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Nunavik cop crisis costs $300,000 a week

Quebec paying big bucks for hotels and charters

JANE GEORGE

Every week sees planeloads of new Sûreté du Québec provincial police officers arriving in Nunavik, at a huge cost to the provincial government. (FILE PHOTO)

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That’s in addition to expensive air charters used to rotate officers in and out weekly, and the cost of hefty overtime pay for officers while they’re logging longer-than-average hours in Nunavik.

The SQ arrived in Nunavik after it turned out only six of the Kativik Regional Police Force’s 54 officers and special constables had all their paperwork in order and had been legally sworn in as police officers.

The SQ arrived two weeks after the Kativik Regional Government’s regional council passed two resolutions, the first firing the KRPF’s police chief Brian Jones and the second replacing him with the KRG’s assistant general director, Luc Harvey.

Since then, it’s also been costing Quebec twice as much to transport prisoners to and from the South: two SQ officers must accompany every prisoner in transit, while only one KRPF officer used to handle two prisoners.

The total cost for the SQ’s presence in Nunavik is more than $300,000 a week – and perhaps more, because those officers who are in Nunavik must all be replaced at their regular postings in the South.

But even though the tab for the SQ’s presence will surpass more than one million dollars, an additional pot of money that the cash-strapped KRPF never benefited from, it’s unlikely that the SQ will be able to leave Nunavik right away.

That’s because only about 20 KRPF officers are expected to make it through the full appointment process underway. The other constables are on four-month contracts with the KRPF until they complete their training at Quebec’s police institute.

These constables need to be granted special powers above and beyond the ability to enforce bylaws before the SQ can pull out, which, at the earliest, could be later this month: the Nunavik Police Association members who are to be sworn in soon wouldn’t be able handle the workload in Nunavik with only bylaw officers to assist.

Nunavik was quieter than average for the first week after SQ arrived, but its officers have nonetheless opened more than 100 cases across the region.

One of the incidents involved a potentially explosive confrontation between SQ officers and a man with a firearm in Kuujjuaq.

Meanwhile, the executive of the KRG was to start tackling the pile of paperwork required this week, so KRPF members can work once more as full-fledged police officers in Nunavik.

And some mayors were hoping for an all-mayors meeting to discuss why the policing crisis in the region occurred.

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