Soaring Policing Costs Are Busting The Budgets And Wallets Of Municipal Governments And Their Ratepayers

A Commentary by Doug Draper

I’ve argued this point before and I will argue it again, however much the union representing Niagara Regional Police and other police officers across Ontario dislike it.

 The catapulting costs of police services in this and other regions in the province – mostly due to the unreasonable and unsustainable wage and benefit demands of the Police Association of Ontario which is one of the province’s most powerful unions – is bankrupting municipal governments and assaulting the pocket books of municipal taxpayers.

Niagara Regional Police headquarters in St. Catharines, Ontario

In that spirit, I was heartened to see a full-page story, entitled ‘What Price For Law And Order’, in the Saturday, January 8 edition of The Globe and Mail, hardly a radical paper in this country, that made exactly the same point.

That Globe story begins like this: “At a time when cash-strapped cities are bringing down austerity measures to reign in spending, police budgets have continued their steady growth, forcing civic leaders to make tough choices between funding law and order and paying for other major services.”

“Despite declining crime rates,” the story continues, “spending on police forces – one of the largest single items on municipal ledgers – has risen 41 per cent per capita across the country over the last decade for which Statistics Canada numbers are available. Much of that cost is being driven by police raises that consistently top the inflation rate.”

“The dilemma is stark: Let policing costs continue to rise and governments must make cuts elsewhere – whether road repairs, libraries or parks – to compensate.” 

Well hallelujah to The Globe for making that point (you can read the whole article by clicking on  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/whats-the-price-for-law-and-order/article1862544/ ) and certainly Niagara is one of those regional municipalities that is being strong armed to financial death by a police union that seems not to give a damn about the rest of the people, many of whom are struggling to keep their homes and pay their bills.

The question is always this: When will a critical mass of our municipal and provincial politicians stand up for the ordinary resident and taxpayer, and stand up against this bully police union and the provincially appointed arbitrators that give this union and its members virtually everything they want? Are our politicians that afraid of this union that they would rather saddle residents in this and other municipalities across this province with costs they can no longer afford?

Just this past fall in Niagara, the regional council felt it had ‘no choice’ but to approve a new contract for the region’s police that amounts to a 9.96 per cent raise hike for unionized members of the Niagara Regional Police Service over the next three years. It is a hike that will see first-class constable on the force making more than $83,000 by the end of this New Year while the median annual income for workers, most of whom have private-sector jobs in this region, is down around $35,000.

Our police like to talk about protecting us against muggers. Well this is a financial mugging of the very people our police are sworn to serve and protect.

Just to give an idea of how many property tax dollars in Niagara region go to policing compared to other services, out of $1,495 (the regional portion of property taxes paid in 2010 on an average home assessed at $210,000), police services rank at the top of the cost scale, making up $572 of that. By comparison, roads and other transportation services make up $180, waste management totals $158, affordable housing is $118, social assistance for the unemployed is $106, ambulance and emergency services is $63, children’s services is $35 and public health is $32.

 Clearly the cost of policing is out of control and hopefully the new regional council representatives sitting on the Niagara Regional Police Board, including Niagara’s new regional chairman Gary Burroughs, Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey and Thorold regional councillor Henry D’Angela, will put the interests of Niagara taxpayers first while they sit on this board.

In the meantime, shame on the police union for continuing to use its power to push on the rest of us a three-per-cent salary increase per year as an entitlement for its members, even at a time of great recession, when so many others have lost their jobs or had to go without wage increases just to keep them.

In a letter to the editor in the January 10 Globe and Mail, Larry Molyneaux, president of the Police Association of Ontario (or police union, as it more rightfully should be called) responded to the Jan. 8 story in the Globe by saying: “We realize that public budgets are strained. In November, the Police Association of Ontario asked the provincial government to form a working group to examine where efficiencies can be found in policing.”

Molyneaux misses the point. Police salaries and benefits make up more than 90 per cent of the policing budget in Niagara and other regions in the province, and he and his union are summarily responsible for pushing wage and benefit increases that are totally unsustainable during a time when so many others have seen their incomes fall farther and farther behind the cost of living.

(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater binational Niagara region.)