Message from the Inspector General of Policing Ontario
Public order policing continues to be complex and is constantly evolving. Mass public events such as protests, demonstrations and riots have garnered significant public and media attention in recent years, often shining a spotlight on policing responses. In Ontario and across Canada, the volume and frequency of these events, and the ability to mobilize large groups of individuals with the ease of a smartphone, is on the rise. Whether the events are reoccurring celebrations or domestic and international protests, all of these events require adequate responses from police to maintain public order, consistent with Ontario policing legislation and Canadian legal norms. This ‘Spotlight Report’ is an example of how the Inspectorate of Policing (IoP) works to fulfill its mission of making everyone in Ontario safer. Through this report, the IoP acknowledged and profiled areas that work well within Ontario’s public order policing system, while identifying ways to drive improved performance.
Striking the balance between public order maintenance and democratic rights and freedoms
In some cases, – such as the 2022 anti-COVID-19 mandate protests – domestic or international incidents create moments where the natural tensions inherent in a democracy can surface. These events reveal deep division within communities and oftentimes pose a risk to public safety. These public events can also be dynamic, unpredictable, and rapidly evolve, requiring police officers to make on-the-spot decisions to reconcile different rights, including those protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The way police services respond greatly impacts public trust in policing. On the one hand, if the police rely too heavily on their coercive powers, many Ontarians’ rights and freedoms can suffer. On the other hand, if the police do not apply their public order maintenance powers effectively and on time, public safety, the economy and civil society can suffer. The balance can be easy to articulate in theory, but difficult to apply in practice.
Navigating this delicate balance between competing rights and safety needs is essential to prevent escalation and ensure public safety in mass gatherings that require a public order response. In potentially escalating situations, officers must be able to rely on well-established governance policies, operational procedures, training in both operational practices and the effective application of the law, and tools that can be deployed appropriately. Recent and ongoing events in Ontario and across Canada have highlighted the importance of continuing to ensure that Canadian, provincial, territorial and municipal laws strike the most responsive balance between the public’s freedom of expression and assembly and the right of others to conduct their activities safely. Given the increasing quantity and complexity of public order events in Ontario, I recommend in this report that the Ministry of the Solicitor General engage its provincial, territorial, and federal counterparts to review the legal framework governing protests.
It is time to get real about the resource demands and impacts of public order maintenance policing in a democracy
The impact of these events on police resources, budgets and the officers who engage in this serious work are now more significant. For example, the ‘Freedom Convoy’ in 2022 is estimated to have cost $1 million per day, with $800,000 for policing alone.[1] It has been publicly reported that the Ottawa Police Service incurred a total of more than $55 million in costs associated with the policing of those protests.[2]
More recently, between October 2023 and April 2024, demonstrations related to the Israel-Hamas war surpassed $12 million in policing costs, with more than 500 demonstrations in Toronto alone.[3] Last year, the Toronto Police Service responded to over 2,000 unplanned events – a significant portion of which was funded through premium pay (i.e., overtime).[4] Recurring events in other areas of the province, such as unsanctioned St. Patrick’s Day gatherings, result in policing deployment needs that incur significant costs. For example, the Waterloo Regional Police Service incurred $318,000 for the three-day St. Patrick’s Day event.[5] The demand for public order maintenance in Ontario continues to rise, with no signs of slowing down.
Police are tasked with facilitating the freedoms of those that participate in these events, while ensuring the safety of the communities around them. Police services must be adequately resourced to meet this societal imperative. Despite police service boards incorporating funds for public order maintenance and related supports, police budgets are struggling to keep pace with public safety demands given increases in the sheer volume, complexity and unpredictability of this police work. Even among Ontario police services with their own public order units, members are not dedicated full-time to public order work. Instead, they perform regular policing duties and are deployed to the public order unit as needed. This means that when they are called to public order duties, their regular tasks are left unattended, creating stress on frontline policing, criminal investigations, and other functions as one area receives attention while another suffers from a service gap. Additionally, prolonged deployments to public order units increase stress for individual officers as they juggle these responsibilities with their regular duties. In many cases, too, many police services rely on overtime work to fulfill their core function of providing adequate and effective public order policing.
I recognize the risk and complexity involved in the policing of protests, demonstrations and other events. I also recognize the skill and dedication of police officers from across Ontario that engage in public order maintenance. These officers are placed under increased strain, often stretched too thin when we need them the most. In turn, this can lead to fatigue and overall challenges when recruiting officers for this important function. These trends are not sustainable, and are realities that police chiefs, police service boards, local municipalities and the province must work to confront together. The well-being of those that do the difficult work of maintaining public peace must remain a priority. Adequately resourcing police services to maintain public peace during mass events – and to look after those that do that work – is the price we should all be prepared to pay in a democracy that values our freedoms and way of life.
The coordination of Ontario’s public order policing needs to be formalized to ensure its long-term effectiveness and success
Public order events are often not confined to a single municipality, and are increasingly animated by provincial, national, and international issues. This reality requires an “all of us” approach to maintaining provincial public safety. Currently, 11 police services, including the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), provide public order policing across Ontario – meaning that 33 police services rely on another service to discharge this core element of adequate and effective policing. This places a significant demand on one quarter of Ontario police services. While the "some delivering for all" model may work for Ontario, its long-term sustainability must account for the financial and human resource impacts on the services delivering this policing function across a very large province.
The reality is that the scope and magnitude of public order events are taking on a new shape. This new shape makes it evident that public order policing is a whole-of-province priority and responsibility. With this responsibility, comes a need to open up important discussions on how to sustain the "some delivering for all" approach to public order policing in the long-term. To maintain the highest level of public order policing provincially amid rising demand and complexity, we need to invest in it appropriately now and over the medium and long-term, explore other potential service delivery and deployment models to ensure public order policing is not stretched too thin. The price to pay for not paying for these resources is just too great, both in terms of what the public should expect, and what police officers should expect in terms of their health and welfare. In this report, I recommend formalizing and enhancing the mobilization structure for public order units – the ‘Hub’ model approach – so that it becomes a permanent fixture of public order maintenance in this province that drives strategic coordination and consistency of response in the overall provincial public order system. I also recommend initiating discussions between the public safety sector and the province on sustainable, long-term funding for the entirety of Ontario’s public order system. Increased collection and access to data, including demand analysis, must drive these resource-allocation discussions.
Police preparedness is essential for effective public order maintenance
In Ontario, every police service needs to plan for the way in which world incidents can create local impacts. Police services, governed by local police service boards, must maintain a constant state of public order maintenance readiness to ensure public safety is delivered in a lawful, professional, and effective manner, particularly when unpredictable mass gatherings occur in local communities. Effective policing in response to these events relies on credible intelligence and preparedness. With clear insights, police can approach these gatherings with informed planning and avoid overly reactive responses that can provoke public mistrust and tension, especially in the glare of cameras. Beneficially, police preparedness can also positively impact police officer wellness during fast-paced, high-pressure situations, which is often compounded by political and community pressures that unfold in real-time.
My recommendations address ways in which police preparedness and insights into these types of events can be enhanced, ultimately for the purpose of ensuring the most relevant intelligence picture and risk assessment is available to police services that are to these sometimes fast-moving and demanding public order events. My recommendations also are aimed at creating not just consistency, but increased overall effectiveness in risk assessment and information-sharing across the Ontario policing sector, ultimately for the benefit of police services, their members, and the public they serve.
Approaching the new CSPA requirements for public order maintenance policing in Ontario
While governance and operational policies, processes and practices vary across Ontario police services and the boards that oversee them, maintaining public order is a core legislated requirement in Ontario. The Public Order Maintenance requirement that previously existed under the now-repealed Police Services Act (PSA)[6] and its revoked Adequacy and Effectiveness of Police Services Regulation, now exist under the new Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019 (CSPA),[7] with specific requirements outlined in the new Adequate and Effective Policing (General) Regulation. These requirements came into force on April 1, 2024. The statutory requirements are designed to ensure that police services’ Public Order Units (POU) possess the necessary ingredients to adeptly manage a range of situations and facilitate expressive rights alongside public order maintenance. In this report, I make various recommendations for police boards and police services to align their approaches with the new requirements under the CSPA to bring them into compliance.
My conclusion on the overall state of public order policing in Ontario
Following this inspection and based on its findings, my conclusion is that the state of public order policing in Ontario is strong. The legal and governance infrastructure that should surround POUs and their operational work is, generally, in place in the form of police service board policy and governance, Chief of Police procedures and direction, and operational planning processes. Ontario POUs have proven themselves to be generally responsive to emerging and evolving conditions, where they can deploy effectively in both planned and unplanned circumstances. This has led Ontario’s POUs to establish a ‘Hub model,’ which allows multiple POUs from across the province to coordinate deployments on a larger scale.
There are also signs that the system is becoming stretched due to demand and complexity, and that this trend is increasing. Therefore, in this report, I have identified areas – both in relation to compliance and long-term effectiveness – that the public order policing system in Ontario should focus on to improve its overall performance and strengthen Ontario’s position as a national leader in this space. Given my statutory responsibility to oversee adequate and effective policing in the province, the IoP will continue to monitor the operation of the public order system in Ontario, with a view to evaluating the system’s ability to manage evolving demands and ensure the maintenance of public safety.
Ryan Teschner
Inspector General of Policing of Ontario
[1]Joanne Chianello, “Protest Has Cost City of Ottawa More than $30M,” CBC news, February 23, 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-protest-demonstration-cost….
[2] These include costs associated with regular, overtime and statutory holiday hours for Ottawa Police Service members; costs associated with provision of direct supports to the City of Ottawa and loss of revenues and economic support through the City of Ottawa; payments to external policing agencies for surge capacity resources; and Ottawa Police Service operational supplies, equipment, leased space and vehicle costs.
Public Order Emergency Commission, Institutional Report of the Ottawa Police Service, February 17, 2023, pp 21.
[3] Of the $12 million total cost, almost $5 million was overtime costs.
John Marchesan, “Police Price Tag for Protests Surpasses $12M”, City News, April 5, 2024.
[4] Toronto Police Service Board Meeting Public Agenda (April 10, 2025), Re: 2024 Operating Budget Variance for the Toronto Police Service, Period Ending December 31, 2024: https://tpsb.ca/jdownloads-categories?task=download.send&id=865:april-10-2025-public-agenda&catid=32, pp. 5-6.
[5] Waterloo Regional Police Service Board Open Agenda, Chief of Police Reports 2024-098, http://calendar.wrps.on.ca/Board/Detail/2024-04-17-1030-Waterloo-Regional-Police-Services-Board-of-Directo/4c557755-56c5-42da-b387-b150013b9f37, April 17, 2024.
[6] Police Services Act, R.S.O. 1990, c.P.15,
[7] Community Safety and Policing Act, S.O. 2019, c.1, Sched.1.