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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
As part of a landmark deal for the Ontario Provincial Police, its experienced front-line officers will soon see an extra bump on top of new significant salary hikes for them and the service's civilian employees, The Trillium has learned.
The Ontario Provincial Police Association (OPPA), which represents almost 10,000 staff of the provincial police, announced on Monday that its members voted overwhelmingly to ratify new collective agreements with the service, including to make "uniform association members the highest paid police in Ontario."
The four-year agreements are retroactive to Jan. 1, 2023, lasting to Dec. 31, 2026. Its members will see their salaries retroactively increased by 4.75 per cent as of the start of 2023, and by 4.5 per cent as of the beginning of this year. They'll receive raises of 2.75 per cent next Jan. 1, and on Jan. 1, 2026.
Factoring in compounding, OPPA members will receive about a 15.5 per cent salary increase over the four years of the agreement.
The top base annual salary of a first-class police constable — the rank typically held by a patrol officer after a few years of service — will increase from $106,598 before the agreement to $123,194 in 2026.
Many of the OPP's first-class police constables, plus some sergeants — a rank above — and certain other police and staff within the service will also see extra pay raises, thanks to the new agreements.
First-class constables with five-plus years of experience who work front-line duties and meet other minor requirements will see three per cent of their base salary added to their pay beginning Sept. 1, an OPPA spokesperson confirmed to The Trillium. Sergeants meeting the same criteria, and either overseeing front-line officers or who work in communications centres that dispatch first responders, will be entitled to the same three per cent bump.
The new "premiums" the OPP agreed to pay front-line officers are part of a trend in policing in Ontario, according to Scott Mills, the OPPA's strategic communications coordinator.
Up to thousands of OPP officers could qualify for the extra front-line pay bump. As of three-and-a-half years ago, there were slightly more than 5,100 total constables and sergeants working for the OPP, according to a 2021 report by Ontario's auditor general. The auditor's report didn't delineate between constables' classes, nor did it include information about how long they'd worked for the OPP.
A spokesperson for Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney, whose ministry oversees labour relations with the public service and broader public sector, also didn't say how many OPPA members would qualify for the premium in her response to The Trillium.
Mills explained that the OPPA's goal in negotiating certain other pay or allowance increases was driven by a need to remain competitive against what municipal police services in Ontario offer.
Staff in certain other OPP roles — including others working in communications centres, security at Queen's Park and elsewhere, and some who work in conjunction with courts — will receive one-time salary increases next year.
More types of uniformed officers will now be eligible for the OPP's specialty pay of up to four per cent, which can't be earned concurrently as the three per cent front-line increase.
The annual clothing expense allowance for OPP personnel working in plain-clothes positions is being increased from $1,250 to $1,750, as well.
Incentive payments aimed at attracting or retaining police to work in 40-plus remote areas that typically struggle to hire officers will also be increased next year.
OPP labour woes
The OPP has suffered in recent years from a challenge that many sectors in the province face: attracting and retaining labour.
The three-per-cent pay increase for experienced front-line officers "is to promote retention of experienced officers," the OPPA said in a document, which The Trillium obtained.
"Like our municipal police partners, staffing is an issue across the sector, and the one per cent salary cap imposed by Bill 124 would have made it very difficult in attracting and retaining members in the OPP, as no other municipal police services were affected by Bill 124," said Mills, the OPPA's spokesperson.
Bill 124 is the legislation that Premier Doug Ford's government passed to put one per cent annual wage increase limits on the salaries of many Ontario civil servants and broader public sector employees. The Ford government repealed the law earlier this year after two consecutive court rulings determined it unconstitutional. The limits Bill 124 imposed on salary increases could have applied to the latest agreements the OPPA negotiated if it hadn't been repealed.
The OPP is the largest police service in Ontario and has jurisdiction over much of the province as the primary policing provider in the province's remote and northern regions. In 2020, it provided municipal policing services to 327 of Ontario's 444 municipalities (74 per cent), according to a report Ontario's auditor general released in late 2021.
About 5,600 police officers and 2,500 civilian employees worked for the OPP four years ago, the auditor general found.
In 2020-21, 88 per cent of the OPP's $1.2-billion budget was spent on salaries and benefits for its employees. By that year, although the service's spending had increased by 26 per cent since a decade before, it employed nine per cent fewer police officers, and its "detachments were increasingly understaffed with front-line officers," the auditor wrote in 2021.
Regions with higher front-line officer vacancies resolved fewer crimes, the auditor also found. Of the roughly 1,000 front-line constable vacancies across the OPP four years ago, 88 per cent were due to constables being on leave or alternative or temporary assignments away from the front lines, according to the report. The OPP's insufficient deployment of its workforce also contributed to staffing shortfalls in certain regions, it said.
According to figures on the OPP's website, it now has 200 more uniformed officers and 100 more civilian employees than in 2020.
The OPPA document The Trillium obtained said the association tried negotiating during its recent collective bargaining process for a "25-and-out" policy for its members, but that the government wouldn't entertain the idea because of the OPP's staffing levels. 25-and-out refers to a policy held by the RCMP, as one example, allowing police to retire after 25 years without a pension reduction.
Currently, OPP employees must work 30 years and be at least 50 years old to retire and receive their full pension.
"We are pleased that the previously landed four-year agreements with the Ontario Provincial Police Association Uniform and Civilian bargaining units have now been ratified," said Liz Tuomi, a spokesperson for Ontario's Treasury Board president, in response to questions from The Trillium. "These agreements recognize the important work that the brave individuals, both OPP police officers and civilians, do every day in Ontario to make sure our province is safe."
"We advocated for our members to be compensated fairly for the work that they do day in and day out for protecting the citizens of Ontario," said Mills, the OPPA's spokesperson. "This contract allows us to be competitive in attracting and retaining uniform members as well as civilian members."