A Decade Later: Have Canadian Police Boards Become Symbolic Illusions of Accountability?
A little over ten years ago, in July 2015, I stepped down as Chair of the Toronto Police Services Board (TPSB) after eleven years at the helm—a tenure that made me the second-longest-serving chair in the board’s history, behind only its inaugural chair, Judge C. O. Bick.
In those years, I had also served as a Director and President of the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards and the Canadian Association of Police Boards (since renamed the Canadian Association for Police Governance). In those roles locally, provincially, and nationally, I was deeply involved in efforts to strengthen civilian police governance through training, policy development, education, and advocacy.
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When I left office, I hoped that the foundation had been laid to take civilian police governance in Toronto and more broadly to the next stage—a stage marked by a board-led agenda focused on systemic transformation, binding human rights policies, rigorous line-by-line financial oversight, and active community engagement. Instead, a decade later, I find myself routinely answering calls from journalists, academic researchers, and even currently serving board members asking for context, analysis, and basic historical background.
Why is it, I wonder, that the voice of a police board chair or member is so rarely heard commenting on or explaining a developing or ongoing event involving the police?
There is clearly a vacuum.
Over the past decade, civilian police governance across Ontario and Canada has taken a major step back due to a catastrophic loss of institutional memory and democratic resolve. Too many police boards have quietly abandoned their statutory responsibility to govern, retreating into administrative passivity and acting as cheerleaders and rubber stamps for police leadership.
Police services boards, composed of ordinary citizens and elected municipal politicians, were established to serve as vital instruments of civilian governance as a cornerstone of democratic policing. Today, they appear to have defaulted into what I called “a symbolic illusion of accountability” in my 2018 book, Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing.
Hiding behind elaborate administrative processes—public meetings, consultation exercises—to project a reassuring appearance of democratic oversight, police boards today maintain the status quo, absorb public criticism, shield police executives from genuine scrutiny, and actively reverse hard-won gains of the past.
1. Dissent in an Era of Ferment: Where is Governance?
Events across the world since roughly 2020 indicate that we are living through a period of intense economic, political, and social turmoil. People and communities struggling to survive—facing severe challenges in housing affordability, healthcare, and access to adequate food, while distressed by environmental crises and their governments’ complicity in violations of international law—are taking to the streets to exercise their fundamental rights to free speech, peaceful assembly, and political dissent.
I am reminded of the caution expressed by the eminent Canadian academic, Thomas Homer-Dixon, at a national conference of police governors that we hosted in Toronto. Speaking on policing in the context of globalization, Homer-Dixon demonstrated how global events inevitably become local community safety and policing issues. He encouraged police governors to pay close attention to global events and proactively plan for their local impact.
Yet what is the police response to these local, national, and global social-political-economic events? Increasingly, it consists of militarized force, AI-driven surveillance, the suppression of free expression, and the routine criminalization of protest under the sweeping banner of “national security” or “counter-terrorism.” In effect, civilian governance has surrendered its role to the very entity it is mandated to govern.
In the face of an aggressive policing posture, where is civilian governance? Where are the binding board policies ensuring that policing remains proportional, non-discriminatory, and strictly compliant with the Charter rights that Canada guarantees all its residents?
A case in point is the response of the Toronto Police Services Board to today’s challenges. This board governs Canada’s largest municipal force, which is also one of North America’s biggest. It used to be said that what Toronto does today, other boards will do tomorrow.
The Toronto police board committed in its Strategic Plan to update its policies to comply with Ontario’s new Community Safety and Policing Act. Yet, as recent submissions from the Law Union of Ontario highlight, foundational procedures—such as those governing demonstrations and protests—remain grossly outdated, biased, and silent on fundamental constitutional guarantees. The board established no binding policy parameters beforehand and demanded no post-operation accountability afterward. Instead of directing the Police Chief to respect constitutional freedoms, the board defers uncritically to a misguided interpretation of “operational independence.”
In effect, the board has given the police service it governs—and its Chief—a free hand in managing the public’s right to free speech and the expression of dissent.
2. The Unchecked Economics of Policing: The Peel Example
Across Canada and Ontario, the cost of policing is skyrocketing disproportionately compared to every other essential municipal service. Nationally, municipal policing expenditures have surged by over 40 percent over the past decade, topping $18.5 billion annually. In Ontario, policing consistently consumes between 15 and 25 percent of total municipal operating budgets. While municipal investments in public health, affordable housing, homelessness support, mental health infrastructure, and youth programming are starved, police budgets swallow the lion’s share of local tax revenues.
Yet police boards approve these escalating budget requests completely unmindful of the broader economic environment or the fiscal strain on local taxpayers.
The case of Peel Region is an appalling example of this governance failure. As reported by The Pointer, Peel Regional Police secured an unprecedented 23.3 percent budget increase in a single year—adding $144 million to bring their operating budget toward $750 million—following a 14 percent hike the previous year.
When interviewed by The Pointer regarding this massive surge, I described it as “an utter failure of governance” and “highway robbery” abetted by municipal passivity. Under Ontario law, police boards are legally required to consider, examine, and approve the police budget before submitting it to city council. The Peel board approved the historic increase sought by the Peel Chief of Police with no financial analysis, no external auditing, and no meaningful questioning. When elected municipal leaders attempted to send the budget back for scrutiny, the door was slammed shut.
3. Opening the Tap: Expansion of Force Size Without Evidence
At one time, the Toronto police board strictly controlled the size of the police force. During my tenure as Chair, the board implemented hiring freezes, demanded operational efficiencies, and pushed for the civilianization of non-enforcement roles. Today, boards like Toronto, actively supported by city halls, have opened the tap wide to expand the size of their police services.
Toronto’s police budget now stands at an extraordinary $1.43 billion—a 7 percent increase in a single year, and a massive expansion over the decade since I left. A large chunk of this year-over-year increase is tied to hiring hundreds of additional police officers in each of the next three years.
What is the justification for this massive expansion? What supportive evidence, empirical research, or independent rationale was evaluated by the board before approving the hiring of hundreds of additional armed officers?
A decade ago, we relied on an independent board secretariat staffed by subject-matter experts to scrutinize such claims. Today, excepting basic administrative support, the TPSB has let go of all staff members who possessed substantive policy or research expertise. It is evident from the board's public record that it has undertaken no significant, board-led policy work in over a decade. By gutting its own internal expertise, the board has surrendered its ability to examine and question police claims, choosing instead to rubber-stamp multi-million-dollar staffing requests without a shred of independent verification.
4. The Degradation of Democratic Process: The Hamilton Example
By law, police boards are required to conduct their business in public. Private or confidential meetings are permitted only for a strictly defined list of matters such as personnel discipline, sensitive legal issues, or proprietary business negotiations. Boards are expected to establish and uphold transparent rules of procedure, foster collegial debate, and welcome public input as essential democratic friction.
Instead, boards today appear to have devolved into autocratic, closed-door bodies that are dismissive of the public and hostile to internal debate.
Hamilton provides a textbook example of this decay. There, Councillor Cameron Kroetsch publicly questioned an “undemocratic” budget process where board members received complex, line-by-line financial presentations barely 24 hours before deliberations. Rather than conducting rigorous public reviews, the board allowed budget oversight to shrink into non-public, poorly attended committee meetings, supinely transferring financial authority to the Police Chief. Remarkably and shockingly, the Police Chief was permitted to dictate the operating budget of the very board that employs him!
When some board members attempted to bring community concerns to the table or ask tough questions, they were met with hostility, discourtesy, and procedural silencing. This hostile governance culture ultimately led to the resignation of Dr. Anjali Menezes, a physician deeply rooted in the community and committed to representing its interests. In her letter of resignation after three frustrating years, Dr. Menezes called for the Hamilton board to be dismantled, warning that her colleagues acted as “cheerleaders” for the police rather than independent overseers.
Concurrently, public participation across municipal police boards has been systematically degraded: deputation times are drastically curtailed, meetings are scheduled at inconvenient hours for working residents, and public input is pre-screened to manage access. When a board fears public input and penalizes dissenting members, it ceases to function as a democratic body.
Reclaiming the Statutory Authority to Govern
In a preview of his paper, “The Illusion of Oversight,” Cal Corley, CEO of the Community Safety Knowledge Alliance, notes that major public inquiries—from the Morden Report on the G20 to the Rouleau Commission—have consistently found that police boards lack the standing, knowledge, or resolve to hold police services accountable. Corley points to structural deficits and a widespread misunderstanding of “operational independence.” Full disclosure: I consider Cal Corley a friend with whom I share a common analysis of the state of Canadian policing and the need for transformation.
While those structural deficits exist, the core reality is deeply political: boards have supinely abdicated their power.
Civilian police governance was never meant to be comfortable, and it was certainly never intended to function as a public relations department for police chiefs. It was established as a firm, democratic safeguard to ensure that an institution possessing a state monopoly on legal force remains strictly subject to public control.
Restoring the credibility and authority of civilian oversight will not happen through minor administrative tweaks. It requires board members who possess the courage to ask blunt questions, demand line-by-line financial transparency, rebuild independent policy expertise, and exercise their full statutory authority. Until that happens, civilian police oversight in Canada will remain nothing more than an expensive, symbolic illusion.