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Toronto Police's Budget Cuts

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The major problem with the Toronto Police’s budget cuts are that they plan to freeze hiring for three years. This has caused major burnout rates and a reduction in moral in many officers (Fox, 2017). The plan initiated by the Toronto Police this January is one looking at a change to police culture as well as budget reduction. The hiring freeze is a product of the budget, the Toronto Police Service has hit the 1 billion mark as of this year, exceeding any budget ever had in the past (Powell, 2016). The Toronto police have made it their goal to not go over this cap and are doing everything in their power to cut costs. One of the ways they plan on doing this is through a 3-year hiring freeze of all civilian and new cadets (Lee-Shanok, …show more content…

Firstly, it reduces the Toronto Polices budget by elevating outside expenditures. Currently, the costs of running court services and parking enforcement is astronomical. The Toronto Police Service spends 30 million dollars of their budget on parking enforcement and a whopping 45 million a year on court services (Dimatteo, 2016). Taking these out of the budget eradicates these costs and thus frees up a huge chunk of money for police expenses. Secondly, removing these agencies from the police budget does not remove them from the publics jurisdiction. The complaint that parking enforcement would become ticket oriented is untrue as it would maintain in the governments authority thus maintaining the same procedures as existed previously. Moreover, the funds that Parking enforcement would not be lost. Many believe that parking enforcement is revenue positive. However, what they fail to realize is placing it within the cities budget still allows the government to collect the funds, it is just in a different budget. Finally, it is being transferred into a budget that has the budget to maintain it. Currently the city is operating under a 10.5-billion-dollar budget (Toronto, 2017) and starting July 1st of next year, Marijuana is supposed to be legal (Cochrane, 2017) bringing in a whole new revenue stream for Toronto. Deloitte business services firm projects, marijuana will boost Canada’s economy up to $22.6 billion annually (Tencer, 2016). Thus, …show more content…

A prominent example is that of the privatization of Hydro One. Premier Kathleen Wynne wants to build $29-billion worth of new transit, roads and bridges over the next 10 years, and needs a way to pay for it(Morrow, 2015). In order to find more money, she has decided to sell off government assets (Morrow, 2015). This takes them out of the budget thus reducing expenditures as well as brings in money to be sued on other aspects of government. This is the same to Toronto removing the agencies not directly related to policing. It will provide more money to the force and remove the expenses that came along with harbouring those agencies. As Sappington and Stiglitz (1987)’s fundamental “Irrelevance Theorem” explains, privatization may be, under some conditions, an optimal solution to the delegation problem (Martimort,

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