Tanisi.
Good afternoon.
Good morning to everybody.
I'm speaking to you from Treaty 8 territory in northwestern Alberta. I'd like to give you a bit of my own history and the history of our police service.
I'm about to enter my 43rd year of policing, so I've been around for a while and have seen a lot of this go on.
Our police service is moving into its 13th year of operation. I spent my first 30 years with the RCMP. I left to become the first chief of police for the Lakeshore Regional Police Service and to build the police service from the ground up.
I'm very proud of the men and women who work here. I'm also very proud of the communities that have stood behind and supported first nation policing.
The issues I want to speak about today are around enforcement, but enforcement within the realm of self-administered first nation policing. We are on the cusp of moving forward in this area, which for years has been neglected. The potential for what can happen there has not been fully recognized.
With Alberta moving forward with Bill 38 last year and recognizing self-administered first nation policing in the province, we were put on equal footing with all policing in Alberta, including all municipal policing and the RCMP. That gave us 48% of the recognition we required. We need the other 52% of recognition as an essential service and a true policing service, and that needs to come from the federal government, our 52% partners in self-administered first nation policing. We hear that is moving forward, but unfortunately I've been hearing those things for quite a while.
Part of what I'll share with you today are stories that show the distrust and the lack of belief within the first nations for this truly moving forward.
I'll share with you a story from six years ago. The public safety minister called together everybody in first nation policing from across Canada. Our meeting was held in Alberta. There were representatives from Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia there. The minister got up and spoke for 45 to 50 minutes. Within that speech, he said at least five times, “I am here to listen to you and hear what it is you need.” He finished speaking and walked out of the room. I was sitting beside an elder, who looked at me and said, “I wonder if he could hear us from out there.”
Those are the types of things that have caused that distrust. Unfortunately, that distrust moves to the policing realm as well. I can tell you it has taken us 12 years to build that trust, and we are in part the victims of our own success.
Our calls for service—and our belief that when people call, somebody will come—have moved forward, and we are sitting with more files than we have officers to police them. Our issue right now is resourcing. I don't sleep at night because with the resources at our police service, I usually have one police officer working.
For everybody to understand, our area consists of five separate first nations. The total area is over 160 kilometres from one end to the other. With only one police officer working, I'm asking police officers to decide which priority one call they will go to first. Do they go to the mental health call where somebody is in possession of weapons or do they go to the domestic dispute where somebody is being hurt? What do they do when there is only one person to go? They can't be split in half. Those are the issues we have out there.
The other story I'll share with you is about an issue that bothers me to this day. Since we do not have enough resources to police around the clock, there are four to five hours each day when nobody is actually working, even though they are on call. At 3:30 a.m. on a blizzardy February morning, we got a call for an assault and stabbing on one of our nations. Our member was called out. He defrosted his vehicle, got on the road and drove through the blizzard. By the time that had all happened, the ambulance had been called.
The ambulance works 24 hours a day. It arrived at the scene. The victim was inside, bleeding profusely, and the family was outside, begging the ambulance attendants to come in and treat their son. However, ambulance services have a policy that attendants can't go into dangerous situations without the police being there. That resulted in a homicide.
Those are not things I'm able to justify to my community, my elders, or to those families.
Those are the areas where first nation policing has moved so far past what it originally came out as—that is, core policing and response policing. We have the trained members, the ability and the community confidence to be able to supply all the services that are required out there.