“Suspension without pay.” Those three words were almost unheard of in Ontario not long ago. On Thursday morning, Toronto police C
“Suspension without pay.” Those three words were almost unheard of in Ontario not long ago.
On Thursday morning, Toronto police Chief Myron Demkiw ushered in a new era in how Ontario’s cops police their own members — and he did it in just three words: “Suspension without pay.”
Demkiw broke the news at a news conference unveiling one of the largest probes of criminal corruption in the Toronto Police Service’s history.
Seven Toronto police officers and one retired officer have been arrested as a result of the investigation, dubbed Project South, and are accused of leaking confidential information to criminals — resulting in extortions, shootings and an alleged conspiracy to commit murder, York Region’s police chief told reporters Thursday.
The five Toronto police constables, two sergeants and one retired officer whose son was also implicated in the probe now face dozens of charges, including trafficking drugs, breach of trust, conspiracy to obstruct justice and accepting bribes.
And now, Demkiw told reporters Thursday, four of those Toronto cops may actually have their paycheques taken away.
“Where appropriate, I will be seeking suspension without pay,” he said.
It’s an act that would have been impossible not long ago.
Why it used to be so hard to suspend an Ontario cop without pay
Before April of 2024, the only way for officers to be separated from their paycheques was for them to be both convicted of a crime and sentenced to jail time, as dictated by the 1990 Police Services Act.
That meant that many Ontario cops ended up being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, even while awaiting trial for serious, high-profile offences, like sexual assault or even murder.
In one notorious case, OPP Const. Jason Redmond was arrested in 2015 and then subsequently paid approximately $700,000 in taxpayer dollars over eight years of paid suspension before he was finally fired near the end of 2022. He was convicted of drug trafficking, aggravated assault, raping an unconscious woman and a laundry list of other offences.
Then there’s the case of Const. Ioan-Florin Floria, the Toronto cop who collected over $1 million in taxpayer-funded paycheques after being suspended with pay for more than a decade.
Or you might recall Const. Richard Wills, who was also suspended without pay — until 2007, when he was convicted of murdering his lover and sealing her body behind a wall.
The old Ontario law was long considered the most restrictive in Canada, tying the hands of police chiefs and preventing them from swiftly dealing with even egregious misconduct.
Cases of such extended periods of paid suspension eventually became a public relations disaster for Ontario police, and the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police lobbied for the law to be rewritten.
What the new law says
In 2024, that 30-year-old legislation was replaced by the voluminous Community Safety and Policing Act — a whopping 263-section act that, among other changes, allowed police chiefs more leeway in suspending officers without pay.
More specifically, chiefs can enact this punishment if an officer is in custody or on bail with conditions that would interfere with their ability to do their job. It could also happen if the officer is charged with a serious off-duty offence that could lead to their firing.
“It’s only under the new act that a police chief was permitted to suspend an officer without pay, which means they’re taking it quite seriously,” Ian Scott, the former director of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, previously told the Star.
Since the act was enacted, at least four officers have been suspended without pay. Some of these officers, like Const. Boris Borissov or Ronald Joseph, had previously been suspended with pay for years, still receiving their annual salaries in excess of $100,000.
At one point in 2021, the Star reported that more than 120 Ontario police officers were suspended with pay at the same time.
With files from Calvi Leon
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