Evidence of meeting #35 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 40th Parliament, 3rd session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was security.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
The rule is you never look at the speaker; you always want to ignore the speaker or the chair and just keep talking.
Liberal
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Chief, thank you for being here. I know you've been dragged through a number of committees and interviews lately, and you're not finished even now.
Contrary to what Paul says, I don't think anybody ever thought that somehow one of the regional police forces, or your police force, was trying to pad their expenses or something to benefit, but we are genuinely concerned, as I think representatives of the taxpayers should be concerned, at $1.3 billion for a three-day conference. We're staggering in trying to understand how you can spend that amount of money. Your figures that you brought to us today--we knew that global figure of $124.8 million.
There was testimony that the RCMP spent $546 million in that same period of time. I did the math, and that would buy the services of 500,000 RCMP officers for a three-day period at their normal $40 per hour rate of pay, or whatever it is. We know there weren't 500,000 RCMP officers; there might have been 4,000 or 5,000. So the numbers for lay people like us who don't deal with the costs of security...on behalf of taxpayers we're trying to understand how this could possibly happen.
Can you give me the total number of municipal police who were involved in the week or 10-day total time period? For that $124 million, how many officers does that represent?
Chief, Toronto Police Service
From within my own budget, sir, it represents a total of 5,400 staff. That's 4,800 police officers and approximately 600 civilian employees. Of course, they weren't on 24 hours a day. Most of them were working 12-hour shifts. Most of them were being paid, according to our collective agreement, at a premium pay level because their leave and days off were cancelled so they could come in and do this work. Again, we had to maintain our staffing in the city of Toronto. We have a responsibility to our citizens, so to provide the personnel required, we had to bring them back during time they would normally be off. The cost associated with those 5,400 staff is generally not at a base rate of pay but at a premium pay rate.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Again, I'm just doing crude math here. Let's say 5,000 people times $1,000 worth of salary, $300 a day, would be $5 million. Even if you double that....
Chief, Toronto Police Service
I think, sir, you're going with a three-day period, and the summit for us was a 10-day event. It began on June 18. We didn't have everybody in on the first day, but we began bringing personnel in on that day. We were providing training to our officers and we were deploying them in the city as well.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Okay. I just multiplied that figure by five, so let's call it 15 days instead of three days. That would be $25 million, not $124 million. I know there's probably lots of good justification and reasoning for this, but it's just beyond the scope of my imagination to understand how you can spend $124 million in that period of time, and even more so how the RCMP could spend $546 million in that period of time. The bigger question is, was it worth it? That's not for your testimony.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
I want you to understand why we've asked you here, and it wasn't to accuse you of wrongdoing or to say you shouldn't have busted heads or whatever. None of those questions are relevant here.
Chief, Toronto Police Service
We didn't bust any heads, by the way, sir.
Chief, Toronto Police Service
About 10. We had a number also who had to attend hospital as a result of exhaustion and other related things, but about 10 were injured in confrontations with demonstrators.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
When the briefings took place for the joint group, who would be advising as to escalation of force or at what point force would be used? Were you just left up to your own judgment as experienced police officers, that when the situation crosses a line, this amount of force is allowed, and when it crosses another line, that amount of force?
Chief, Toronto Police Service
Sir, we're guided not just simply by our own discretion, but by the law. We have policies and procedures and performance and training standards in place in policing in Ontario, and our people are guided by the policies of the Toronto Police Services Board.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
But you must have been briefed by the organizers of the event. Mr. Alcock or somebody must have told all three law enforcement agencies, here are the rules of engagement.
Chief, Toronto Police Service
Let me tell you, sir, that's not the case. No one from a political body can direct the operations of me or of the police service. We did not receive any such direction.
As to our rules of engagement, we have very experienced commanders who do major incident command. We have from our police services board our own standing operating procedure policies that guide our operations. But the responsibility for determining operations is with the police.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Under those traditional guidelines, at what point are you allowed by law to arrest someone?
Chief, Toronto Police Service
That's a rather broad question. First of all, within the Criminal Code, on reasonable probable grounds if an offence has been committed, it does empower a police officer in Ontario to charge—
Chief, Toronto Police Service
There is another test, sir. There is a section of the code with respect to preventing a breach of the peace. It is an authority for the police, but it's also a responsibility to prevent a breach of the peace. It's not a charge; it's a preventative detention. When there's a reasonable apprehension that the peace is about to be breached, the police have the authority under the Criminal Code to detain a person while the risk of that breach is imminent and in any event not longer than 24 hours.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
It seems that was used a great deal, and very generously, an interpretation of that clause to be—
Chief, Toronto Police Service
I would disagree with you, sir. It was used a great deal, but a great deal of effort was made to resolve every situation peacefully. But if they begin to riot tumultuously on our streets—and they did—I think there was a very reasonable apprehension that a breach of the peace was at great risk, and we made every effort to prevent that.
NDP
Pat Martin NDP Winnipeg Centre, MB
Could I speak about the variation of venue that you and Paul were talking about? Canadians generally don't like to see that level of security on their streets. Whether it was necessary or not, it's Orwellian. Even the War Measures Act.... People still remember how sick it made them feel to their stomachs to see armed soldiers with guns on their street corners in 1970. We don't like it.
Now, surely if you held this event at Camp David in the States, a place where you can have these things secure, or Meech Lake, or Kananaskis, or on an old military base, you could spruce it up. For $1.3 billion, you could pave the streets of an old military base with gold and build a “Taj Mahal” and have a beautiful event there for less money than we spent.
Don't you think that it would have been easier to police a pre-existing facility that's self-contained? You could have had a ring of law enforcement officers holding hands around the thing for the whole three days.
