Outgoing Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum in the parking lot after court Oct. 31. Judge Reginald Harris said late Wednesday afternoon that he would announce the verdict in the public trial of former Surrey mayor Doug McCallum sometime during the week of November 21. Harris initially said he could issue the ruling in a week after McCallum’s defense team and the special prosecutor completed closing arguments in the Surrey District Court trial. He agreed to the delay due to lawyers’ schedules and estimated that he would need a two-hour session to state his reasons. McCallum, who lost the mayoralty to Brenda Locke in the Oct. 15 municipal election, pleaded not guilty when the trial began on Oct. 31. He did not testify. Special prosecutor Richard Fowler said Wednesday that if McCallum’s foot had fallen in a Save-On-Foods parking lot last year, then he took advantage of an apparent accident to exact revenge on a Keep the RCMP in Surrey. [KTRIS] protester. “This is not a trial about whether or not Mr. McCallum’s leg was hit,” Fowler told Harris. “This is a trial as to whether Mr. McCallum, with intent to mislead, made false statements to the police, with the intent to provoke Ms. [Debi] Johnston should be suspected of crimes she did not commit.” McCallum initially accused Johnstone of running over his foot and speeding away in her Mustang convertible on September 4, 2021. Instead, she was charged with public disorder. There were no eyewitnesses to the incident and video evidence was inconclusive because a bush hid McCallum’s lower leg and Johnstone’s rear wheel. Fowler told Harris he had proven the charges beyond a reasonable doubt because the evidence disproved McCallum’s claims that Johnston drove up to him, pinned him in his vehicle, ran over his leg and sped away . McCallum called 9-1-1 more than two hours after the incident after he went shopping and spoke with KTRIS Chief Ivan Scott at a report booth outside the store. He spent two hours in the emergency room at Peace Arch Hospital, where a doctor found no fracture or visible swelling, only a bruise on the top of his left leg. McCallum then attended a 45-minute interview with an RCMP officer. “Sir. McCallum’s statement or statements were not spontaneous utterances at the scene of an accident, on the side of the road, they were not simply reckless exaggeration,” Fowler said. “They were not statements made in the heat of the moment, with no time to we silently reflect on what had just happened or what the declarant had just experienced.” Instead, McCallum told an RCMP officer in a videotaped interview 11 times that Johnstone had pinned him in his vehicle. “No one had him pinned or anything,” Fowler said. Video evidence played in court showed McCallum initially responded to Johnstone by walking 15 feet from his car to where Johnstone had stopped, swore at him and urged him to resign. Fowler said McCallum chose to stand next to Johnston’s vehicle during their minute-long verbal exchange before she slowly and carefully drove away. “He went to the car and nothing stopped him from going,” Fowler said. Earlier Wednesday, one of McCallum’s four attorneys, Eric Gottardi, closed the defense case, saying McCallum neither wasted police resources nor sought revenge against Johnstone. He said McCallum should be acquitted because he never deviated from the main premise of his complaint that Johnstone singled him out, shouted profanities at him, drove over his leg and drove off. He said McCallum endured a terrifying experience. If McCallum exaggerated any detail, Gottardi argued that is irrelevant under the case law. “He’s not literally trying to convey the idea that he burned rubber and left marks on the ground, and he’s not trying to convey the idea that he was literally and physically pinned mechanically between two vehicles,” Gottardi said. “The main complaint is that it went over his leg and left.”
