Evidence of meeting #45 for Public Safety and National Security in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was services.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I'm told, though, that it's very hard when looking at the increase to determine how many of the additional police officers are front-line officers. Would you agree that it would be difficult to ascertain?
D/Commr Steve Graham
Well, I think the obvious way of doing that would be to reach out to the many police services. If you concentrate on police services of more than 50, I think there are something like 82 or 84 in the country that would meet that test, so that would be a good place to start.
Liberal
D/Commr Steve Graham
Well, I think the police services would be able to tell the researchers how many of their staff are front-line staff.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
But so far nobody is collating that information. Is this one of the problems?
D/Commr Steve Graham
Well, Statistics Canada collects a great deal of data relative to policing resources in Canada: costs, criminal measures, crime rates, crime severity indexes, and so on. We may in fact have the data.
I guess my point earlier, when I raised the point on data, was that we need to look at it and come to a conclusion about what it's telling us. So in your research, or research from the department, that would be important.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
When you say that we need to collect that data and analyze it, is there an initiative, other than what we're trying to do here, that will not involve crunching data? Is there a nationwide initiative under way, perhaps in conjunction with StatsCan, to gather information? I was told that StatsCan does show that there are 6,000 more police officers than there were in 2006, but they just can't tell you how many of them are front-line officers.
You said in your presentation that we need better data, but is somebody doing something about that? I know that you're having a forum or a conference, but is that just a one-time event? Or is somebody going to be charged—some kind of federal-provincial-territorial working group—with actually getting the data we need to make the intelligent decisions that you're saying need to be made to contain costs?
Director General, Policing Policy Directorate, Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness
I think that's an excellent question and an area that I'd encourage this committee to look into. Certainly we do have some capacity in Canada at StatsCan, within the individual police services themselves, and within certain associations, particularly the police boards.
But if you compare us to the United States, say, you have not only universities—such as Harvard—and the Department of Justice playing a pretty big role in gathering and interpreting data, but you also have, in the U.K., some even more advanced models, where you have the National Policing Improvement Agency and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, which do a lot of this cross-cutting data-gathering and analysis, which gives them a very robust foundation for looking at how policing is evolving and at its efficiency and effectiveness. So when they're looking at bringing about change, they have a stronger base to do that.
So I'm not suggesting that we don't have the capacity in Canada, but there is, I believe, some room for improvement.
Liberal
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
—and payroll, I understand that as the positions become more complex, you need to offer more to attract the people with the skills to do the job. But for the most part, the police unions don't have the right to strike, so how can they use collective bargaining so effectively to extract such large salary increases and such generous pension benefits if they don't have the right to strike?
I just don't understand, I guess. You would expect that maybe with teachers or someone who can go on strike and paralyze a society....
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much, Mr. Scarpaleggia, for concluding today's meeting.
We very much thank you for coming here and bringing your level of expertise.
I noticed that in Mr. Tupper's presentation he referenced Hobbema. Hobbema is close to where Mr. Rathgeber lives and close to where I live in Alberta. In regard to any success stories coming out of Hobbema, we'd be very interested in hearing about them, because it's generally not the success stories that we hear every other night on the radio or the television.
I think that if we do have you back we'd be very interested in that aboriginal aspect as well. Are we getting value for our moneys that are invested in aboriginal policing? Those are some of the questions that may come in the next round.
Thank you very much. Again, our apologies. The way Parliament is working is cutting back on your testimony here, but we do appreciate you and we look forward to you coming again.
We're adjourned.