Ottawa riot cops who answered a midnight call and raced to make it to Toronto by Sunday morning each billed $2,079.99 for a single day’s work.
Three police officers from the tiny township of Stirling-Rawdon made more than $25,997.66 in overtime pay alone.
One Hamilton cop earned $31,590.27 in six weeks.
These are three examples of the premium payouts the RCMP made to out-of-town police officers to patrol last summer’s G8/G20 summits in Huntsville and Toronto.
The Mounties’ contracts with “partner” police agencies, obtained by the CBC through Freedom of Information laws and published Monday, detail how hundreds of police officers from outside the GTA drew lucrative contracts laden with overtime and vacation bonuses.
More than half the hours worked by out-of-town cops were paid at one-and-a-half or double-time rates.
All of the 278 Montreal police officers, for instance, were paid double-time for all their work during the summit, earning a total of $3,342,578, almost half the $7 million cost to hire 657 officers from 17 Canadian police forces.
“It’s as though no one was paying attention to the money,” said John Sewell, former Toronto mayor who heads the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition. “If any other public servant spent money this way, people would be beside themselves; but for some reason we don’t hold police to the same level of accountability as other civil servants.”
The RCMP say they had no choice but to compensate the officers as per their respective collective agreements, which were non-negotiable.
Spokeswoman Julie Gagnon said in an emailed statement the agency still came in $4 million under budget: The RCMP had forecast paying $11 million to “partners” for supplemental policing needs.
Gagnon said there was no cap on overtime expenses, all overtime hours had to be approved by supervisors and the RCMP “maximized efficiencies to minimize overtime.”
The Eastern Ontario township of Stirling-Rawdon, with a police force of only 10 officers, including police Chief Brian Foley, sent two sergeants and a constable to Toronto for about 10 days to police the summit.
Sgt. Colin Cook, Sgt. Jim Orr and Const. Trevor MacLean did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The RCMP paid the officers $38,048.96, two-thirds of which was overtime pay. One officer earned $11,419.46 in overtime and more than $14,000 in total.
Ottawa police Insp. Mark Ford was part of the team that raced along Highway 401 in the middle of the night after getting an emergency call from the RCMP for last-minute reinforcements after a chaotic day of rioting downtown.
All the officers were paid time and a half, Ford said, because they were called in on days off. He said the more than $2,000 paid to each officer was fair, because when you include travel time “the officers worked 37 hours straight.”
Roughly half the 10,000 police officers who patrolled the summits were from outside Toronto, with most coming from the RCMP or other forces within the GTA. About 2,000 had to be flown in, and all of them, including Toronto police officers who live outside the city, were put up in hotels such as the Hyatt, Marriott and Delta Chelsea, at a time when the hotels had inflated rates.
The Toronto Police Service’s own G20 costs were $124 million, which the police board has said ballooned because of the tight timeline to meet security demands. Security costs for the G8/G20 totaled at least $676 million.
High costs for out-of-town cops
• Five of the 16 Vancouver police officers sent to Toronto each made more than $9,000 for a week’s work.
• Eight Barrie police officers were hired on paid duty to patrol the Integrated Security Unit’s headquarters — where there was no protest activity — around-the-clock for 13 days. They each walked away with an average of $8,495.
• North Bay’s eight police officers were paid their overtime rate for more than three-quarters of their total hours, each earning an average of $5,742.70.