Public Safety Committee on May 7th, 2013

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

I guess you explained it in the differences right across Canada.

The next question I had was who's doing the major part of police-associated research; in other words, best practices, what works best, what are the most modern...? It used to be we went to one of the Michigan universities for a lot of the studies. I know in the OPP we looked at them, because they had one or two of their universities, one in particular. I know the University of Western Ontario does some research into that sort of adopting of best practices or leading-edge stuff. Usually we compare ourselves with police forces in the western world that have similar laws and similar challenges to ours. I wonder if you could comment on who's doing the bulk of research. If you're running a police organization, who do you go to? Who do you look at for some best practices or some cutting-edge stuff?

[Sandy Sweet]

It's a great question, and I think one of the weaknesses in our current model is that there is no one place for that. Actually the police community is very good at finding out themselves who's doing something interesting and going off and seeing if it would apply in their local jurisdiction. But from a research perspective, Chris Murphy at Dalhousie is doing interesting things; Mike Kempa from Carleton is doing interesting things; at Simon Fraser University, they're doing interesting things.

Police services tend to team up with a local university, and that's the flavour they're very comfortable with. Linda Duxbury is another one from here in Ottawa who has done great work in policing and other areas. There's no one place. In the U.S. they have PERF. In the U.K. they have their national police college. Those are central bodies that are made for this type of information-sharing, repositories, if you will, for what's going on. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has a role to play in that through their annual conferences, but it's not formalized, it's more ad hoc.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

I just wonder if you could now talk about training. I know you probably would be reticent to do this, but you can couch the wording. When it comes down to the cutting edge in Canada, who's exploring avenues that seem to be bearing the best fruit? Who could we point our researchers at, or who could we point ourselves at to take a look at what they're doing, especially in the field of how that training accommodates making that officer do the work of one and a quarter; in other words, to make that officer a more efficient and effective law-enforcement agent?

[Sandy Sweet]

Wow, that's a tough question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Time is up. We're going to have to just move to the next one.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

If I may, since I've run out of time, perhaps the chair would want to explain that an answer can be given to us at a later date.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

For any of these questions, if you don't have a way of segueing it into, say, Mr. Scarpaleggia's or another round, you can always submit an answer.

Mr. Scarpaleggia, go ahead, please.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you.

You were saying, Mr. Sweet, that we spend about $1 billion in Canada across all police forces—federal, provincial, and municipal—on training. You mentioned that the software-based training would save money. Have you thought about or analyzed or projected what the cost curve of training would look like if police forces across Canada used online training to its full potential and if the online training was brought up to the highest standard? In other words, there would be some initial investments so that figure might go up and then it might go down. Do you have a sense as to what the future could look like if we invested what we need to invest to get the best and most up-to-date world-class online training that would be picked up by the maximum number of police forces in Canada? I know that's a very big question. I understand, but do you have a sense of where we're headed? The $1 billion is going up. Is it going to go down if we follow your recommendations? Do you know how much it's going to go down?

[Sandy Sweet]

It's 10% to 30%.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It could go down 10% to 30%?

[Sandy Sweet]

Remember, what I'm talking about is not dollars, because people don't have a billion dollars in their training budgets. They have some of that in their salary budgets, if you will. What you're doing is freeing up that much in terms of resources to do other things with, but if you save 10%, that's $100 million worth of resources. If you put that into $100,000 per police officer, how many new police officers is that? That's 1,000 new police officers. That's the order of magnitude we're talking about. If it's 30%, on the high end, do the math. It's significant. With incremental investment on the front end, you're talking about.... Over the next three years if you put in somewhere between $10 million and $20 million, that little amount of investment could get you that payback year after year after year. That's the order of magnitude.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

That's interesting. So you have thought about it, obviously.

How many people are in your organization, per se?

[Sandy Sweet]

We have 20 full-time employees.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Twenty full-time employees.

Is there a lot of training software out there? Is it really difficult to come up with the best training software? Are there many suppliers, or is there just one really good training software for, I don't know, pulling over a drunk driver or something? I'm just pulling anything out of the air. Or is there quite a lot out there you have to evaluate, and so on?

[Sandy Sweet]

We don't have a competitor in this country. There is nobody doing what we're doing in terms of the breadth and the depth of training courses that we have in our catalogue. We get phone calls every day of the week, every week of the month, from private sector companies who want to have access to our 75,000 users. They say, “Wow, we have this great thing. Let's partner on this”. They'll take 80%, and we'll take 20%. We've worked with private sector partners before and have had good partnerships with them. There's nothing wrong with that.

But of the 100 courses we have in our catalogue, my team has built probably 60 or 65 of those. The other 35 or 40 have come from either the RCMP, the Toronto Police Service, the Calgary Police Service, Durham. There are pockets of e-learning units that occur in the Canadian police community, and they come to us with the courses they've developed and we make them available to every cop in Canada sort of thing. So yes, we're a developer, but we're also a platform for collaboration and sharing.

Our challenge, quite frankly, is keeping up with technology and making sure our topics are relevant but also our courseware is relevant, especially in terms of what younger people need. We know that the courses we build today are different than the ones we built three to five years ago. The challenge for my team is what our courseware will to look like in three to five years, which brings in gaming and simulation. It's probably shorter and just in time than it is longer. We'll also in the future do instructor-led training, which we don't do now, and that sort of thing.

I'm not sure if I wandered off with that.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

You answered it perfectly.

Maybe you mentioned this, but how are you funded? Where does the money come from?

[Sandy Sweet]

We're funded by revenues. We had funding. I live in Prince Edward Island. Our head office is in Charlottetown. We started up with funding in 2003 that came from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, from Holland College in Prince Edward Island, as well as the National Research Council. That money has been long gone. That was a start-up of three to five years to get us up and running as our revenues started to grow. About five or six years ago we started to break even, and we've been sustaining ourselves based on revenues since.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

You are really an entrepreneurial enterprise, at the end of the day.

[Sandy Sweet]

It's not for deficit.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

You also offer these courses not only to the police forces but to police programs. For example, in my riding we have John Abbott College, which has a police tech program.

[Sandy Sweet]

Yes. We have a subset of our catalogue that's available for police foundation students.

As an aside, we've also just recently launched a separate catalogue of courses in private security, the Private Security Training Network, because we had private security people coming to us all the time. Our police people and our board of directors weren't comfortable with private security having police training. We've repurposed some of that. We also launched the Canadian Corrections Knowledge Network last week. Again, it's very corrections-specific things that we're doing. We're trying to use that CPKN policing model in other sectors but all under the same umbrella and all for the benefit of Canadian policing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sweet.

Mr. Rousseau, please go ahead. You have five minutes.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

My first question is this. Who really manages the content? Do the various police forces manage the content? Is it constantly updated? Is it verified? When there's legislation-related or legal content, do members of the bar or others review it for objectivity and accuracy?

[Sandy Sweet]

Thank you for that question.

I'm sorry, my French is not good enough—

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

It's okay, Mr. Sweet.