Statement on Council Notice of Motion

City Council’s Executive Committee passed a technical review for a notice of motion that addresses police funding. This notice of motion will be voted on by Council at a future Regular Meeting of Council.

The Calgary Police Commission has had several requests from members of the media for a statement and is happy to provide the following:

“Our Commission is grateful for Council’s willingness to work closely with us to ensure that Calgary’s police are properly resourced. Public safety is a top priority for Calgarians and we are all committed to delivering the policing services that Calgarians expect.

Our Commission also believes that traffic enforcement should only be used to promote public safety, and a year ago we adopted the position that fine revenue should be removed from future police budgets to ensure that safety remains the only focus of enforcement activities. We look forward to working with Council to try achieve this goal as well.

The province shares 40 per cent of the revenue from traffic fines with municipalities and Calgary’s Council has traditionally used this funding to reduce the tax dollars needed to pay for policing. The police budget therefore includes an estimate of how much fine revenue is likely to be shared each year, based on previous years. In 2024, the Service received about $15 million less than expected in shared fine revenue and we knew the province’s photo radar changes would significantly increase that shortfall in 2025.

For us, the revenue impact of the photo radar changes is not nearly as important as the community safety implications of losing such an important tool that has proved effective at reducing the number and severity of collisions where it has been properly deployed.

However, we will still need to work with the Service, Council and the province to also manage the financial implications of reduced traffic enforcement, because fine revenue was being used to offset the cost of policing. We also recognize that Calgarians and Calgary Police Service employees have clearly told us that there is a need for more staff to police our city, so we are doing our best to try manage this situation without impacting existing staffing levels.”