one of the most noticeable figures in the ottawa police service’s 2024 draft budget, tabled on wednesday, is the exorbitant amount of overtime it’s paying to its members.
with the new south facility breaking ground and a byward market neighbourhood operations centre set to open next year, the ops is facing numerous pressures in providing ottawans with services without breaking the bank, and the $17.4 million in spending on ot in 2023 doesn’t help.
this year’s amount is just shy of the $17.7 million it spent in 2022, when the oversized convoy protest invaded our streets for nearly a month, followed by a few smaller protest engagements thrown in. by comparison, in the three years prior to the pandemic, annual police overtime costs ran in the $7- to 8-million range.
but what was expected to be an anomaly with 2022’s convoy-related ot numbers is now looking more like the norm, with smaller but more frequent demonstrations occurring “almost every weekend,” and extreme weather events adding to the tally. that $17.4 million, were it to happen again in 2024, would represent more than four per cent of the total budget of $414.5 million — more than simply chump change.
while not attributing this year’s overtime costs to particular events, the draft report notes many of the instances in which policing here faced challenges were the result of being in a national capital city, thus the police force incurred expenses that many other police services wouldn’t. in 2023, those included visits to ottawa by u.s. president joe biden and ukraine president volodymyr zelenskyy, canada day celebrations, ongoing convoy-related demonstrations, the psac strike and recent demonstrations linked to the crisis in the middle east.