Alok Mukherjee, The Way I See It

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has unleashed a national debate with his recent announcement that those seeking to become police officers in his province will neither require post-secondary education nor have to pay tuition fees for the 12-week mandatory Basic Constable Training for new recruits at the Ontario Police College. The Premier’s justification is that faced with a rise in crime, police services need to be able to hire more police officers quickly but are having trouble recruiting. He says that he is removing barriers to recruitment.

The removal of barriers to recruiting sounds reasonable. However, there are unanswered questions and implications. In particular, what does Ford’s announcement regarding educational qualifications signify in terms of the decade-plus long attempts in Ontario to reform policing culminating in the 2019 legislation, Community Safety and Policing Act (CSPA), which is pending proclamation? 

The cancellation of tuition fee of some $15,000 is probably the easier of the two moves. Obviously, for recruits with limited or no financial means, this is a large sum of money. We may expect that the measure will help all police services in attracting candidates. However, it is not clear who will make up the significant loss of revenue by the college. Will the province increase its budget, or will police services have to pay for the cost of training their recruits? If it is the latter, we will be looking at a further increase in police budgets, creating significant pressures on small and medium sized municipalities especially.

Did Ford alert police services boards or municipalities or consult them before making this decision?

The supposed change to minimum educational requirement is probably the bigger issue. It is intriguing and confusing, runs counter to the emerging consensus on police education as expressed in the recommendations of the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission, and abruptly jettisons a decade of work done in Ontario on modernizing policing.

Ford left the impression that he was changing an existing practice, and doing so immediately to address a problem that police services were facing now. The fact is that there is no post-secondary education requirement at present. It will be when the government finally proclaims the Community Safety and Policing Act and replaces the Police Services Act (PSA), which is currently in force.

Section 43(1)(e) of PSA requires only that to be hired as a police officer in Ontario, a person must have “successfully completed at least four years of secondary school education or its equivalent.” This requirement is no different from what Ford is claiming credit for introducing.

The CSPA will require a post-secondary education as part of an expanded list of criteria for appointment. Section 83(1)(e) of the new law states that to be appointed a police officer in Ontario, a candidate must have a degree from a university or a college of applied arts and technology, and it provides for many options to meet this condition.

The announcement, then, raises a few questions.

Is Ford saying that his government will amend the CSPA before it is proclaimed to replace the post-secondary educational requirement with that which already exists in the PSA? He did not say, nor has the government introduced any such amendment in the legislature so far.

But then, are we not faced with a conundrum? Since, under the PSA, one needs four years of secondary schooling to become a police officer and not post-secondary education, surely, education cannot be the barrier to recruitment at this time, contrary to Ford’s claim? If Ontario’s police services are having trouble attracting candidates, something that Ontario’s Premier professes to be deeply concerned about due to rise in crime, couldn’t there be other reasons that need to be investigated and identified for meaningful action?

Yet, given the prominence with which Premier Ford made his announcement, accompanied by a supportive promotional video featuring his Solicitor General, Toronto’s Chief of Police Myron Demkiw and newly minted Toronto police graduates, we have to wonder if there may be another reason.

The post-secondary educational provisions in the CSPA are the result of a long process of debate and discussion in Ontario. Some twelve years ago, Ontario held a summit on the future of policing where a cross-section of participants explored the emerging issue of police reform. There was growing concern about the exponential increase in the cost of policing and talk about alternative models of community safety. The summit generated many recommendations, which the provincial government pledged to act on.

Following the summit, in 2013, the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services established a Future of Policing Advisory Committee (FPAC), composed of representatives of municipalities, police services boards, police chiefs and police associations. FPAC was chaired by an Assistant Deputy Minister and supported by a team of officials from the Ministry and other government agencies. 

Mandated to plan for effective, efficient and sustainable delivery of police services in Ontario in the future, FPAC contributed to the development of proposals for legislative, regulatory and policy change related to all aspects of policing. It worked through a number of working groups, one of which dealt with the theme of police training and education.

As chair of the Toronto Police Services Board and one-time president of the Ontario Association of Police Service Boards, I was a member of FPAC and several of its working groups, including the one on training and education. I remember well the lively and intense deliberations that occurred on this subject. Most members felt strongly that reforms to policing must include reforms to police training and education, and that the emerging demands of community safety required that the new generation of police officers had a higher level of academic education and received a broad range of high-quality continuous training during their career. The director and staff of the Ontario Police College entered into extensive consultation with experts and academics to enhance and modernize the college’s program.

Representatives of police associations were supportive of improving the training provided to police officers but were adamant that post-secondary education should not be a pre-requisite to be a police officer. They believed strongly that this would exclude many candidates and, in any case, there was no concrete evidence that a higher level of education contributed to good policing.

The yet-to-be-proclaimed Community Safety and Policing Act of 2019 is the most recent incarnation of the legislation that emerged from the work of FPAC and its working groups. The mandatory education requirement provision represents the compromise resulting from the debates and arguments that began in 2013.

So, here is the intriguing question: could Premier Ford now be using the problem of recruitment to give to the police associations what they did not get back then? An earlier version of the Community Safety and Policing Act was passed by the Ontario provincial parliament before the Ford government took office. The new government quickly put a pause in order to hold further consultations and do a review of the legislation. In the first speech from the throne laying out the new government’s plans, the Lieutenant Governor proclaimed the government’s view that police officers were shackled in doing their job by excessive accountability. The subsequent revisions, which took several years, reflected changes consistent with this view, although the bulk of the proposed new law governing policing was left intact. Why the CSPA has not been proclaimed after almost four years of its passage remains a mystery. Any changes to the educational requirement would constitute a further watering down of a legislation that was a decade in the making, and a further indication of Premier Ford’s partiality to the preferences of police associations.