At an announcement last month of $75 million more for police, Premier Doug Ford was asked whether spending millions more would really help with the root causes of crime — that is, poverty and a lack of opportunity for vulnerable people.
"I think it's gonna be a huge difference," he said. "We need more boots on the ground. We need more police officers on the ground. They've been stressed out. Their budgets are always under review, always being chopped. We need to put money back in there."
That framing about police budgets isn't accurate.
QP Briefing reviewed the budgets of the 10 largest forces in Ontario over the past decade and found that, far from being repeatedly "chopped," police get more money almost every year.
At least nine of those have grown since last year, when protests swept the world with demands to defund the police (the Ontario Provincial Police hasn't made its 2021 budget public yet)
Ontario has 44 municipal police forces, in addition to nine First Nations police services. Everywhere not covered by those forces — over 320 of the province's 444 municipalities — is served by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
Ford was correct that police budgets are often under review. The OPP's budget is decided by the provincial government each year. Municipal forces make requests to local governments for a certain amount of cash every year, and councils debate that number as part of the annual budget process, as other city divisions do.
Nearly every year, police lobby, often intensely, for more money for a variety of reasons — growing municipal budgets, growing populations, provincial cost downloading and more.
And nearly every year, they get it.
Here are two graphs showing the budgets of the 10 largest Ontario police forces over the past decade. One graph shows only the OPP and Toronto Police Service (TPS), due to their size, and the other shows the eight next-largest forces.
Each budget number should be taken as a minimum, as some include the operating and capital budgets, and some only include operating budgets. In a few cases, the actual expenditure figures were used.
Operating budgets include salaries, which make up the vast majority of police expenses — sometimes well over 90 per cent. Capital budgets include things like new computers and cruisers, which can cost millions more for large forces.
Due to the different ways municipalities publicize their data, some numbers are rounded and others are exact. A spreadsheet with more details and sources can be found here.
One reason is inflation — as cities' budgets go up each year, so do the amounts they spend on law enforcement. Toronto Police have argued that their share of the city's budget has remained about the same for years, despite increases to the dollar figure.
But an Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) study found that Ontario cops and firefighters were paid $485 million more in pay hikes than other municipal employees between 2010 and 2014. This was largely due to the provincially-controlled arbitration, which leans heavily in favour of unions — often awarding police raises much higher than inflation, AMO said.
Some police unions also have "me too" clauses in their contracts, which require municipalities to match raises given to other emergency services.
As of 2017, about 40 cents of every Peel Region tax dollar went to police. It's an outlier, and most police budget shares are closer to 20 or 25 per cent of the tax base, but cops are almost always the top-line expense of local budgets — handily beating out transit, social services and road repairs.
Just three of the 10 budgets QPB reviewed have dipped at some point in the past decade: The OPP's in 2012, 2016, and 2019, the latter when the Ford government cut it; Toronto's in 2013 and 2015; and the Niagara Regional Police Service's (NRPS) in 2012, 2013 and 2016.
But overall, the OPP is getting nearly $213 million more than it was 10 years ago; the Toronto Police Service (TPS) now receives $150 million more; and the NRPS is getting over $34 million more.
A 2014 Fraser Institute study found that between 2001 and 2012, the number of cops per 100,000 Canadians rose by 8.7 per cent while the crime rate declined by 26.3 per cent.
And all 10 of the budgets have not only survived calls for defunding the police, but have grown since the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin. As protests rocked the United States and the world, advocates demanded cities and provinces take much or all of the money spent on enforcement and invest instead in mental health support, education and anti-poverty initiatives — so-called "upstream" spending that's been repeatedly shown to decrease crime better than boots-on-the-ground enforcement.
In Toronto, home to the province's largest force after the OPP, a 10-per-cent reduction in the police budget proposed by some councillors was soundly defeated. Instead, the TPS asked for a flatlined budget from the year before, and got it. But that appears to be a momentary pause — the city's 2021 budget projects the force's spending to rise by nearly $100 million in the next two years.
Despite cutting the OPP's budget by $46 million in 2019, citing the deficit, Ford maintained in 2020 that he doesn't "believe in (defunding the police) for a second" — a continuation of his pro-cop stances from his time on Toronto city council.
When Ford and his late brother, Rob, were councillors, and when Rob became mayor, the Toronto Police Service often got what it asked for. When Rob as mayor demanded 10-per-cent cuts in all city departments, the TPS ended up with a $6 million budget increase after it argued, through some creative accounting, that it was actually a 4.6-per-cent decrease.
Sometimes some politicians try to give police more than they want. In 2004, Rob tried to buy the TPS a helicopter that the chair of the police services board said it didn't need.
Ahead of the 2022 election, the premier is again positioning himself as a friend of police, adding more money and lavishing praise on the province's forces.
Ontario New Democrats are more open to reimagining the role of police. Though the party hasn't promised to defund the police, it has laid out a number of issues it believes need to be fixed, including a lack of oversight and control over line items in police budgets.
Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca also called for police reform, promising more details in his 2022 election platform.
“I believe that a justice system where somebody can be treated differently by law enforcement simply because of their skin colour is deeply flawed and needs to be reformed. We need to make sure law enforcement has the funding to keep people safe, but we clearly have to look at reforms within police departments to increase accountability and make sure everyone is treated fairly and equally," he said in a statement to QPB.
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