THE announcement by Surrey councillors Brenda Locke and Jack Hundial of the formation of their own civic party Surrey Connect has no other councillor willing to support them.

Neither Steven Pettigrew, who quit the Safe Surrey Coalition along with Locke and Hundial, nor Surrey First’s Linda Annis seem interested in joining the upstart party.

What is causing a lot of amusement is Hundial’s statement that Mayor Doug McCallum had pursued them vigorously to join his team and claiming that he, a former RCMP officer, and Locke had name recognition.

The truth is that Locke and Hundial begged McCallum to include them in his team. McCallum, who was reluctant to have them on his team, was persuaded by a common friend to let them join the Safe Surrey Coalition.

The fact is that Hundial never distinguished himself in the RCMP and Locke was a well-known political loser.

As The VOICE has pointed out before, Locke got only about 13,600 votes when she ran for Surrey Council in 2014 – she was No. 17. She was defeated by not only the successful Surrey First candidates but also candidates like Rina Gill, Kal Dosanjh, Narima Dela Cruz and others.

This time she won only by joining McCallum’s Safe Surrey Coalition team and ended up getting more than 40,000 votes.

Earlier, the only time that Locke won was in 2001 as a Liberal candidate in Surrey-Green Timbers when the NDP was at an all-time low and Gordon Campbell’s Liberals won 77 of the 79 Assembly seats.

Locke, who defeated incumbent NDP MLA Sue Hammell by less than 2,000 votes in 2001, lost to Hammell in the 2005 election by more than 5,000 votes.

Locke later ran as the federal Liberal Party candidate in Fleetwood—Port Kells in the 2006 and the 2008 federal elections, but lost both times to Conservative incumbent Nina Grewal.

So why would McCallum have pursued Locke and Hundial to join his party?

Safe Surrey Coalition councillors Doug Elford, Laurie Guerra, Allison Patton and Mandeep Nagra continue to support McCallum.