When Is Niagara, Ontario Going To Say Enough Is Enough When It Comes To Escalating Police Costs

A Commentary By Doug Draper

Well what can almost anyone who’s been following the leaps and bounds of police spending in Niagara, Ontario say except – here we go again!

Niagara Regional Police Chief Wendy Southall has done a better job than many of her predecessors in keeping police costs down. But they are still well above rate of inflation.

Unless you are a cop in Niagara, Ontario or one on the police force’s administration who continues enjoying at least a  three-per-cent salary increase every year while so many others in this “great recession” we’ve been living through over the past couple of years has either lost their job or had their job or wages downsized,

Another annual operating budget from the Niagara Regional Police Service’s board, and another request for a newly elected, not-yet-sworn regional council for another budget increase that will escalate the cost of policing above any measure of affordability in this region.

That’s right. Here we go again with another draft budget for the Niagara Regional Police Service that is well above an annual rate of inflation in Ontario, which, at 2.9 per cent, according to recent Bank of Canada figures, also adds up to the highest inflation rate reported this year for any province in the country.

But why let a few little things like a soaring inflation rate, above-average jobless figures and a “great recession” that seems far from over for too many of us sloshing around in the trenches out here get in the way of the public sector’s apparent God-given right to gold-plated entitlements. So it should hardly come as a surprised that the board representing the NRP last Friday tabled a draft operating budget for 2011 containing an almost 5.5 per cent increase.

To be as fair as I can, this is about the lowest, if not the lowest increase the NRP has come out of the starting gate with in the last 15 or so years. A decade ago, it wasn’t out of the question at all to have the board deliver budget requests to the regional government with increases hovering around 10 per cent. So Wendy Southall, who took over the helm as Niagara’s police chief five years ago, deserves some credit for beating those kind of increases down to about half of what they were 10 years ago.

Still in all, the newly elected regional council, once it is sworn in this Dec. 9, should make the following one of its first orders of business. It should let the NRP’s board and to the provincial government, which ultimately dictates how much funding police forces across Ontario get, that a 5.5 increase for the operating budget of the police this coming year is unacceptable – especially at a time of financial hardship for so many residents across the region. It should respond with a resounding “no” to a request for an increase that is four times higher than the 1.4 per cent cap the region is placing on increases for its key departments, including public health, community services, public works (an body responsible for everything from water and wastewater treatment to roads and waste management) and planning.

The cost of policing has surely and not so slowly been growing to a point where it is becoming economically unsustainable for struggling regions like Niagara to support. And it has gotten completely out of whack with the real world that private businesses, and working and retired people trying to pay their bills lives in. If your not sure, when was the last time you got a 5.5 per cent increase over a year for any budget you have to manage to keep your business or affairs at home afloat?

If you are a retired person, when is the last time you got a 5.5 per cent increase on your seniors’ pension? And if you are an employee working for a private company, when was the last time you got a raise that amounted to 9.96 per cent over three years. There is just a good a chance that you were asked to accept a far more meager increase or even a salary cut, just to keep your job. Even workers represented by unions as time-honoured as the Canadian Auto Workers and Steel Workers know about that.

Yet earlier this year, the police union managed to achieve that 9.96 per cent raise hike for their members in the NRP – a raise that will see a first-class constable on the force making more than $83,000 by the end of next year while the median annual income for workers, most of whom have private-sector jobs in this region, is down around $35,000.
Southall and her fellow NRP administrators and members of the police board repeatedly argue that they have very little wiggle room when it comes to keeping down the force’s operating budget because some 93 per cent is eaten up by salaries. And those salaries, demanded by one of the most powerful public sector unions in Ontario, are ultimately rubber stamped by provincially appointed arbitrators in Toronto.

It is an arbitration system that has been allowed by successive provincial governments – Liberal, Tory and NDP –  to call the shots for decades, through Liberal, NDP and Conservative governments, and it is becoming ever more punishing now for struggling regions like Niagara that can’t afford to go on paying our police Toronto wages.

Our new council will hopefully push this point with the province, insisting that it either give our region final say over police salaries and budget or that it take over policing services and transfer the cost burden from property taxes to income taxes, which is at least a fairer way of paying the freight for lower and middle income people.

I’ll bet if the province had to pay the tab for policing, it would show a lot more interest in the unreasonable demands being made by the police union during a time of recession.

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