I voted against the 2017-2020 police collective bargaining agreement (+8% over 4 years) in April 2019. My vote is not ideological. I’m not automatically for or against unions. With this particular collective agreement I felt local economic conditions did not warrant this increase of wages. Council often has to balance between competing values and these are difficult conversations to have. This is especially true with conversations about union wages.
Here’s my understanding of the factors that contribute to a police collective bargaining agreement.
The First Class Constable is the standard measure for comparing Canadian police wages. It typically takes four years to reach the rank of First Class Constable.
Wages for every year aren’t easily available as collective agreements begin and end at different times. Due to the complicated bargaining process police often work beyond the end of a collective agreement. Citations for this publicly available information are available at the end of the column.
The first thing that stands out is the similarity of wages across the country. Lacombe, population 13,000, pays its municipal police roughly on par with wages in Canada’s largest cities. Medicine Hat police are paid more than Toronto police.
Like most modern professions there are similar standards for training and performance across the country. Police also have similar responsibilities, regardless of where they work. So from this perspective it makes sense that professionals working in the same field, with the same training, doing the same work, regardless of location, are paid roughly the same.
However, we also know that local economic environments differ vastly within the same province and across the country. Living wages are a useful indicator of the uneven economic conditions in Canada. A living wage is the minimum income required for a worker to meet their basic needs. Here are a few examples.
Calgary: $17.70/hour
Vancouver: $19.50/hour
Toronto: $18.52/hour
Medicine Hat: $13.65/hour
It’s fair to wonder whether these wages are ‘living wages’. But it confirms what many of us implicitly know, it’s cheaper to live in Medicine Hat than Vancouver or Toronto. Police may perform the same tasks across the country, but $100,000 goes much farther in Medicine Hat than in Toronto.
When determining wages how do you balance local economic conditions against the idea of equal pay for equal work? Should one take priority over another?
Arbitration process
Arbitrators must perform this delicate work of balancing between competing values. And they must defend their decisions with understandable rationale.
It’s always preferable for the city and the police union to reach an agreement without an arbitrator, but it’s helpful to understand how arbitration works to better educate the public for what types of balances and compromises to expect. After all, binding arbitration is the hammer that hangs over every collective negotiation.
It should be noted that police are designated as an essential service. This weakens a union by taking away their most powerful negotiating tool—their ability to strike. As such we need to be extra careful with our relationship.
If the city and the police union cannot reach an agreement either side can request mediation. If mediation fails to resolve our differences, either side can once again escalate and ask for binding arbitration.
An arbitrator (or an arbitration panel) is then appointed by the Government of Alberta to resolve the dispute. The arbitrator must follow specific criteria set out in the Police Officers Collective Bargaining Act. Importantly, the legislation does not tell arbitrators how much weight to assign each criteria.
Fair and Reasonable Comparators
The arbitrator will try and replicate a fair and reasonable agreement. Determining what is ‘fair and reasonable’ begins with studying other collective agreements that have been reached in the same industry and geographic areas for use as comparators.
In 2016, the Vancouver Police Board and Vancouver Police Union, went to arbitration. Both sides disagreed over which cities should serve as reasonable comparators.
The Vancouver Police Union argued that the neighbouring city of Delta’s collective agreement was not a fair comparator. Rather the union suggested using Calgary and Edmonton. The police board counter-argued that Toronto and other Ontario police forces were better examples to use rather than Calgary and Edmonton.
Arbitrator Stan Lanyon works through the rationale of each argument. He agreed with the union that Delta’s collective agreement was not a good comparator because economic conditions and working conditions were significantly different in Vancouver. But he also disagreed with using Calgary and Edmonton. In Lanyon’s 2014 and 2016 ruling he wrote that Alberta wages were “too rich” for Vancouver and not a fair comparator due to Alberta’s uniquely strong provincial economy (at least at that time). From 2001-2015 Alberta wages grew by 17.6% more than British Columbia wages.
This explanation indicates that not all provinces are fair comparators, since economic conditions can be materially different. It also indicates that the closest city may not be the best comparator since even neighbouring cities can have significantly different environments. In other words local economic conditions matter.
Balancing the different criteria
In a 2016 British Columbia Supreme Court case between the City of Penticton and its firefighters Judge Catherine Bruce described the process arbitrators must follow.
Judge Bruce strongly states that arbitrators who simply use external wage parity to settle wage disputes are distorting the collective bargaining process. Wage parity is a formal term for similarity of wages. In other words arbitrators can’t simply say Medicine Hat police should get paid X because Toronto police get paid X.
“Arbitrators [should not] “rubber stamp” external wage parity in every case because this would stifle free collective bargaining and would never permit local economic concerns, regardless of how serious, to regulate or influence wage settlements. Why would the [Firefighters] ever agree to something less than external wage parity if arbitration invariably led to the imposition of wage parity with other firefighter groups in the Province?”
She continues, “the arbitrator cannot start with a presumption that external wage parity will prevail unless there are extraordinary circumstances justifying a different result. This approach would clearly violate the mandate to consider and weigh local conditions when determining wages and working conditions.”
This isn’t to suggest that police wages should exactly mirror the differential cost of living in each municipality (that would swing the pendulum to the other extreme), only that local economic conditions cannot be ignored. But the de facto police wage parity across the country suggests cities and/or arbitrators have prioritized wage parity over local economic conditions. In my opinion this imbalance needs to be corrected.
Wages and the strength of the economy
The Vancouver Police Union made another interesting argument in their 2016 arbitration case. In 2016 Vancouver was leading the country in economic growth. “Therefore,” the union argued, “the salaries of the Vancouver Police Officers ought to exceed those in both the Western Provinces, in Toronto, and in Ontario generally.”
However, if strong economic growth should lead to high wages, then the opposite must also be true. When an economy weakens, then wages must also face downward pressure. You can’t argue for one and not accept the other. Arbitrator Lanyon did expect that the Alberta recession would create that downward pressure on wages. Indeed the recent arbitration decision between the Government of Alberta and the Teachers and Nurses Union outlines exactly this rationale.
Wage parity over local economic conditions
Perhaps there’s another reason for this wage parity. A shallow labour market may necessitate paying big city wages in small urban centres. For example, I imagine places like Methanex or Cancarb absolutely have to pay comparable wages to Calgary or Edmonton when hiring chemists or engineers because the local hiring pool is too shallow.
When skilled professionals don't want to move to small cities employers have to match big city wages. The shallower the job market, the bigger the area that has to pay comparable wages. Specialized jobs will fall on one end of this spectrum with general low skill work on the other.
But if police work fell under such specialized jobs legislation and previous arbitrators & judges would not have gone to such lengths to emphasize the need to consider local economic conditions on police wages. Therefore I imagine police work falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, where again, we should see wage parity tempered by local economic conditions.
The problem
Ignoring or minimizing the impact of local economic conditions on police wages disadvantages two groups: small municipalities and big city cops.
Paying Medicine Hat police more than Toronto police hurts us because we don’t have the same buying power as Toronto. The cost of living is cheaper in Medicine Hat, thus labour is cheaper—that is one of the main competitive advantages of small cities.
It’s the same reason that too high a minimum wage hurts smaller cities and towns. The previous Government of Alberta raised the minimum wage to $15/hour in 2018. That increase eroded the competitive advantage of small towns and cities. $15/hour isn’t even a living wage in Calgary and Edmonton—so the raise makes sense in those economic environments. However, $15/hour is higher than the living wage in Medicine Hat. This can have detrimental effects for small urban centres. That’s why Thrive, the local not-for-profit dedicated to eliminating poverty, joined the Medicine Hat Chamber of Commerce in opposing the minimum wage increase.
Small cities and towns are already losing a long term demographic battle as more and more people leave rural areas for large cities. On top of that we must now also compete with big city wages.
Police officers in big cities are disadvantaged when they are paid the same as police in small cities, but have to contend with dramatically higher living costs.
Unwilling to pay or inability to pay
Yet another reason why local economic conditions may not be reflected in police salaries is the distinction between a municipality’s unwillingness to pay and an inability to pay. It’s an important distinction. A city has far more power than a union since city council controls the budget. However, city council cannot simply use the budget to justify why we can’t pay more. This principle is articulated in another arbitration case, Hamilton Police Services Board and Hamilton Police Association 2002. Arbitrator Kenneth Swan wrote that a municipal council cannot, simply by a budgetary process, control the arbitration process. Our budget is one factor, but it doesn’t trump all other considerations to what a fair wage is. In other words city council can’t just say, ‘we can’t afford to pay you’.
However, this rationale ignores another reality of governments—we can always pay more. The City of Medicine Hat can pay any wage we set, because we can always raise taxes to cover wage increases. We can keep raising police wages and taxes until the city no longer is competitive and slowly dies. The bargaining process doesn’t seem to consider that different municipalities have different abilities to pay. Medicine Hat and Vancouver, Camrose and Toronto are not equal.
Difficult conversations
I recognize the historical contributions of unions in Canada. Union efforts to improve working conditions are eventually adopted by everyone. We all benefit from their tireless work to improve working conditions for people.
We know that modern policing is brutally difficult. The Canadian Police Association reports that their members are experiencing heavier workloads. I got a small taste of this during a police ride-along in December 2019. Police go from call to call to call. It’s a long hard work day and there are good indications that police work is getting harder. It’s also getting harder to recruit police to work in Medicine Hat. But if paying local police more than Toronto wages isn’t enough to attract suitable people there is obviously something else going on that we should address.
I want police to feel valued, but ever increasing wages that outpace inflation will reach a breaking point. It’s not a matter of if, but when. Wages are not the only way to improve working conditions for police. I’m sure there are creative alternatives to maintaining a great police force. As I outlined in my previous column the nature of service calls have dramatically changed and we need to reform our emergency response to match these new needs. Medicine Hat was rich enough in the past to use money to paper over these issues, but that’s no longer the case.
These are hard conversations to have because police are essential to a community. It’s tempting to say police are worth any amount considering what they put on the line everyday. But that is an unrealistic position. Politicians must always balance competing values. My job is to have difficult conversations respectfully.
The City of Medicine Hat wants to be a great employer. We want to set a good example for private industry, but the choice here isn’t between a private (profit seeking) company and a union—it's the taxpayer and the police. The public has an interest in both getting a fair deal. And the local cost of living needs to be factored more heavily in any settlement.
Bibliography