Candidates for mayor and council are split on whether council should provide stable funding for the Edmonton Police Commission or apply more scrutiny to that body when answering the question Which of the following comes closest to your guiding principle for council's relationship with the Edmonton Police Commission? on Taproot's candidate survey.
Thirty-one respondents said that council should Primarily provide stable funding and work through commission processes. That includes mayoral candidates Tim Cartmell, Vanessa Denman, Andy Andrzej Gudanowski, Rahim Jaffer, Omar Mohammad, and Michael Walters.
There were also 31 candidates who said that council should Scrutinize commission decisions and demand greater transparency. This includes five of the seven incumbent council candidates who have answered the survey (Michael Janz, Erin Rutherford, Ashley Salvador, Anne Stevenson, and Keren Tang).
Jason Bale, Roger Kotch, Abdul Malik Chukwudi, Jon Morgan, Fahad Mughal, Anand Pye, and Ashok Sui, meanwhile, said council should Make police funding contingent on achieving specific outcomes.
As of this writing, 24 candidates have not yet completed the survey.
The commission develops budgets for the Edmonton Police Service but recently declined to share its own audit with city council. Since 2018, council has used a funding formula based on inflation and population growth to determine increases to the police budget. In early 2024, the commission requested that two city councillors be removed from sitting on the commission but council voted in September to keep them. Until recently, council appointed the commission's members, 10 of whom are civilians and two of whom are from council. In 2022, however, the provincial government gave itself powers to appoint commissioners, and in 2024 it appointed three.