Am I good to go? Okay. Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Back to the force structure model, on the reductions that our constituents and our committee members and other parliamentarians can use in terms of those sliding scales, I was someone who had to live through that political fad known as “defund the police”. I had the opportunity to work with our police chief in terms of the calls for a 20% reduction in the police service. At my request, the chief came forward to show what a 20% reduction would look like. If we had had that sliding scale during that time period, a lot of people might have used the model and the interactive model that has been placed online and made available to us.
What I found when that 20% reduction report came forward was that it was not as simple as just a 1:1 ratio. If you wanted to decrease the police budget by 20%, it meant much more, from a service-reduction perspective, than just a 20% cut. If you were to take, for instance, 20% of the workforce out of commission, it would mean a 35% to 40% reduction in services to the community.
I could go through the list. We don't have time today, but I could give examples of the services that residents would live without because of that.
Mr. Chair, I'd like to ask our delegation this. If I were to ask someone in the service who's dealing with budgets whether it's as simple as just sliding the scale 20% one way or 10% another way and whether that accurately reflects the options that are available to those who create our budgets and deliver our services, would those who answer the question say that it's not that simple?
Can you comment on that in terms of the accuracy of using that sliding scale? You've tried and I think at times struggled to relate to us how you've modelled this. It's very complex. It's just not that simple, so could you comment on that?