It sounds to me as though it means one of two things. It means taking some of the services that are performed in-house by police forces and essentially contracting them out to outside specialists. Again, the state will still be spending money, except it will be spending on outside contractors, and sometimes that doesn't save that much money.
Is there another element of trying to download costs onto the civilian population? In other words, are we saying, “Create more neighbourhood watch groups, and we won't have to patrol as much”, and so on?
In terms of demand management, I think if you speak to any citizen who's witnessed a break-in or whose house alarm has gone off or what have you, they'll say they didn't call the police because it takes them so long to get here and so on. Whenever they do come and take a report, they say—and this is just anecdotal—“Look ma'am, it's really going to be hard to find this person. It's like a needle in a haystack”, and so on.
It seems to me there's a sort of pent-up demand for policing services, so I don't think there's a lot reduction of demand to be had. I just think the system's overwhelmed. That's what citizens seem to be saying to me.
I'm really curious about the jurisdictional aspect of policing. We say policing is a provincial jurisdiction unless we're talking about the RCMP, and yet we have all kinds of federal programs and crime prevention, and the government—