Public Safety Committee on Jan. 29th, 2013

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Okay. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll move back to Mr. Hawn, please, for seven minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to all the witnesses for being here.

I'd like to talk about the funding side for just a second, because there have been suggestions that funding to the front line has been cut. You addressed the one issue of gangs, for which funding, in fact, it has not been cut. We're getting more money out the door in that area. Could you comment on funding in general, specifically the funding of front-line policing?

[Shawn Tupper]

I can speak only to the aboriginal policing program that I run.

That program was protected under the deficit reduction plan. In the dictatorship of math, there was a $1 million reduction in the program, but frankly, that was nothing in a $120 million program. Essentially that funding has been maintained at a stable level, and it gets out the door every year, so from the perspective of the first nations policing program, we have maintained the funding and it is getting out the door.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Mr. Potter, can you comment more broadly?

[Mark Potter]

Absolutely.

Certainly policing hasn't been cut. In the last 10 years, we've seen police expenditure in Canada rise from $6 billion to $12 billion. The situation is one of looking at those costs and ensuring that the money is being spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. We can't speak to provincial and municipal police budgets, but in terms of the RCMP budget, as was mentioned, that has been reduced with a focus on administrative and operational support areas.

The last point I'd make is that the whole point of this process and the summit is to get ahead of the point that other countries such as the U.K. and the U.S. are at, where they're being forced, due to fiscal realities, to make fairly drastic cuts to policing. The goal here is to essentially give police services the opportunity to make well-considered adjustments to the new fiscal environment so that we're not in the situation of making stark cuts to both budgets and police officers.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

Deputy Commissioner Graham, how are you coping with being more efficient regarding recruiting and training, which, I would suggest, are the lifeblood of any military or paramilitary organization like the RCMP?

[Deputy Commissioner Steve Graham, Deputy Commissoner, East Region, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Do you mean specifically with regard to training?

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I mean training and recruiting. Is there an impact on recruiting as well?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

There is an impact on recruiting inasmuch as the numbers coming in the front door are not as high as they were, but those are driven more by demographics, service demand, and so on.

As you know, the emphasis has been on cost reduction with regard to administrative efficiencies and re-engineering services. I believe Deputy Commissioner Cabana or someone from his office is coming before the committee to talk about federal policing and some of the re-engineering there. We have, of course, the lab system. Forensic science is re-engineering itself and reorganizing. Internally a lot of administrative services, such as compensation and so on, are being re-engineered. We're going from having different sites across the country to having one site in order to take costs out of the system.

On the operational side, new technologies are being deployed. Things like traffic tickets involve a very basic system. It's now fully electronic in some jurisdictions, from the car right through the entire system, including the registry of motor vehicles, the court system, and everything, so it takes out a lot of human intervention and cost.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you for that.

I'll go back to Mr. Potter. There's been some suggestion that people are blaming the police. Can you tell me what the component is? Do you know what the salaries component is as a portion of the overall budget?

[Mark Potter]

It typically varies to some degree, but human resources represent in the range of 80% of police service budgets. I think the perspective one should have on that is that it's mostly about getting the most out of that salary envelope.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

That goes back to some of the things that Deputy Commissioner Graham was talking about—making the system more efficient, and so on.

You mentioned other countries. Are there other countries that we specifically should look at or should not look at as examples of things we might try?

[Mark Potter]

In particular, there are certainly a number of countries, such as the U.K. and the U.S., that we should both look at and draw certain lessons from, whether good or bad, based on the experiences we've seen. There's a lot of experimentation happening in the U.K. with new service models, use of new technologies, new approaches to tiered policing, and so on. They're not all perfect and we shouldn't necessarily rush to embrace them, but there are certainly things we can learn and benefit from and consider applying to our own police services.

However, it's really at the discretion of individual police services themselves to draw on those lessons as they see fit. Part of the challenge of developing a strategy and part of the role of governments, both federal and provincial or territorial, is to facilitate that process by providing information and research that will help those police services make sound decisions.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You mentioned the U.K. A lot of the things we do come from their traditions and practices and so on.

Could you comment on their system, which obviously is a geographically small area that doesn't have the provincial system we have, and the challenges of implementing something that we might get from the U.K. across Canada, for example?

[Mark Potter]

Yes, we can certainly look at the U.K. from many different aspects. Their overall numbers in terms of number of police officers per 100,000 population are actually quite high, and their spending per capita is actually quite high, so there was, I think, some scope in the U.K. to improving efficiency.

In U.K. police spending budgets over the last 10 to 15 years, you've seen very dramatic increases that actually outpaced our own, so I think they're retrenching there. We're seeing significant cuts that the central government is bringing out, in the range of 15% to 20% cuts to policing in the U.K., with significant impacts on front-line officers and on policing numbers generally.

Many police services are exploring a whole range of tools, whether technology, civilianization, outsourcing, or tiered policing, to try to manage those cuts in a way that preserves a high level of service to their community and minimizes the impact on the front lines to the greatest extent possible, but quite a transformation is happening in the U.K. right now.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay.

To Deputy Commissioner Graham, with technology come new forms of crime. We're always trying to stay one step ahead, obviously. How are we doing on that with respect to new-technology crime?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

I think the Internet has been very empowering for society generally, and with it come different types of crime, whether it's Internet fraud, Internet-facilitated fraud, or something as tragic as child exploitation. It's certainly changing the dynamic in how we allocate resources and the kind of training required for people to be technologically savvy in order to do those kinds of investigations. It's changing the dynamic quite a bit, and we're recognizing that change throughout the system in how we train and develop officers. The demand currently is outstripping capacity, but we're working hard to catch up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Graham.

We'll now move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please, for seven minutes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I would like to affirm what my colleague said about invitations not being forthcoming to the opposition critics.

I imagine you had academics there from universities, or...?

[Mark Potter]

Yes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It would have been very instructive. As a matter of fact, I read about the summit as it was taking place, and I thought it would be quite interesting to be part of that, to be listening and to take in the information.

You were saying that policing costs have gone from $6 billion to $12 billion in Canada—over what period, again?

[Mark Potter]

It was about the last 10 years.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It was the last 10 years. That's an incredible increase. It reminds me a little bit of the galloping increases in health care costs and how this has been as a result of many factors, some demographic—for example, the aging population—and the introduction of new and complex technologies and so on and so forth.

Often we hear—and we've been hearing this for a number of years with respect to health care—that all we need to do is bring about some administrative efficiencies and we will keep our costs down. Today there is a realization, if you've read Jeffrey Simpson recently—he's just written a book on the subject of health care in Canada, but this is specifically in relation to an article he published recently—that this is not the road to bringing down health care costs. We've tapped that possibility as much as possible.

I'm wondering, then, how much room is there for saving as a result of administrative efficiencies when you have more complex crimes, especially in the area of white-collar crime, which I am told needs more resources within the RCMP. It's extremely complex. You have highly technological crimes that require highly trained individuals. The investigations are more complex, and so on and so forth.

As well, you have the problem across the board, not just with the RCMP, of very high policing costs due to high police pensions. As a matter of fact, when we talk about the problem in the United States, from what I gather, the impetus for looking at bringing down policing costs has been the result of huge pension liabilities. In some communities, the whole municipal budget goes to pension liabilities.

I must say that I'm sure there are some administrative efficiencies to be had, but I just don't see how you can solve a $12 billion problem just by so-called back office improvements. I would like your comments.

[Mark Potter]

Thank you.

I think the challenges are multi-layered. The first is we don't often know how efficient most police services are because we have a measurement challenge. There are a range of indicators that can be helpful. Any one indicator in isolation often gives you mixed or ambiguous information, so you have to be cautious in how you use it and you want to look at a range of indicators. That's on the quantitative side.

Then you begin to look more deeply into police work and realize there's a whole qualitative side to policing that is not easily captured by typical measurements. It's a real challenge to open up the box, look inside the police service, and figure out how efficient and effective it is. We've seen programs in the U.K., for example, in which private sector specialists come in and work with you to look at all of your processes, look at each officer's daily routines, and break them down into what they're doing basically every minute of the day. They look at all of those steps. Having done that, they assess possible areas in which efficiency can be increased, and often what they find are fairly straightforward things.

A lot of policing is about demand management. Whether it's calls related to crimes or calls for service, you're managing the demands that residents place on the police services, so it's about how you do that as efficiently as possible: how you prioritize those calls, how you use things like scheduling for non-urgent calls, how you use technology—mobile technology, for example—and how officers in the field are better able to respond to those calls.

Once you do that assessment, you're in a much better position, having looked in a very detailed way at a police service, to recommend how you might improve the efficiency.