In relation to giving a police officer the ability to arrest a parolee who breaches his or her conditions, we have noticed two things. First of all, there's been an effort on the part of Corrections Canada to reduce the number of conditions they request when a parolee is released into the community, because it helps their recidivism rate if there are fewer breaches. Second, when police officers now come across somebody who is in breach of their parole, they have to report that back to the probation and parole authority. It's then up to the parole officer whether or not to take action on that breach.
Again, there's pressure from the top down to not breach a parolee for not living up to their conditions because they don't want their statistics to show that the offenders are not rehabilitated. Certainly, we have concerns about that.
The value of a police officer being able to proceed with an arrest for a breach is that it takes that offender out of that situation, whether it's because they've been consuming drugs or alcohol while they're out on parole, which is a violation of their conditions.... Generally, the conditions that are imposed are intended to try to prevent the type of behaviour that leads this individual to commit crimes. So we would certainly support providing police officers with the authority to intervene in those situations when there's a higher level of risk.