With the federal government's announcement to make first nations policing an essential service, all the chiefs of police welcome this, but, to be honest, I'm not holding my breath for it. I'm not. It's going to take some time to get this legislation in place. With the consultation that has to occur, it's going to take time to update this program. It is.
We welcome the money that's been announced for first nations policing programs; however, when you look at the money that's been announced, and there's a lot of it, we still have to apply for this funding. Why are we applying for core function policing when it should already be available in our agreements? That's what is hindering our services.
The restrictiveness of the terms and conditions is what is restricting us. If we were to outfit all these programs or what we're doing onto the OPP, they would probably be able to get this money because of their access to dollars, but for us, we have to write proposals and business cases and apply for funding. Do we get it? Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't.
Not only do we have our own funding agreement, we also have several bilateral agreements. I have to praise my finance department for keeping track of all the reporting requirements for all these bilateral agreements that we have just to ensure that we can provide a service to our communities.