Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair’s five-year contract is set to expire in April 2015, and that raises the question: does he want an extension?

While the deadline is fast approaching when he must notify the Toronto Police Services Board, Blair isn’t sharing his intentions publicly.

“I still have well over a year in my current appointment and the future is a discussion I will have with my board when the appropriate time comes,” Blair wrote in email Friday.

In April 2009, the board voted unanimously to extend Blair’s contract for a second term. It was a “no brainer,” said Councillor Pam McConnell at the time, while she was vice-chair of the board. “He is partway done his journey.”

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Arguably, Blair can make a persuasive case for why he should be kept on. Crime rates have dropped 25 per cent in Toronto since he took the helm in 2005, the year the city experienced record-high gun violence. Surveys by the force show that public satisfaction levels with policing, while down, are still very high.

But a lot has happened since Blair got a slam-dunk extension.

Today he has rocky relations with the Fords, who have called for his resignation and have suggested that the police investigation into the mayor’s office was politically motivated and retribution for proposed budget cuts.

Blair also faced fierce criticism over how police dealt with law-abiding protesters during the G20 summit in June 2010. And critics say Blair has not adequately responded to concerns about strip searches, racial profiling, carding and the force’s treatment of mentally ill people.

His once cordial relationship with board chair Alok Mukherjee, appointed to his job the same year Blair became chief, is now strained.

Mukherjee has grown openly critical of police leadership. He described the continued use of carding — which has persisted under Blair’s watch — as having a “devastating” and “unacceptable” impact on young brown and black men, who are disproportionately affected.

He has also hinted that maybe it is time to consider outside candidates for police leadership.

“To what extent the people who are embedded in the same organization all their life can provide true leadership (calls for public debate),” he told the Star’s Jim Rankin and Patty Winsa last September.

The board must make up its mind “on which way it’s going to go” by October — the same month as the Toronto municipal election.

Mukherjee declined to say whether he would support a request from Blair for a contract extension. “This is a personnel matter and, as such, confidential,” a board spokeswoman wrote in email last Thursday.

So if not Blair, who?

Deputy Chief Peter Sloly is most often touted as the man most likely to become Toronto’s first police chief of colour.

Sloly has “all the qualities” you would hope for in a police chief, Councillor Michael Thompson, now vice-chair of the police board, said in 2009. He could not be reached for comment for this story.

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Sloly won’t say whether he wants to be Toronto’s next chief of police. “I love being a deputy chief,” he wrote in email. “I am doing the best job I can here working with Chief Blair and the Command Team.”

John Sewell, the former mayor who runs the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition, said he would support looking outside for a police chief.

“We’ve never done it in Toronto. They’ve always been internal people,” he said. “I think it’s a question of what kind of good policing are we going to deliver in Toronto — cost-effective policing that actually respects people in Toronto.”

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