Changes to photo radar announced by the Government of Alberta in 2024 have led to a $28 million shortfall for the Calgary Police Service in 2025.

That announcement by Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors Devin Dreeshen stripped the ability of police across the province to use photo radar outside of school, playground, and construction zones and limited the use of red light cameras for speed on green enforcement.

The reduction in CPS’s budget has led to increased pressures on the service, and for its members said Chief Mark Neufeld on Feb. 7—just a day after CityNews broke the story about the shortfall.

“The CPS budget is constructed in a way that 85 per cent of it is personnel costs, salaries and benefits, so really what I’m talking about is people. The other 15 per cent is things like vehicles and maintenance and equipment, utilities, that sort of thing. So, it’s really difficult to find a sum of that amount in the budget without going into the people side of it,” he said.

“It’s also the people side of the equation through which we get the bulk of our work done.”

Chief Neufeld said the extent of the $28 million gap is entirely attributable to the loss of photo radar revenue.

Amtul Siddiqui, Chair of the Calgary Police Commission, said in a statement said that the revenue from fines has traditionally been used to pay for policing, but that the commission has believed that funding should only be used to promote traffic safety and not generate revenue.

“Our Commission believes that traffic enforcement should only be used to promote traffic safety and not to generate revenue, so the revenue impact of the photo radar changes is not nearly as important to us as the traffic safety implications,” Siddiqui said.

“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 the policing services that Calgarians expect us to deliver.

“Calgarians and CPS employees have also 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.”

Chief Neufeld said the CPS had put into place an immediate pause on the hiring of civilian employees, as well as limiting travel and other types of training expenses.

“We have paused civilian hiring, and that doesn’t mean we’ve stopped it—everybody’s job in the organization is very important. But as a short term measure, all of the staffing actions… we’re just stopping and looking at them and saying can we slow those down? Because if we can slow them down even a little bit, it saves us money,” he said.

“If you were to slow down the sworn hiring, I think it sends a message to applicants that maybe we’re not open for business and they may look elsewhere. So, at a time when you know competition is fierce for people who want to get into the industry, that is not a message that we want to send.”

That came with the acknowledgment that was likely to have impacts on both the attraction of new employees and officers to the service and for officer morale.

“When we talk to the members, the things that they’ve said is that the things that are important to them are workload and staffing and the pressure they’re feeling as a result of feeling like we’re not adequately staffed. The other thing that they’re feeling is things that matter to them, is things like training and development and this sort of thing,” Chief Neufeld said.

“These are exactly the things that we’re talking about taking away or can take or curtailing, at least for a period of time.”

Costs from policing protests a large part of budget gap

Chief Neufeld said that the video discussing that shortfall with employees of the service, and which CityNews obtained for their story, was meant to come before a larger public discussion about the financial situation at the service. That was intended to include input from members about proposed actions to be undertaken to cover the shortfall.

“Once we knew the impact of this to CPS budget, we certainly let the Commission know right away. Commission has let city council know, as you can imagine, and certainly, we’ve advised the province as a courtesy,” the Chief said.

“I can tell you, we’ve been through this before, so it’s not as though there’s a bunch of fat to get. We’re cutting muscle anything that we do.”

He said that the service has been soliciting ideas from members and that so far over 100 different ideas have been collected.

One of the areas of reductions that Chief Neufeld said the service would be looking at, would be from the overtime and call out for members.

He said that the number of protests over the past several year has made up the bulk of that overtime and put the service into a situation where they were “living on a credit card.”

“Last year, we had a negative variance in the overtime column, to the extent of about $13 million. So if we’re talking about trying to find $28 million within the budget, cutting staffing anywhere, that’s somewhere where we really need to look at,” Neufeld said.

“But that means some fundamental changes in the way that we’re operating.”

He said that the budget shortfall would not impact the Community Safety Investment Framework, given that both Calgary city council and Calgary Police Commission have made it clear that the program is to be a priority for the service.

“We think it has been a very good program. One of the things that I can say that is going in our favour is the fact that through that program and some of the investments that have been made there,” Chief Neufeld said.

“We have managed to actually reduce calls for service to the police service at a time when many other police services are saying they’re seeing increases, and we know that they were seeing increases with respect to EMS and Calgary fire and others. So that program has contributed directly to that.”

Other less visible programs, such as the work that the service has been doing with Statistics Canada, are in the crosshairs as a way to reduce that gap.

“I think none of the work that we’re doing, either work that’s really that’s high profile you see, or work that is unseen in that background is not valuable. But that’s exactly it: as you diminish your capacity, you have to ask yourself that question, what are we not going to do here?” Neufeld said.

“It really just comes down to difficult choices and continuing with the difficult choices until we balance the budget because going over budget is not something we’ve ever done and not something that’s an option for us.”