I don't mean to be facetious, but I sometimes refer to it as a growth industry, because for policing, dealing with mental illness has become a major piece of business. It's an unfortunate reality, but often if a person who needs help doesn't call the police, he or she may not get the help. The police have become the responders of first resort when it comes to mental illness.
There are, as Mr. McFee said, some very good examples across the country of partnership-based approaches that police services are using. I just talked about the one in Toronto, through which we have entered into agreements with hospitals in different parts of the city. In these partnerships the hospital provides a mental health nurse and we provide the police officer. At certain times of the day—from evening until early morning, when calls go up—they travel together. Quite often when a person in distress calls, the matter is resolved on the side, because the police officer makes the scene safe so that the mental health nurse can deal with the situation. When hospitalization is needed, ambulances are on standby and the person is moved to the hospital. That system is working exceptionally well. We now have that across the city.
The other thing that we have had to do is training. As you know, most of the mandatory training a police officer receives is around use of force, and this is a big issue. We have created a group of people from the community, including providers of service, consumers, and survivors themselves, to work in our police college to help us develop a good training model for our police officers.
Those two have been very helpful for us in responding as much as we can effectively to mental illness in Toronto.