Kenora services at risk after OPP bills for 'insane' amount of calls for service

[Michael Jack]

KENORA — One way or another, Kenora will have to pay for the services of the Ontario Provincial Police in 2025 – but at what cost?

With the end of the year comes the City of Kenora’s annual budgeting process, and with it, a bill from the OPP for the services they expect to render in 2025.

The amount in question? A staggering $8,786,451, which is an increase of $1.82 million, or nearly 35% more than the $6,960,519 Kenora was billed by the OPP for 2024.

To put the numbers into perspective, in order to foot the bill, Council would have to increase next year’s property taxes by 7.6%, just to pay for policing.

The jaw-dropping sum was enough to provoke Mayor Andrew Poirier and the City’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Kyle Attanasio to hold an impromptu media scrum on Oct. 25.

“The increase is equivalent to two times what the City puts into municipal paving each year, more than three years of the City’s budget towards winter control, greater than what the City spends on its water main replacement program each year, roughly equal to the City’s operating costs for the entire recreation department, and I could go on,” Attanasio said during the scrum.

In fact, to hear the Mayor tell it, the OPP’s entire costing formula is broken, which he said has resulted in more and more municipalities across the province calling it into question.

On April 1, the province introduced a brand new Community Safety and Policing Act (CSPA) that is bringing with it retroactive bills – or more specifically, roughly $717,000 baked into Kenora’s 2025 tab.

At the same time, Attanasio went on to say that having had conversations with other municipalities across Ontario, “there seems to be something else going on that’s driving very significant increases, even for municipalities that aren’t experiencing the same call for service volume that we are.”

Within the CSPA, each municipality the OPP serves is required to pay an initial base charge, followed by more and more money based on the total amount of calls for service within that community.

According to Poirier, this is the main driver behind Kenora’s massive bill, as the amount of calls for service within the city are out of control.

“It’s an insane amount, we’re approaching 20,000 per year,” Poirier said.

In his discussions with the Solicitor General, Poirier said he has been advocating for several ideas he thinks could cut back on that amount, starting with introducing more controls around the downtown LCBO.

Having collaborated with the local OPP detachment, Poirier said that doing something like implementing a controlled entrance at the liquor store would stand to bring down Kenora’s calls for service by 1,200 to 1,800 per year.

Notably, the province did plan to implement a controlled entrance at the LCBO in question, as well as a few others across Northwestern Ontario earlier in the year, but the idea was scrapped after less than 48 hours amidst pressure from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

In addition to revisiting the LCBO, Poirier said he is also pushing for the OPP to conduct a general audit on their services rendered in Kenora, to see “if there’s some items or calls for service we’re paying for that maybe we shouldn’t be.”

“We’re aggressively looking to have that done by the OPP, and if it’s a third party that does it, that’s entirely up to them, but I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request to ask for, in light of what we’re paying,” Poirier said.

On top of this, Poirier also suggested that Kenora’s status as a hub community is doing itself a disservice, as having a provincial jail “draws people into our community for a variety of reasons, and that ends up as additional costs as calls for service.”

“And we have data to back that up,” Poirier said.

While the OPP CSPA has automatic discounts for communities that have certain amounts of calls for service – Kenora, for example, qualifies for 5% off – the Mayor went on to say that he thinks the formula should be tweaked even further to reflect how the province’s setup in town affects what the municipality pays.

“At the end of the day, there are people on our streets who have nowhere to go and no means to access addictions (treatment), and that continues to be an escalating issue in our community,” Poirier said.

“We can’t solve this problem ourselves, but we need to help to bring these calls for service down, not just for money and what it’s costing the taxpayers, but for the betterment of the community and the people who require assistance.

“Whether it’s a program for substance abuse or mental health, having them on our streets is not helping them either.”

The Miner and News obtained information on the of calls for service related to mental health and addictions, as well as others that are driven by criminality in the downtown core.

“Unwanted Persons” is the leading operational call for service in Kenora, with an average of 1,580 per year. Other relevant calls for service amounts include:

Disturb the Peace: 212
Mischief: 233
Mental Health Act: 293
Trespass to Property: 338
Suspicious Person: 392

With all this in mind, Poirier continued, “we need to start talking about and implementing some of the solutions that go along with these problems, and we need to start having programs in place where people can go to seek services, so they’re not out on our streets and they can work through their addictions.”

“I don’t see that happening at a rapid pace,” Poirier continued, speaking on the overall involvement of the provincial and federal governments, “and not fixing the fundamental problems that we have, that has to be addressed at some point.”

To this end, the Mayor says he has been involved in formal discussions with the rest of the Kenora District Municipal Association (KDMA), which includes eight other municipalities from across the northwest that he hopes will be able to lobby with the province and the feds to do more.

In the meantime, being faced with such an extreme cost ahead of next year’s municipal budget, Poirier and Attanasio eventually expressed great concern with how things might work out in town.

Option A, essentially, would see property taxes jump by an incremental amount; Option B, meanwhile, would see the City have to cut back on other services, in order to lessen the burden on taxpayer bank accounts.
“We’re not going to lay down and just say we’re going to pay this,” Poirier said.

“My concern is that if we have to foot this entire bill, we’re looking at potentially reducing services, reducing investment in infrastructure, reducing investment in housing,” Attanasio added.

“I believe its incumbent on the OPP headquarters and the policing bureau to remember who they serve, which is the residents of Ontario and these communities serviced by the OPP, and to recognize that structurally, something is not working here.

“We really believe that policing leadership needs to consider the impact these exponential increases are having, because at the end of the day, these are the people these police officers are serving, and I don’t want to be in a situation where we’re losing out on core services because we have to pay so much for another service.”

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