Priority will be given to recruits from small, medium-sized and First Nation police services, said an Oct. 9 news release from the Ministry of the Solicitor General.
Under Ontario’s Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019, BCT is the initial training program that all police officers must complete at the Ontario Police College near Aylmer, Ont., southeast of London. The college has four intakes a year.
According to the government release, BCT includes courses in federal, provincial and traffic law, diversity and professional practice, ethics, mental health for first responders and for people in crisis, community safety, defensive tactics, use of force and de-escalation techniques, firearms and officer safety. Officers are also required to complete training in human rights and systemic racism, multiculturalism in Ontario and policing in First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities.
In a bid to boost police recruitment in April 2023, the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Doug Ford eliminated the post-secondary education requirement for becoming a police officer in Ontario and dropped tuition fees for the BCT program. It also expanded the number of spaces in the BCT program by an additional 70 recruits per cohort from 480 to 550 — and starting this year expanded the intakes from three to four.
In early 2023, it expanded the length of the BCT program from 60 days to 66 days. Police training in Ontario in total typically lasts 24 to 25 weeks. That compares to an average of 21 weeks in the United States and three years in Norway, Finland and the United Kingdom.
In a May 2023 editorial, the Toronto Star endorsed calls by the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Michel Bastarache, in his report on sexual harassment in the RCMP, to modernize police education.
“Both reports suggest that not only a general liberal arts education is necessary, but that police trainees need a university education focused on the realities of policing in the 21st century,” noted the editorial.
“Certainly, attending university is no guarantee of virtue,” it added, “but traditional police training, with its paramilitary ethos, is ill-suited to preparing officers for the demands of a diverse, knowledge-based society.”
In the government news release, police organizations welcomed the government’s move to expand the number of police recruits in the BCT program.
“The expansion of the Basic Constable Training Program at the Ontario Police College is a significant investment by the Government of Ontario in the public safety of communities,” said Roger Wilkie, deputy chief of the Halton Regional Police Service and president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police.
According to a news release last year by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), there was a 66.5 per cent increase in deaths associated with police use of force when comparing the 2011–2022 period with the previous 10-year period.
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