Ontario spent $44M on strike that never happened

TORONTO — Ontario spent more than $44 million preparing for a correctional strike that never happened, The Canadian Press has learned.

The Liberal government has publicly said it spent $8.5 million on training and renovating spaces in the province’s jails in the event that managers had to run the facilities on a 24-hour basis during a strike.

But an itemized list of strike preparation expenditures requested by The Canadian Press through the Freedom of Information Act shows the estimated total is actually $44,380,472.45.

Nearly $32 million of that was spent on one-time expenses, including accommodations for managers and private security.

Less than a third of the total was spent on items that were ultimately repurposed for regular use in correctional facilities, such as $3.2 million worth of food and beverages, $1.1 million for beds, mattresses and partitions, $866,000 in medical supplies and $776,000 in safety equipment.

A three-year deal reached Jan. 9 with 6,000 correctional and probation officers averted a threatened strike, but by that time correctional managers and managers from across the public service had already been brought in to the jails.

The document pegs the cost of redeploying 2,000 managers at about $6.7 million.

About $15.8 million was spent on trailers placed on the jail grounds where managers would live during a strike. Another half a million dollars was spent on storage trailers for “cook-chill” meals and $286,000 went to “storage rental costs.”

A further $2.4 million was spent on a logistics co-ordination supplier and $2.2 million on “loading and unloading costs.”

More than $660,000 was spent on security services that went “to provide security guards at the institutions, who were responsible for monitoring the perimeter and providing escorts,” said Lauren Souch, a spokesperson for Correctional Services Minister David Orazietti.

The corrections deal included agreeing to interest arbitration for future contracts, meaning there won’t be another strike threat in the next round of bargaining, the government noted.

Wage issues were sent to an arbitrator, and correctional officers will be getting 4.4 per cent raises next year after an arbitrator ruled their salaries had fallen behind those of their federal counterparts.