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Canada · Paid duty
How paid duty works in Canada
Paid duty, pay duty, extra duty, special duty. The same work goes by different names and runs on different rules depending on where you serve. Here is the shape of it.
What paid duty is
Paid duty is police work done for someone other than your service. An organiser — a construction company, an arena, a film production, an event — asks the service for officers, the service assigns them, and the officers attend in uniform with full police authority. It is policing, done on your own time, paid for by whoever asked for it.
That is what separates it from outside work. Working the door at a bar as a private citizen, or running a business on your days off, is a different thing entirely, with a different approval process behind it. On a paid duty you are a police officer. On outside work you are not.
The word changes with the force
The same work goes by several names. Ontario services generally call it paid duty or pay duty. Elsewhere you will hear extra duty or special duty. In the RCMP the language is different again, and the distinction matters: extra duty generally means hours worked beyond your scheduled shifts to meet the policing the force is contracted to provide, while outside work is treated as secondary employment and goes through a written approval process.
If you are moving between forces, check what the word means where you are going. It does not mean the same thing everywhere.
Why there is so much of it in Ontario
Ontario has more paid duty than anywhere else in the country, and the reason is legal rather than cultural. Provincial rules restrict who may direct traffic and close a road, and sworn officers are the ones authorised to do it. Every construction site that needs a lane closed, every road race, every film shoot that stops traffic, has to hire officers to do it. That single rule creates a standing supply of work that does not exist in the same volume elsewhere.
Your own record of the year, built as you work rather than reconstructed at filing time.
Who books it, and how
Requests do not come to you. They go to the service — usually a central paid duty office, and increasingly an online portal where the organiser sets up an account, picks a date and describes the job. The service reviews the request, decides whether it is work officers should be doing at all, works out how many officers it needs, and then fills it from whoever is available.
Services generally want notice. Some ask for a couple of weeks, some for a month, and construction work often runs on its own timetable. None of them guarantee the request will be filled: if nobody takes the assignment, it does not happen.
What officers are not sent to
Services keep a list of assignments they will not accept, and while the list varies, the same items appear again and again: anything connected to a labour dispute, anything likely to put officers in the middle of two groups in conflict, political events, bodyguard work, and escorting money or valuables. Officers are also not assigned to anything that would have them acting outside the normal scope of police duties.
This is worth knowing before you take something that sounds straightforward. If an organiser is offering you work directly rather than through the service, there is often a reason.
The bill is not your rate
What the organiser pays is not what you earn. Services add an administration fee, and tax goes on top of the whole thing. Vehicles are charged separately where one is assigned. So the number on the contract is considerably higher than the number that reaches you, and an organiser complaining about the cost is not complaining about your pay.
Everything else is local
Minimum hours, cancellation windows, how far ahead the work is posted, who gets first refusal, whether a supervisor is assigned once several officers are working — all of it is set by your service and your collective agreement, and all of it differs. Nothing on this page overrides either. Check with your paid duty office for the version that applies to you.
This page describes how paid duty generally works. It is not policy and it is not advice. Your service's paid duty office and your collective agreement set the terms that apply to you.
Your rotation and your paid duty on one calendar
Set your rotation once and BlueShifts fills the year in. Add each duty as you work it, with the hours, the rate and what is still owed.
Scan to install — or hold it up for the officer next to you.
