Next month, a new law will start being used in Ontario to govern policing, covering oversight, discipline, and making it easier to suspend officers without pay.
The Community Safety and Policing Act will become effective on April 1, five years after it was passed. This followed a lengthy process involving meetings with municipalities, advocates, and police services, and the creation of more than two dozen regulations to go along with the law.
The new act is massive, with 263 sections—more than 100 sections longer than the old law it replaces. Among its notable changes, it will allow police chiefs to suspend officers without pay in certain situations.
Under the previous Police Services Act, a police officer would only go without pay while suspended if they were both convicted of a crime and given a prison sentence.
Before, an officer who was convicted but didn’t go to jail would stay suspended with pay until they were fired through the police disciplinary process. If they contested their termination, they could be suspended for a long time.
The Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police has long pushed for more authority to suspend officers without pay. While they see the new rules as progress, spokesperson Joe Couto believes they may not fully meet the public's expectations, especially since they mainly address incidents that happen while off-duty.
“We might be a little further ahead, but not really, I think, what the public expects from their lawmakers,” he said.
The new law expands on earlier rules—chiefs can now suspend without pay if an officer is in custody or on bail with conditions that would interfere with their job, or if the officer is charged with a serious off-duty offence that could lead to their firing.
Police unions have raised concerns about broadening the provisions for suspension without pay, saying that officers should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. However, Mark Baxter, president of the Police Association of Ontario, feels the new rules strike a good balance.
“When we have some really serious and horrific cases that involve allegations that involve police officers, we understand the public’s expectation that the member is not going to continue to be on the payroll,” he said in an interview.
It’s unclear if an officer could recover lost wages if they are ultimately acquitted, Baxter said.
Significant changes are also being made to the police discipline process. Currently, a police chief selects an investigator to look into alleged misconduct, hires the prosecutor, and hires the adjudicator, according to Baxter.
“It really feels like the deck is stacked against a member from the beginning,” he said.
The new law establishes an independent body to conduct adjudication hearings.
It also establishes the role of inspector general, who will be selected to check and supervise how police services, police boards and chiefs are following the new law, as well as look into alleged misconduct by police service board members.
The inspector general will also have the authority to demand that a police service be supervised by another organization, and to dismiss individuals from leadership positions.
The Ontario Human Rights Commission said the establishment of the inspector general position is favorable, as are the expanded ability to suspend officers without pay and provisions regarding gaps in oversight.
The commission said it is also positive that under the law, municipalities creating community safety and well-being plans must consult with members of the public, including youth, people who have received or are receiving mental health or addictions services, members of racialized groups and First Nation, Inuit and Métis people.
However, the human rights commission said not all of its suggestions were incorporated in the law.
“For example, its recommendations that the equipment and use of force regulation include stricter standards for the use of conducted energy weapons (Tasers) and that the adequate and effective policing regulation encourage the use of non-police response options to persons who are in crisis,” the commission wrote in a statement.
The law and its accompanying regulations establish minimum standards for “adequate and effective policing” in areas such as crime prevention and maintaining the public peace.
Another important regulation with the law, Baxter noted, is one specifying what equipment front-line officers should have access to in case they respond to an active attacker situation, including heavier body armour, a battering ram and a “reasonable number” of semi-automatic rifles, which will vary between communities.
“The act really sort of modernizes police workplaces,” Baxter said. “There’s some components that are going to make our workplaces safer for our members.”
Municipalities, which largely pay policing costs, say they are keeping an eye on what the law will mean for their budgets, but that the changes are good overall.
“(The Association of Municipalities of Ontario) has encouraged the Ontario government to understand the financial impacts as Ontarians already pay some of the highest per capita policing costs in the country,” AMO president Colin Best wrote in a statement.
“The proposed reforms … are important, overdue and will provide a more consistent level of safety across the province for both the public and our front-line officers.”
The Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office said there are many worthwhile measures in the new law, including on transparency and accountability of police services boards, but it doesn’t provide for enough transparency in making new regulations.
“There is also heightened public interest in enhanced transparency and accountability when it comes to both the governance of police powers and addressing systemic discrimination associated with policing,” it wrote in a statement.
The police need to take extra steps to make sure they review and remove records that show or could help with unfair or illegal police actions.
The law has been in progress for a long time.
The previous Liberal government asked for opinions on changes to policing laws for many years before passing the Safer Ontario Act shortly before the 2018 election. But when Premier Doug Ford’s government took power, it stopped the enforcement of that act, calling it anti-police.
Ford’s government then introduced its own law in 2019 but said that the size of the bill, the needed regulations, and delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the implementation of the bill.
Even after seeing how the new rules and regulations actually impact policing, Couto of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police said that there will still be a lot of work to do.
We have clearly told the government that April 1 is not the end, but actually the beginning, because three months, six months, eight months, 12 months later, we will need to come together and say that we need to address this.
