Thank you very much, and thank you very much, witnesses, for being here today.
I have two questions that I'd like to squeeze in. One for Mr. McFee, but that will be the second question. The first one is for Mr. Stamatakis.
As all the witnesses are aware, when it comes to funding police services, particularly from the province and the federal government, all police services are not created equal. I'll use the example that I know best, which is the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service, a first nations police service in northern Ontario. The pay is less, the benefits are inadequate, and the working conditions are very poor. As a consequence, officers' health is a big concern. As well, many communities are left without policing services, and many officers spend an extra week, two weeks, three weeks in a community before a break because there's no one to replace them, and so on.
When it comes to the economics of policing, what happens in a police service like this is you have high turnovers—you also have poaching from other police services, but I don't want to get into that—which create a real problem in terms of where money is spent. Of course, it's spent training officers continually, on a continual basis.
I wonder, Mr. Stamatakis, if you'd just take a moment to maybe give your thoughts on first nations policing in Canada and what that means in terms of where we're going in the future.