I think they've always been around. I am new on the job. I am four months into my administration. I was a councillor two years prior to this. I am an educator by trade. Coming into this, I'm about education and trying to learn as much as I can about this. I became aware of the FNIPP program.
When it comes to policing, we are a border town, basically. We're right on the north shore of New Brunswick into Quebec. It's a hotbed for trafficking interprovincially. We've been trying to build relationships with the RCMP. We've had some good conversations with them. When we contact the RCMP, their focus is much more on international, interprovincial and larger-scale drug trafficking. For us in the community, the small-potato fellows, they're big fish in our area. We use the tools we have at hand. We have BCRs and the homes that people live in. Ultimately, at the end of the day, our assets are the community. We have community bylaws to protect our community from outside unwanted persons and to protect our homes from damage and from illegal behaviours and illegal actions.
We have our BCRs. We publish BCRs. We do our best to include and involve the community, but the question is, who serves these eviction notices? The province can't. The province is unable to, jurisdictionally. The RCMP has been hesitant to push our bylaws. I don't think it's malicious. I think a lot of other issues are at play there. But we're left holding the bag. We publish BCRs. We have eviction notices. When the RCMP at first could not enforce those eviction notices, it sent a loud message to those bad actors and those criminal elements: Look, this is like a no man's land. This is a very grey area, the reservation.
We have community members who are deeply involved with this. It leaves us in a position of wondering how we enforce this. We try to avoid conversations about vigilante justice and that kind of measure, but that's the level our communities are left at when their neighbours and their communities are overrun by these behaviours. A lot of them happen after midnight, in the darkness of night, when most people are sleeping. People wake up to different things.
I reached out to the FNIPP program when I became aware of that. I saw that as an opportunity, and I know some communities here did, when it comes down to what is, for us, a lack of funding to bring on a whole police force and then training and all of that. As I alluded to in my messaging, I'm really focused on resource revenue-sharing in our province here to combat the tariffs. We hear a lot of conversation about the softwood lumber, for example, that's taken out of New Brunswick woods. That's billions of dollars of resources. If we could have access to some of that, we could handle these businesses ourselves.
When we talk about policing, I heard Chief Leroy Denny speak from a Mi’kmaq perspective. Policing is different. We wouldn't really be expecting police in full gear. We have to take a very trauma-informed approach to that. Our policing is more about safety.