Thank you very much, and thank you to the witnesses.
To Mr. Purcell, since we share a similar background, one of the things we did as junior managers in the Ontario Provincial Police when we were looking at ways of going about tackling crime—and I notice you alluded to the street gangs in your testimony.... In the special squads we call them street crimes. Intelligence-based...we did that. But one of the things I was involved in—somewhat of a sociological part of it—was that we looked at one of the highest crime areas in North America back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that was in New York in the social housing area.
One of the common denominators for criminal activity, especially property crimes, was that people who committed property crimes were people who didn't own property and therefore didn't value property. And of course the other common denominator was literacy—in other words, levels of education.
They looked at areas of crime activity—and of course that comes back to the Halifax Regional Municipality—and the area was the Bronx, which today happens to be one of the better places to live in New York. They looked at social housing. People who lived in social housing were less educated and didn't have a trade.
There is going to be a point to this.
We looked at the people who committed crimes. The people who committed the big crimes were also the people who committed the little crimes. So the guys you arrested or stopped for jaywalking or failing to pay their parking tickets ended up being the guys who were committing the murders and those other crimes. The criticism of police forces was, “Well, why don't you go out there and catch the big guys? You're after the little guys.” But the little guys happened to be creating the big crimes also.
So what am I saying? I'm saying, would you not agree that if governments looked at social housing...? One of the things they said in New York was, “Okay, well, let's do this. Let's take a look at the people. How do we get them to change their lifestyles?” So they taught people trades, but they took away the social housing aspect and said, “You people need to own your own properties,” and of course they came up with co-op housing.
The next thing they needed were trades, so that instead of hiring somebody to fix the social housing, they actually trained people to paint, to fix the plumbing, and to be electricians and those other trades. The people became owners of their own properties, and they didn't want somebody damaging their property or putting graffiti on their property and they took ownership of their property.
So if I said to you that the Government of Canada currently, through employment insurance, has increased exponentially the amount of training we're giving people who are unemployed to upgrade their skills.... And then we go outside of the employment insurance scheme, and we then said that even people who aren't on employment insurance will have an opportunity to train.
Then we looked at policing and we said that provinces and municipalities need extra police officers as well as the federal government's own police force, the RCMP—1,500 additional RCMP officers. And in your particular case here in this area you said somewhere in the vicinity of 250 police—and I imagine some of the money going towards those police officers was as a result of the federal government's contribution across the country to increasing the number of police officers.
My question to you is this, Mr. Purcell, because I've been out of policing for so long. I know when we were talking about telemarketers—