Public Safety Committee on June 18th, 2013

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Potter.

We'll now go to the opposition for seven minutes. Mr. Rafferty.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Potter, it's nice to see you again, and Ms. Huggins, it's nice to see you also.

My first question is for Mr. Potter.

One of the things that was missing in your preamble that is not often talked about, although I try to talk about it as much as I can here, is first nations policing, which is a joint federal-provincial responsibility. It's almost half and half.

As you are probably aware, on this committee we're sort of at loggerheads, the government side and the opposition side. The government side can correct me if I'm wrong, but generally speaking, the government side is concerned about the cost per capita of first nations policing and it being considerably more than the regular per capita cost of policing. We've heard it a number of times today; we've heard Ms. Bergen talk about that.

As you're aware, of course, there are many variables. I don't think there are non-native police services in Canada that have to deal with communities with an 80% addiction rate, for example—those kinds of variables—or flying in, or whatever the case may be.

So we're sort of at loggerheads. That's the government's side.

I see them shaking their heads, so I must be right in what your main concern is.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[A voice]

They're more than shaking their heads.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Oh, they're shaking their heads the wrong way. Well, we'll straighten that out in a minute.

But on this side, and I've said it a number of times, we know there are investments that need to be made to make first nations policing effective, to make it efficient, and to bring it in line with adjacent police services.

I'm aware that now some first nations police chiefs are attacking the main costs they have, which are salaries and benefits, and reducing those in a number of instances. Treaty Three is a good example of where that's happening. Of course, that's a self-defeating thing, because you have to keep up with adjacent municipalities and adjacent police services; otherwise you get all your people poached. They get many of their officers poached already, and that's a serious problem.

I wonder if you could give us your thoughts on both of those positions, and let us know where the government sits on this.

[Mark Potter]

I think it's important, as I mentioned, to respect jurisdictional responsibilities, so in the development of the strategy we're ultimately trying to strike a balance between recognizing that provinces are responsible for the administration of justice. That is often delegated to particular communities. Most fundamentally, it's the communities themselves, the clients, the people who pay for the services, who should be setting the priorities and setting the directions for their police services. No two communities are exactly alike. So whether it's a first nations community or any other community across Canada, they have unique needs and unique challenges. It is their role to define those priorities and establish the sorts of police services that they believe will best serve their communities.

Having said that, I think the goal of the strategy is to say, “Yes, let's recognize that that's an absolutely core element of the way forward”. But at the same time, you also want to strive to find areas where it makes sense to cooperate, where it makes sense to share services, look at new models of community safety, try different innovations, and improve the efficiency of your operations through applying certain tools, different performance metrics to assess how you're doing. So there are areas where it makes sense to cooperate collectively and there areas where you're going to be acting independently in response to the needs and priorities of your community.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

There's a reason, Mr. Potter, that in northern Ontario the OPP were happy to get rid of first nations policing in the far north: they just couldn't keep up with the costs.

While I know we're studying the economics of policing, I think we need to also look on the other side and recognize that we have to bring all police services under federal responsibility—that is first nations policing—to the same level as everybody else. Everybody deserves to get the same public safety that everybody else gets in this country.

I wonder if the government has done any scientific studies, any proper studies, on first nations, specifically in first nations police service areas—work analytics, workload analytics, that sort of thing—just to see exactly what some of the issues concerning police services are. Or is that something that might happen in the near future?

[Mark Potter]

My colleague, Shawn Tupper, who has previously appeared before this committee, is the ADM responsible for the first nations policing program at Public Safety. He'd be best placed to speak to that.

I'm actually appearing this afternoon in Maniwaki at a meeting of the first nations policing panel to talk about this exact topic, the economics of policing. That meeting and those series of meetings with first nations communities is an opportunity to not only allow them to help shape the evolution of the first nations policing program in Canada, but to participate very directly, as they did in the summit and as they do through the national associations, in the evolution of the shared framework of the strategy for policing in Canada.

We're looking at finding ways to engage with all participants in the policing community in shaping the way forward. Their often unique needs and unique challenges.... You've certainly heard in this committee, from the RCMP and others, about the challenges and the costs of providing services in the north to first nations communities. They're much higher than elsewhere in Canada. There are a lot of very valid reasons why that's the case. That's why you have the FNPP, to provide that additional funding and support to those communities to ensure that they have a level of policing that's generally comparable to what exists in other parts of the country.

That objective is not always achieved. Shawn Tupper would be in a better position to speak to this, but there is a process under way to look at the FNPP to ensure that it is indeed meeting the needs of first nations communities, and to look at how it might need to evolve to better meet those needs. That's the one track. Then there's the whole economics of policing track, and where we go with this strategy. There will clearly be first nations elements of that, and how we better service those communities.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

I wonder if Mr. Potter—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Sorry, you're out of time.

I'll turn to the government side again.

Ms. Ambler.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much, Mr. Potter and Ms. Huggins, for being here today.

I noted with interest the index. I was wondering if that is anything like the United States website, crimesolutions.gov. Is it similar, or will ours be more comprehensive, or less, or completely different? I'm just curious.

[Mark Potter]

It's similar. Imagine a precursor of crimesolutions.gov, which has been evolving over a number of years. It has an administration around it. It has a number of academics who feed into it, who review the operational experiences that are put on crimesolutions.gov. Part of the advantage of crimesolutions.gov is that if you take, for example, a broken window strategy in Boston, it will be implemented, it will be assessed by one or multiple academics over time, and they will put their findings on that website. It's continually evolving, continually refining the analysis around the various initiatives that are under way. If you, as a community, are looking at moving in that direction, you'll know how the program started, you'll know how it's been evaluated, and you'll know probably how it's evolved over time, so that you can implement what is truly the best practice in that particular area going forward.

I would see our index as an early version of crimesolutions.gov. You have to walk before you run, and this is the first step in that process.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

I'm glad to hear that. I suspect that with crimesolutions.gov already existing, ours will probably be able to develop faster than theirs, because we'll be able to use what they've already accomplished and move forward more quickly.

I also want to talk about training. You mentioned that sometimes the traditional methods of training are not only costly but are simply not the best way to train a police officer—sitting in a classroom with a lecturer at the front.

Can you tell us a bit more about the summit that's happening this September in P.E.I.?

[Mark Potter]

We're calling it a training summit, but it will essentially build on work of the Canadian Police Knowledge Network. I know you've heard from Mr. Sandy Sweet about that organization and the good work they do across Canada to support police services with online training.

They've been holding an annual event in Stanhope, P.E.I., over quite a long period of time. We're going to work with them to take that event and make it broader. It's not just about online learning, although that will be a key element of it. It's about training generally. How do we train? Are those approaches working? What have we learned about new training models and about the styles of learning of new recruits? How do we move forward, and what's the balance we want to find?

Clearly, you do need some of the traditional in-class type of training, but there are other parts of that training or other types of training where an online approach is often much more effective.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

And it can reach many more people.

[Mark Potter]

Exactly.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

In the discussions at the summit, did anyone present a reasonable estimate of how much money could potentially be saved through this increased use of technology?

We've heard estimates as high as $1 billion. After considering some of the indirect costs, do you think that's a fair estimate?

[Mark Potter]

That's certainly the number that I'm familiar with, that around $1 billion of the $12 billion we spend on policing is for training.

Policing, as you know, is a pretty training-intensive type of occupation, so you're going to continue to spend a lot of money on policing. But as I think you mentioned, it's some of the indirect costs, your travel and your accommodation in terms of bringing people together in traditional in-class approaches, whether it's at Depot or at the Pacific regional training centre for the RCMP, and similarly for Ontario and Quebec, that are often the biggest costs associated with policing. It's indirect, in terms of their travel and their accommodation, but also their time away from work, the backfilling of positions. There are a whole bunch of follow-on effects.

To answer your question very directly, I don't know the answer. Of that $1 billion, are we going to be saving an amount of...? It's hard to say. It's much too early in the process now, but that's clearly one of the objectives of the summit.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Wonderful.

In a situation like training, which is costly but absolutely essential, how do we as a government measure success? How do we take the value of that and decide whether it's actually working or not?

[Mark Potter]

These are excellent questions.

I know you've heard from Mr. Gruson from the Police Sector Council. They've done some very good work with academies, looking at the training they provide to recruits and whether there can be greater coordination and commonality in the type of training provided to recruits and linking this to competency profiles and standards related to occupations. The sense is that there's a great deal of scope for improvement in that regard.

In terms of training, just looking at the perishability of skills, for example, do you need, every year, to be recertified on first aid and other skills? Frankly, there's not enough research to tell you how rapidly those skills diminish. We just don't have the research foundation to say, okay, of the 25 courses you would normally need to take in a year, these ten are the highest priorities, because your skills in those areas tend to diminish the most rapidly for a variety of reasons.

We just don't have the research foundation around training. Coming out of the summit, we're hopeful that there will be some sense of what is the research plan, what is the research that we need to do, to build a better approach to training in Canada.

[Stella Ambler, Conservative, Mississauga South, ON]

Thank you.

You mentioned that you've been following this study carefully. I'm wondering if there are one or two things that stand out in your mind that you've heard and that you think would help most that we should absolutely implement as quickly as possible.

[Mark Potter]

Well, you've heard a lot of things certainly this morning on the research, and that being the foundation for evidence-based approaches to reform police services. I think when we look at the three pillars that the FPT community is building around, at what is happening within police services in terms of performance measurements, these are the foundational elements to any sort of transformation. Do you have the right measurement tools? What are you measuring? Are they the right things to measure? How do you, if you wish to do so, reform your police services? What services are out there?

KPMG in the U.K. was mentioned, for example. Companies like that provide certain assistance and support to police, who often don't have the skills or background to look at organizational efficiency, and make operational changes that will allow them to be more efficient, better serve the communities, and then reinvest those moneys into new models of community safety—more proactive policing. There are some activities happening in Saskatchewan, Waterloo, right across the country, to better serve Canadians and get to the roots of crime.

I think that's the kind of transformation we're looking at.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Mr. Scarpaleggia, you have seven minutes.

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

Just to recap, you're producing your report in the fall, did you say? You're producing a report out of this summit. Is that what I understood you to say?

[Mark Potter]

The summit report was released very recently. It's on our website.