Chris Selley on the vote by Toronto city councillors to retain the existing budget for the city’s police force at $1.22 billion:
On Monday, Toronto City Council debated and passed a variety of proposed police reforms, the newsiest of which had been asking the department to table a 10-per-cent budget cut for 2021. That idea was voted down 16-8. Further proposed changes included asking the Toronto Police Service for a line-item budget, and subjecting police to the municipal auditor-general’s oversight — utterly revolutionary concepts, you will agree. (Both passed.)
The budget cut might at least have been a useful exercise: It would be interesting to know what the police would and wouldn’t do with $1.1 billion instead of $1.22 billion. If I had been a consensus-seeking councillor on the virtual floor, I might have moved a motion asking the police to table line-item budgets for both — and maybe push for 20 or 30 per cent, too. But the question of the budget sucked up too much oxygen.
That’s certainly understandable. The “defund the police” movement in all its permutations is having a moment. There are North American police departments and police unions that might as well be begging to be disbanded, as much with their banal and petulant misbehaviour as with their needless use of lethal force. A few might even get their wish.
Canadian departments haven’t been begging quite as hard, however, and too many Canadians take false solace in that. When it comes to police-involved fatalities, we fare quite poorly against Western nations other than the one next door. Our accountability mechanisms are, generally speaking, a sick joke; indeed, it seems considerably easier to fire flamboyantly terrible cops in the United States than it does here.
James Forcillo, the Toronto officer who was caught on tape fatally unloading nine shots at 18-year-old Sammy Yatim for no good reason, was on the payroll for two-and-a-half years until his criminal conviction. He was at least suspended. Simon Seguin, the Alberta RCMP officer caught on camera in March rugby-tackling, punching and choking Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam in a dispute over an expired vehicle registration, was at the time awaiting trial for assault!
