In December, the Toronto Police Services Board unanimously endorsed the request by the police for a 1.7 per cent (or $20 million) increase in funding for 2024. By the end of January, the police’s $1.2 billion total budget is likely to pass the city’s budget committee, maybe with minor changes. Then it will be considered in the overall municipal budget by city council in February.
The police are currently in collective bargaining, negotiating with the city for a new contract, and any resulting salary increases will also be added to this total.
Where will the money go?
The police say the increase in funds will be spent on hiring more officers and civilian employees, like clerical staff and administrators. The police have also been emphasizing the need to respond to a reported increase in hate crimes. At the Jan. 11 police services board meeting, Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw said a proposal to cut $12.6 million from the requested budget would lead to “unacceptable risks.”
But many advocates are critical of this rhetoric. Britt Caron of the Toronto Citizens Collective (TCC) points out that even when police respond after the fact to an incident, they “are not preventing hate crimes.” She continues: “We know that prevention is much more complicated than that” and requires funding for education, for meeting people’s needs, and for basic elements of safety that have nothing to do with policing.
“This entire narrative about hate crimes is really problematic,” says Beverly Bain, with the No Pride in Policing Coalition (NPPC). Bain says that people who face systemic oppressions like racism experience a wide spectrum of harm, and the category of “hate crime” only gives attention to one very narrow slice of that harm. So, for instance, people who face racism are deprived of resources and made less safe and less healthybecause of how they are treated by powerful institutions and the people in them, as well as by other ordinary people.
“What we keep repeatedly seeing, though, is that there seems to be more money for cops.”
At best, the “hate crime” designation captures a small subset of interpersonal mistreatment, while downplaying or dismissing everything else. As Bain asks, “What makes a hate crime any more profound than other kinds of harms that people experience?” And at worst, the category of “hate crime” gets used in ways that stigmatize or even criminalize actions that are not actually contributing to larger oppressions, including legitimate political protest.
Bain says that “hate crime” is a category defined by the state and “deployed for particular purposes. And it’s being used in this very moment in the most profoundly dangerous way. … It gives legitimacy to police and for police budgets, and for police buildup of militarization, and for the criminalization of particular groups of people.”
As an example, she points to institutional responses to even very basic forms of solidarity with the Palestinian people. When they act in solidarity, “certain people become targeted. And it’s so happened to be [that] the majority of people who get targeted around Palestine happen to be racialized, Black, and Indigenous people.”
Divest & reinvest
Lorraine Lam is a street outreach worker and a member of the Shelter and Housing Justice Network (SHJN). She says that advocates “keep hearing all this language around, ‘Oh, there is no money’” to do anything about the housing crisis and deteriorating social and health care services. “What we keep repeatedly seeing, though, is that there seems to be more money for cops.”
Community members have been working together to respond to the harms of policing in Toronto for decades. But the specific “defund the police” language comes from the racial justice uprising in 2020 sparked by a number of high-profile killings of Black people in the U.S., including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Organizers we spoke to in Toronto say that while the defund demand remains crucial, it is just one part of a broader struggle.
The demand to defund is not currently the sole or central focus for any of the groups that are working on it. Some groups are overtly abolitionist, meaning they are working towards a much larger social transformation that involves abolishing the police and prisons entirely. Others focus more narrowly on issues like homelessness and poverty, or on reforms related to policing like ending solitary confinement or strengthening civilian oversight of the police, and these groups see defunding as one element of advancing that work.
In 2020, the banner for defunding in the GTA was most visibly carried by Black Lives Matter – Toronto, a group which has since become much less active. An Ipsos poll conducted in July of that year found 51 per cent of Canadians were in favour of defunding the police. Despite the popular support and the movement’s demand for a 50 per cent defunding of the Toronto police budget, a motion at city council in 2020 to shift 10 per cent of the police budget to other priorities failed to pass.
In the years since, various groups working on this issue have formed and faded, but the call to defund has remained. During last year’s municipal budget process, for instance, a number of groups came together to work on policing issues as the Another Toronto is Possible Coalition.
Organizers say the challenges facing defund organizing include the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the cumulative toll of internal movement divisions and individual trauma from earlier moments of uprising.
Movement work is emotionally gruelling, particularly for people in those groups that are more likely to be targeted by state repression, and it is almost always unpaid. Other factors are more specific to this year, like the need for some organizers to focus on other urgent issues, particularly Palestine solidarity, and escalating police repression targeting grassroots political mobilizations in the city. “There’s a lot going on right now,” says Caron, “so there are people who normally would be at the forefront of this kind of thing who are preoccupied with other things.”
At the same time, other groups have become more active on the issue. Lam says that in the past, the SHJN has focused more on “amplifying other groups’ efforts” when it comes to the defund demand, but this year is taking more of an “active” role.
Chow’s choice
The TCC and SHJN are part of a campaign that has been focused on “Chow’s choice.” The campaign’s website argues that Mayor Olivia Chow, in the first budget process since her election, can either choose the status quo priorities of funding police and “private luxury for the few,” or fund social services, housing, and “public good for the many.” Groups involved in this effort have been training community members to make deputations to city council, plan to make their own deputations, and are engaging in other forms of political pressure.
In addition, Caron says in an email, that while they have “varying degrees of ability to call for full out defunding,” groups like Showing Up for Racial Justice, TTCriders, and the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition “are definitely all aligned in that we think the police budget could and should be reduced in order to fund other services.”
The campaign’s website argues that Mayor Olivia Chow, in the first budget process since her election, can either choose the status quo priorities of funding police and “private luxury for the few,” or fund social services, housing, and “public good for the many.”
Another coalition of community groups was announced on Jan. 21, a week and a half before Chow was set to unveil her budget on Feb. 1. Its membership includes NPPC, Voices for Unhoused Liberation, Jane Finch Action Against Poverty, Palestinian Youth Movement, Wet’suwet’en Land Defenders, and Jews Say No To Genocide. They wrote in a press release, “These budget decisions are being made in the context of mountainous evidence that policing is fundamentally anti-Indigenous and racist — and that increased spending on policing does not lower crime rates.” They warn that “Mayor Chow appears ready to continue the status quo of prioritizing policing” and called for money instead to be invested in “social services and community support programs that keep people safe and alive.”
The NPPC also made deputations earlier in January that included a demand for defunding, linking it with calls for abolition, as part of their organizing in response to the February 2023 police shooting of Devon Fowlin. The shooting took place in a North York park and left Fowlin with serious injuries. An administrative investigation by the Toronto police chief found that Fowlin posed no threat to the public, that the constable who shot him used unnecessary force, and that three of the other officers involved in the incident also violated law and policy.
“At a time when police are requesting more funding, this report highlights their practice of needlessly escalating encounters and causing lasting harm,” says Fowlin’s lawyer, Dave Shellnutt, in a press release.
As useful a tactic as deputations can be, Bain says that the NPPC’s view is that “deputations aren’t sufficient. We have to be out there protesting in the streets during this time.”
Many organizers agree that resisting the harms of policing in Toronto requires more than just coming together once a year to tell the city to give the cops less money. Lam says people “hear the term ‘defund’ and they have a certain idea of what it means, but I don’t think they’re really thinking about how it’s interconnected” with so many other issues.
The demand to defund the police asks politicians to make a choice: they can choose to put resources into policing, or into other things that would meet people’s needs. More than that, it highlights two competing ideas for how to respond to people’s needs: When the city spent millions on cops, fences, and landscaping to clear homeless encampments out of parks, for instance, it only happened because the city and other levels of government had already failed to properly fund work that would prevent homelessness in the first place.
Bain says abolition is about “creating a city, creating a country, creating a world that’s based on a form of ethical care” to replace current systems that invest in policing, prisons, and carceral logics and that are “choosing violence over care.” For abolitionists, it’s about defunding, yes, but it is also about organizing against all of the many kinds of violence that governments and other powerful institutions do to people, and in support of initiatives that meet people’s needs and allow them to thrive.
Municipal Budgets and the “Strong Mayor” Powers
It used to be that Toronto city council had to vote to pass the municipal budget. But the “strong mayor” powers introduced by Premier Doug Ford changed that, as seen first with the 2023 budget.
Now, the mayor simply prepares the budget themselves, and the most city council can do is propose amendments to it. The mayor can veto those amendments, and in that case, council can override vetoes only with a two-thirds majority vote.
This year, a number of budget consultations were held around the city, and staff reports and budget committee recommendations have landed on the mayor’s desk.
But it ultimately comes down to Mayor Olivia Chow to propose a budget by Feb. 1.
Council then has an opportunity to propose amendments on Feb. 14 at a special budget meeting.
Chow has said she will put forward a property tax increase. City staff prepared a budget including an increase of 10.5 per cent, which would raise monthly property tax bills by an average of around $30.
This article appeared in the 2024 Feb/Mar issue.
