Over the past 15 years, police salaries in Ontario have risen by nearly 60 per cent.
Critics say it’s because of a system of competition between policing organizations, with each successive collective agreement bumping up the pay for the next group to come along.
Take, as an example, members of the Ontario Provincial Police – currently the highest paid in the province.
If any officers anywhere in Ontario get a better deal, the OPP contract will automatically bump them up to retain the top spot.
It’s one of the most blatant examples of what critics call a leapfrog approach to setting police salaries.
For municipalities that have their own policing services, unions tend to point toward wage increases achieved elsewhere in the province, with a similar effect.
“Somebody settles, and then that becomes the benchmark and the arbitrators just rule their arbitration settlings from there,” says Tom Galloway, chair of the Waterloo Regional Police Services Board.
Fed up with the constant increases, 59 of the province’s police services have issued an open letter to Premier Kathleen Wynne, calling for an end to the OPP highest-paid clause.
“We are at a very critical juncture in terms of polices costs and municipalities capacity to pay them,” Ontario Association of Police Services Boards president Ken East said in the letter.
In addition to ending the automatic increases for OPP officers based on other agreements, the OAPSB wants to see changes made to the arbitration process and support for co-ordinated bargaining.
Galloway describes co-ordinated bargaining as organizing arbitration hearings so that bigger agencies negotiate contracts before smaller ones with their deals expiring around the same time.
“We’re hoping that they try to hold the line to some extent, so that the rest of us will follow suit,” he says.
“We think it’ll carry a fair bit of weight with the arbitrators.”
But co-ordinated bargaining only works as well as the co-ordination, and some municipalities – including Sarnia and Chatham-Kent – have already pulled out.
The solution may not be the same, but communities with OPP contracts are feeling the pressure of rising salaries as well.
Wellington County warden Chris White says that’s because, with no way to control the pay of the officers in their municipality, officials have only two choices.
“Either the services get cut, or infrastructure becomes secondary,” he says.
“If you’re trying to cover police, plus fire, plus EMS … it’s not sustainable. “
This year, Wellington County was affected by a retroactive 8.55 per cent pay increase for OPP officers.
