Province paid $44M to prep for jail strike

Training, renovations last fall were to get ready for work stoppage that never happened

Ontario spent more than $44 million preparing for a strike by Correctional Services 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 equipment, and $776,000 on safety and security 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.

Lauren Souch, a spokeswoman for Correctional Services Minister David Orazietti, said it would have been “irresponsible” to compromise the health and safety of the more than 8,000 inmates and 50,000 people on probation across the province in the event of a strike.