Protests increasingly tying up police resources across Canada: Public safety analyst

In Halifax, former head of OPP discusses protests The former head of the OPP discusses protests and other challenges after police chief summit in Halifax.

Canada’s police chiefs have wrapped up their three-day summit in Halifax, where they discussed many topics including growing concerns around the frequency of protests linked to both domestic and global issues.

Many chiefs agreed that the growing amount of protests have created an “unsustainable demand” for policing services, and they’re asking Ottawa for help.

“The chiefs right across Canada face unprecedented numbers of protests, some departments [who] maybe never had one ever have had them over recent years and many like Ottawa, Toronto, and some larger municipalities are facing hundreds and hundreds of them which is often new work for them and often very resource-intensive,” said CTV News public safety analyst, Chris Lewis in an interview with CTV’s Bruce Frisko on Wednesday.

“When they take those resources to answer those protests, they’re taking them from the front line so something’s not getting done elsewhere in policing.”

Lewis, a former head of the Ontario provincial Police, says there is a growing need for resources in policing across Canada.

“The reality is that so much new crime and types of crime have emerged over the last years that are really sucking up police resources, and then this protest situation has resulted in the case of, for example, Toronto, they’ve had a thousand protests related to nothing but the Israel-Gaza conflict, let alone all the normal that would occur, so it’s a huge demand and it can’t just all be done with the current resources,” said Lewis.

“Police services just can’t handle that with the few officers that are on patrol somewhere and respond to that, [it] requires dedicated resources, and then something else doesn’t get done in policing elsewhere.”

Part of the problem policing in Canada is seeing is the lack of officers entering the industry. Lewis says, despite good salaries in many parts of the country, there are many other factors pushing people away.

“Some are seeing what police are going through out there in terms of the demands, the criticisms, the constant videoing, and all the stuff that’s facing police services.”

With recent protests being very emotional, Lewis says police have to be very careful with their approach, especially to not lose trust with their communities.

“If the police go to a protest and just march in and start arresting everybody, that’s not going to solve the problem it’s going to infuriate it, and so they have to handle them very carefully but there has to be a line in the sand too when you have to take action,” said Lewis.

“At the same time police officers have to earn the trust of communities every day one call at a time, one interaction at a time, so it’s a 24/7 continuum of earning trust for earning trust across every municipality and rural Canada.”

He adds that the more emotional protests being seen across the country now is likely to be the new norm.

“They seem to be, there was a time where the only protest we ever saw was the occasionally strike that got ugly, and then of course in more modern years a lot of First Nations protests over land claims, etcetera, that really started the more sustained in length protests that we have now and higher levels of violence as some of these highly emotional situations are being dealt with,” said Lewis.

Lewis adds that many protests across the country are connected through the use of social media which can also create additional problems.

“If something happens in Halifax in the morning and police take action, somewhere across Ontario an hour or two later the protestors there are digging in because they think it’s coming to them next, and so on as the sun rises across Canada,” said Lewis.

“They communicate constantly and sometimes with falsities and alleging that police beat people up and things that didn’t happen and that inflames protests across the land, so a very difficult situation to deal with.”

With files from CTV's Bruce Frisko.