British Columbia is setting out new rules as it attempts to navigate a way to curb the overdose crisis with drug decriminalization. Possession of small amounts of many illicit drugs was decriminalized in B.C. in January after the federal government issued an exemption, but legislation introduced by the province today would make their use illegal in many public spaces.
The federal New Democrats have rejected the first draft of the Liberals' pharmacare legislation, in what the health minister describes as "extremely fluid" negotiations over the highly anticipated bill. The Liberals promised to table pharmacare legislation this fall as part of the supply-and-confidence deal the government struck with the NDP.