Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the deputy mayor from Brooks for that very clear presentation of policing issues there.
I want to turn to the FCM to talk a little bit about some of the things they have said.
I certainly come from a riding with diverse policing. I was just making a note to myself: I have two municipal police departments, six municipalities policed by the RCMP, five first nations, and unorganized territory that is policed under the provincial policing contract. You talk about lack of clarity. Often residents of my riding have a really unclear understanding of responsibilities and of who is paying for what in policing.
I come from a community within that riding that has had a decade-long dispute with the provincial government over the best way to deliver policing services, with the province prohibiting the municipality from contracting with the RCMP, which the municipal council wanted to do because they felt it delivered better service at a lower cost and would coordinate with the neighbouring municipalities, which were already being policed by the RCMP. We've been dealing with this—I am a former municipal councillor—literally for a decade, trying to figure out the best way to deliver police services, without ever saying that there's anything wrong with the quality of service we're delivering now, but feeling that there is a lack of coordination, a lack of efficiencies that could be achieved by other modes of delivery. Because of that, I was very interested to hear you focus on roles and responsibilities.
Am I understanding correctly that you are really saying that, while on paper we know who is responsible and who should pay for what, in practice municipalities are picking up responsibilities from a lot of other levels of government?