Since the 1950s, we've found ourselves in a model of government contracts with various provinces to provide policing at the municipal and federal levels. If it's a small community, there's a different formula. It could be up to 30% where the federal government subsidizes the provincial policing there. Usually at the provincial police level it's about 10%. The historical reason for that is that the western provinces were lightly populated and so on.
We've now found ourselves in the position where there are about 7,000 RCMP in British Columbia. Now we have the have provinces, we'll call them, Alberta, except for the little blip in oil, but it will be back up, B.C., Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. They also used to use those, and Saskatchewan leads the three of them. They were funded by tax dollars nationally through this 10% and 30% formula. That funding is coming from, let's say, Ontario and Quebec, which have their own municipal and provincial police forces. The RCMP doesn't do that role there, so taxpayers here in Ontario pay for their local police, their provincial police, and the RCMP federally, and their tax dollars subsidize policing in these other provinces. That's the model.
What I'm saying is that two-thirds of the RCMP resources are dedicated to that kind of policing, and you heard references, whether it's in the north and small communities, that that skill set cannot be called upon by the federal government to enact federal enforcement, so there's a small cadre of the total resources that are used for federal policing.
There is also pressure to rededicate federal resources frequently to backfill those contracts. You saw recently on terrorism where the RCMP had to reallocate organized crime resources to fight terrorism, because here they are moving the peas under the shell. Regarding the Treasury Board statement with reference to the resources given for terrorist financing—and I saw the last one to Treasury Board—those funds will now be pooled with other federal resources, a new form and part of federal serious and organized crime. They're being moved out of silos into a general thing, so there's the capacity to be further drawn down.