A dispute over lunch money has led a group of Quebec police to withdraw from the G8 summit, according to a police-union leader.
The Sûreté du Québec was to dispatch 100 officers this month to join thousands of other police hired to protect world leaders visiting Huntsville, Ont.
During contract negotiations, however, the SQ had argued the officers should get a meal allowance. This $70.85 per diem would be paid atop the police paycheques, which are anticipated to be at least $500 a day.
The problem? Caterers have already been hired to provide hot meals to police working the G8 summit.
Organizers refused to sign off on any per diem, even as SQ negotiators dug in and pushed for it as part of their contract. In the end, the SQ did not join the G8 team.
"During the negotiation, the Quebec provincial force was not satisfied," said Jean-Guy Dagenais, of the Association des policières et policiers provinciaux du Québec, in an interview.
He told The Globe and Mail that the meal allowance had emerged as a sticking point in the Huntsville deployment. But he stressed that the SQ is still sending more than 200 officers to join the security team for the subsequent G20 summit in Toronto, where police are to be paid meal allowances for their work.
The RCMP is running the G8/G20 security operation on Ottawa's dime. The job is so massive that thousands of police from many forces are being hired on.
Their wages will drive the lion's share of the estimated $930-million in security costs. The specific agreements between police forces - the memorandums of understanding - will be scrutinized by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser when she probes the books for waste.
On Friday, La Presse revealed that police dispatched to Ontario from Quebec will be getting up to twice their regular salaries. They will be technically working on their vacation days, and police contracts require topped-up rates for this.
"It's not expensive," Mr. Dagenais said, arguing that Ottawa is just paying the market rate for police.
The salary for SQ officers working the G20 should come out to about $46 an hour, he said, to be paid for several 12-hour days. That would work out to $552 per officer daily, though any overtime could drive costs far higher.
The Ontario Provincial Police are co-captaining the security effort in Huntsville. The OPP had hoped to subcontract some positions to its Quebecois counterparts.
Now, officials are glossing over the crux of the dispute. "The OPP told us that our services were no longer needed," said Sergeant Gregory Gomez del Prado, an SQ spokesman.
With reports from Siri Agrell in Toronto and Rhéal Séguin in Quebec