BRENDA O’FARRELL
The 1019 Report
Rising costs for the Sûreté du Québec have local elected officials voicing outrage and calling on the Quebec government to make changes.
“It’s indecent,” said Vaudreuil-Dorion Mayor Guy Pilon last Wednesday after the MRC approved its $40.1-million budget for 2025.
The exact cost of the provincial police force in 2025 is not yet publicly known, as each municipality receives a separate bill for the service. But the two largest towns in the region – Vaudreuil-Dorion and St. Lazare – are reporting hikes of just over 10 per cent, pushing costs for policing services to record highs.
What is worse, Pilon argues, is the amounts the 23 municipalities in the MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges pay for policing has increased faster compared with other regions of the province, while the number of officers assigned to this area is set to drop again in 2025, for the second year in a row.
“We should not accept it,” Pilon told his colleagues during the MRC meeting. “We should reject it.”
As the largest municipality in the MRC, the City of Vaudreuil-Dorion pays the biggest share of the MRC’s policing bill in the region. In 2025, that figure is expected to hit $10.9 million, up 10.1 per cent from the $9.9 million paid in 2024, said city treasurer Marco Pilon in an interview with The 1019 Report last week. The city’s council is set to formally adopt its budget for the coming year on Dec. 9.
In St. Lazare, the second largest municipality in the region by population, the bill for SQ services is set to top the $5-million mark for the first time, hitting $5.34 million in 2025, representing a 10.6-per-cent increase over the 2024 bill of $4.82 million, according to Mayor Geneviève Lachance.
St. Lazare council will formally be denouncing the hikes for policing costs at its next public meeting on Dec. 10, Lachance said. The municipality will also issue a call to the provincial government to change how it bills municipalities for policing, including setting maximum limits.
How SQ costs are assessed is determined by the provincial Public Security Ministry. It is calculated using a complex formula largely based on property valuations within each MRC, which provides for the so-called richest regions of the province – those with the highest property values – to pay more. As such, municipalities in MRCs like Vaudreuil-Soulanges end up footing more of the provincial bill to reduce the financial burden of the SQ on other, less affluent regions.
But that formula is being abused, Pilon claims. Instead of towns within the MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges sharing its policing bill with the provincial government – as was promised when municipalities were forced to disband their local policing services in favour of SQ services in 2003 – it is now one of three regional counties in the province that pays more than 100 per cent of the assessed costs to offset the burden on other regions. This shifting of the financial burden is completely out of whack, he says, with the municipalities in the MRC Vaudreuil-Soulanges now assuming just over 117 per cent of the actual costs of the police force.
“There is a word for that,” said an incensed Pilon in an interview with The 1019 Report last week. “It’s ‘fraud.’ It may not be illegal, but it’s immoral en maudit.”
“The MRC has to settle this issue,” Pilon added. “It’s a nail they should be hammering all the time.”
For her part, Lachance has put together an analysis of the growing costs to bolster the message her council will be sending to the Quebec government, arguing that since municipalities have no input on the SQ’s costs and given that the provincial officials are the only ones to negotiate these costs, the provincial government should assume a larger share of the bill.