THUNDER BAY — The Thunder Bay Police Service Board will now start looking for its first executive director.
“We need someone who's going to be able to direct us ... and do futuristic and strategic thinking,” board chair Karen Machado said to reporters after Tuesday's meeting. “So, the dialogue has been about what level do we need, and we've agreed today, and we landed on it is that executive director level.”
“We're at a critical juncture right now,” vice chair Denise Baxter said during the meeting. “I really don't want to be responsible for the complete board falling apart because we have no technical support or no administrative or executive support tools.”
The board passed a motion to officially amend its staffing model to include a full-time board executive director position, to develop a job description for it and to start the recruitment and hiring process.
Machado said the position will greatly help the board with its workload, including policy development and responding to dozens of recommendations made by multiple investigations into conduct by prior iterations of the police board.
The position will effectively replace the existing board secretary role, currently held by John Hannam, whose contract expires at the end of July, Machado said. She added that anyone, including Hannam, can apply for the new position, and that this change is not reflective of his work in his existing role.
“It's the board's choice to realize and recognize that we need more supports that we can currently get, and that we need to move forward on these recommendations and our work that we need to do,” Machado said.
“So, recognizing that need, we will not renew the contract at the secretary level — we're going to engage in a new contract at an executive director level (to) which anyone can apply.”
“This is business-critical for us," Machado said during the meeting. “We're under inspection again due to our lack of ability to move forward on the 140, 114, 144 — depending on what numbers you look at — recommendations that we as a board have.”
The need for an executive director position was first identified in a 2018 report by late Sen. Murray Sinclair, who investigated the board on behalf of the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, finding that it was failing to provide proper civilian oversight of the local police force in the face of documented systemic racism against Indigenous people.
The current board has been grappling with the title and job scope of the role — and at Tuesday’s meeting, there was still some concern raised about budgeting for the executive director position.
“There is a considerable difference between administrative director and executive director, and, well the qualitative difference is about 40 thousand dollars,” Mayor Ken Boshcoff, who also sits on the board, said during the meeting, adding that he agrees there needs to be a full-time position.
“The pressure on a municipality of 110 or (115) thousand to sustain yet another quarter-million-dollar aspect to the service is something that we — we have to put this into the total perspective because that's incumbent from the board responsibility.”
Machado said that the board’s budget has already been set to accommodate the role, and that they have to get moving.
“We did talk about salary, we talked about the criteria of this position, the skill sets they needed,” she said, adding that the “topic has been … sitting with us as a board for well over a year.”
The board also heard that the civilian oversight board of the London Police Service recently made a similar hire to positive early results.
“I can tell you that they struggled with this decision just like you,” said Ron LeClair, who was serving at the meeting as an advisor to the board from the provincial Inspectorate of Policing. “They made the decision to go with an executive director and I can tell you it's paying in spades for the work that they're moving forward.”
“The move to the executive director brings a lot of policy expertise that she (the London police board's executive director) brought. And she has a focus of what she wants to see the board accomplish — be it branding, be it communication strategies, be it legislative compliance, be it policy development.”
Machado told reporters that the board will work with a hiring company (they’re still in the process of selecting which one, she said), who will help with interviewing and shortlisting candidates and other administrative work around the hiring process.
