Thank you, Chief. I really appreciate the successes you've had and the hard work you're doing.
I'm finding in my area out in Alberta, mostly in the rural area, that the RCMP are the main enforcers, but I do have a lot of conversations with the police officers of Calgary and other towns and cities. One thing that is happening in Alberta, of course, is that we're having a fairly good economic boom, and opportunities for jobs are quite high. The number of resignations from police forces is on the rise because they're taking these better-paying jobs.
When I talked to some of these people, their response was that it wasn't about the money. They said they liked what they were doing as a police officer, but when they dropped people off at the remand centre in the city, because the rural area didn't have a place to keep them, and then drove back to their hometown to do the work and these characters beat them back there, that got very discouraging.
When they stick their necks out, put their lives on the line, day after day, to apprehend and arrest these people, and they beat the officers back to their hometown because of bail or the “soft approach”, for lack of a better term, I think the sentencing factor is an extremely important thing in the minds of police officers who are out there putting their lives on the line. Is this not true?