Public Safety Committee on April 16th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good morning, everyone.

This is meeting 79 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Today we are continuing our study on the economics of policing.

We're going to go for an hour and a half with the panel we have here, if that's all right, and then we will move into committee business to discuss some of the issues we have to deal with.

On our panel today we have with us the chief superintendent of the Ontario Provincial Police, Mr. Gary Couture. Welcome. Thank you for coming on a rainy day in Ottawa.

Appearing by video conference from Toronto is the deputy chief of the Toronto Police Service, Michael Federico.

Appearing by video conference from Regina, Saskatchewan on behalf of the Government of Saskatchewan is the deputy minister of corrections and policing at the Ministry of Justice, Dale McFee. We welcome you back.

Our committee wants to thank all of the witnesses for appearing today to help us in our study. I would invite our witnesses to make a brief opening statement before our committee moves into the first round of questioning.

Chief Superintendent Couture, if you would you be so kind as to begin, we look forward to your comments.

[Chief Superintendent Gary Couture, Chief Superintendent, Ontario Provincial Police]

Thank you, sir. I do have a prepared statement, if I may read through it.

Mr. Chair, vice chairs, committee members, good morning. Thank you very much for the invite here this morning.

I am Chief Superintendent Gary Couture, commander of the east region, field operations of the Ontario Provincial Police.

Since 1909 the OPP has had a long and proud history of ensuring the safety and security of the people of Ontario. The Ontario Provincial Police fulfills its mandate as one of North America's largest deployed police services, with more than 6,200 uniformed officers, 2,800 civilian employees, and 850 auxiliary officers. I understand this is of interest to this committee.

The OPP's mission is policing excellence through our people, our work, and our relationships. This guides each OPP member toward achieving the OPP's overall goal of safe communities and a secure Ontario.

The OPP provides core policing services to 323 of Ontario's 444 municipalities. Of these 323 municipalities, 151 are policed under contract, with the remainder policed on a non-contractual basis.

Policing is conducted through our provincial headquarters, five regional headquarters, one divisional headquarters, 165 detachments, numerous investigative and intelligence offices, four provincial communication centres, the OPP Academy and in-service training facilities, forensic identification units, and other facilities.

Both the obligation of the municipalities to provide core police services, and the methods by which a municipality may opt to have these services delivered, are outlined for us in section 5 of Ontario's Police Services Act. If a municipality does not provide police services by one of the methods outlined, the Ontario Provincial Police is required to provide police services to that municipality.

Under Ontario's Police Services Act, the OPP is further mandated to deliver a wide array of specialized services, including criminal investigative and technical expertise, and leadership, not only to OPP communities but also as support to all municipal and first nations police agencies across Ontario.

The OPP utilizes a variety of diverse positions to ensure an efficient, cost-effective service delivery, while operating within the limits and guidelines of the Ontario Public Service Act, Ontario Police Services Act, and current collective agreements.

I'm here to outline some specific roles filled by members of the OPP, as requested by this committee. These include special constables, court officers, court security, and auxiliary members. I will describe in greater detail the respective general roles and responsibilities as well as the legislative limits of their respective authority.

Special constables are classified by the OPP as bailiffs. They constitute a unique category in law enforcement. Unlike police officers, whose duties have been established by legislation, special constables do not have specific statutory authorities. Under subsection 53(2) of the Ontario Police Services Act, the commissioner of the OPP is authorized to appoint special constables to act for the period, area, and purpose that the commissioner considers expedient, subject to the approval of the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services.

As a result, individuals are provided limited peace officer and/or police officer powers, as defined in the appointment. The appointment is utilized for a variety of positions to provide the necessary authorities to perform their duties. The specialized and focused roles of those appointed as special constables involve law enforcement, security, and investigation services, closely related to the duties of police officers.

To ensure that the public trust and professionalism related to the appointment by the commissioner is maintained, anyone who is appointed as a special constable is subject to strict accountability outlined in their conditions of employment. Subsection 53(4) of Ontario's Police Services Act clearly states that a special constable should not be employed by a police force to perform on a permanent basis, whether part-time or full-time, all the usual duties of a police officer.

Within the OPP, special constable status is primarily awarded to these positions: offender transport, court security, and court officer civilian positions.

As the name implies, members of the offender transport unit, provincially and regionally, are responsible for the physical movement of offenders between OPP detachments, municipal police services, regional jails, and court locations. These uniformed special constables receive extensive training to ensure their own safety, public safety, and the safety of the offenders. This category can further be broken down into the following areas: offender transport, provincial; offender transport, regional; and offender transport, within municipal contracts.

Court officers are responsible for managing the files, making notifications for court appearances, updating databases after court appearances, DNA sampling, processing court briefs, and organizing offender transportation. This role is filled by a combination of regular uniformed members and special constables. The court officer is the face of the local detachment within the court environment in relation to all judicial and administrative matters.

In terms of court security, the OPP has a mandate under section 137 of Ontario's Police Services Act to ensure “the security of judges and of persons taking part in or attending” court “proceedings”where the OPP is a primary police service. This also includes the security of those in custody at the court facility.

A local committee establishes the appropriate level of security, and the OPP uses a combination of regular uniformed members and special constables to meet these requirements. In communities policed by the OPP under contract, individual municipalities are required to pay the costs associated with this court security, which affords opportunities for enhanced special constable positions within the parameters of OPP contracts. In smaller, non-contractual municipalities, the requirement for court security has resulted in financial and operational pressures for the OPP.

On the OPP auxiliary program, the Ontario Provincial Police supports a contingent of dedicated civilian volunteers through its auxiliary program, which also receives its mandate from Ontario's Police Services Act. The mission statement of the auxiliary program is:

To provide fully trained volunteer Auxiliary members to assist in the delivery of traffic safety and community-based crime prevention initiatives and; to perform police duties only in special circumstances, including an emergency that the police officers of the OPP are not sufficiently numerous to deal with.

An executive committee comprised of senior auxiliary officers, commissioned officers, and representation from the OPP Commissioned Officers Association and the Ontario Provincial Police Association administers the provincial auxiliary program.

Members of the OPP auxiliary have no police authority or power and must rely on the same arrest provisions afforded regular citizens. Ontario's Police Services Act does, however, provide for instances when an auxiliary member may have the authority of a police officer. This can occur in an emergency situation where the OPP requires additional strength to cope with a special occasion or event.

Being a volunteer with the OPP auxiliary allows citizens an opportunity to experience the excitement and challenges as well as the routine and the uneventful in any tour of duty in police functions.

Members of the OPP auxiliary are not paid but are reimbursed for travel and meal expenses.They include people from diverse backgrounds and civilian occupations. Their duties in assisting front-line officers are extensive and may include ground security at major events, doing surveys, seat belt clinics, assisting with RIDE spot-check initiatives, assisting at safety displays and presentations, foot and road patrols with regular members, accompanying regular members on marine and snow vehicle patrols, and ceremonial duties.

OPP auxiliary members are not used to replace regular members in any duties. Training for auxiliary personnel must occur to a level to provide necessary skills to safely fulfill the requirements of their mandate under the Police Services Act. And they participate within those duties that enhance community policing efforts, crime prevention programs, and public service as opposed to direct police service delivery. Our auxiliary members must always be under the direct supervision of uniformed OPP members.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I'd be happy to answer any questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Superintendent.

Let's move to Deputy Chief Federico in Toronto.

[Deputy Chief Michael Federico, Deputy Chief, Toronto Police Service]

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

I'd like to say on behalf of Toronto Police Service's Chief of Police William Blair, thank you for the opportunity to share some information with you.

I'm going to quote Chief William Blair about the reviews that the Toronto police are currently undergoing in the context of the economical climate that we face, who has said: “The service is a solid foundation of excellence upon which to build an adaptive and flexible organization. We have the chance to benefit from our past experience: what's worked, what hasn't, what we could do better.”

In the context of the discussions today, I will just make some observations. The governments in our city, our province, and in fact right across the country are facing enormous challenges in maintaining the economic sustainability of the services they are tasked to provide to their communities. The Toronto Police Service is operating in an environment of budget deficits at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels, and our own budget is verging on over a billion dollars a year. Our policing budget has grown to become one of the most expensive line items paid for by the Toronto taxpayer. Cost-cutting in police budgets is taking place throughout the United States, Great Britain, and Europe.

The Toronto Police Service has earned the trust of our citizens by delivering excellent service to our community and by keeping our community safe. We have an obligation to maintain the trust of our community and maintain a safe city. We also have the responsibility to deliver those services in an effective, efficient, and economical matter.

Chief William Blair has initiated a review of the Toronto Police Service, including how its services are delivered, its business processes, and its organizational structure. The purpose of this review is to examine how we are currently conducting business and ask whether we can do it better, more effectively or economically, and whether we are delivering service that is of value to our community.

The chief's decision to direct a comprehensive review was reinforced by the recent release of the report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario's Public Services, colloquially referred to as the Drummond report, in 2012. The Drummond report calls for reform of government programs and the manner in which they are delivered as a way to address deficits. It recognizes that simply cutting budgets will not address the problem. A similar approach is called for in the policing sector.

For the Toronto Police Service, our review is not a cost-cutting or budget exercise, although we must be mindful of the fiscal environment we are in. Therefore the review includes an examination of options for more economical ways of delivering services and meeting our obligations. The desired outcome is to prioritize our service and deliver those necessary services in a manner that allows the police service to meet its legislation obligations and maintain a safe city.

The new model of policing that will be achieved will represent changes in the organization. Those changes will include the manner in which the services may be delivered. That new delivery of service may include the use of new technology, civilianization of services currently delivered by police officers, consolidation of resources, outsourcing of services, and shared delivery. In the same way that my OPP colleague discussed the use of special constables and auxiliaries, suffice it to say that our model of the use of special constables and auxiliaries in Ontario is comparable with that described by the OPP.

Toronto police have special constables working in courts for prisoner and court security and in our police precincts booking prisoners. We also have a special constable working at the Toronto Police College in our armoured section, so that they can handle restricted and prohibited weapons. Our auxiliaries, just as those in the OPP, are subject to the Police Services Act and participate in special events, crime prevention events, and ceremonial events.

The service has looked at a number of functions internally that might be performed by alternative methods. I would like to point to two examples. We are currently working in detailed partnership, closer partnership, with the City of Toronto, the United Way, Toronto Community Housing, and what we're calling a hub or focused approach to crime prevention and crime solution. It focuses on intervening in the cycle of violence at an earlier stage, on behalf of both victims and perpetrators, in an attempt to try to intervene before matters escalate into more serious activities in the community. So it has both a crime prevention as well as a crime interdiction approach.

In the same way, we're looking at using technology more efficiently in Toronto to help enforce traffic safety. Our belief is that through automated traffic enforcement or photo enforcement, we can achieve more efficient and safer movement of vehicles and pedestrians on the roadway and free up police officers to deal with more habitual offenders or more dangerous locations in the community.

These are just a couple of examples of how Toronto police are addressing some of the challenges facing our community.

Again, like my OPP colleague, I would be happy to answer any questions the panel may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Deputy Chief.

We'll now move to Deputy Minister Dale McFee from Saskatchewan.

Mr. McFee, we certainly appreciated having you on our committee previously, especially when you were talking about the experience in Prince Albert. Just to make you aware, the committee plans on travelling to Prince Albert to see some of the things you were talking about with the hub and spoke system they have there and also with the aboriginals.

We look forward to your comments again and welcome back.

[Dale McFee, Deputy Minister, Corrections and Policing, Ministry of Justice, Government of Saskatchewan]

Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Like the others, I would like to start by thanking each of the members of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security for having me appear here again in support of your ongoing studies.

I was pleased to receive this invitation to build upon our previous economics of policing discussion, and I have been very pleased to hear of the continuing and growing interest that you and others have expressed in the work of my colleagues and I in Saskatchewan.

There is a movement taking shape across Canada, and we in Saskatchewan are very proud to be at the leading edge of what we regard as one of the most important breakthroughs in community safety that we've seen in Canada in many years. As many of you will know, we had no choice but to seek out new solutions. Conventional approaches were failing to keep our cities, towns, and first nations communities safe and healthy, and continued investments in policing, while still necessary, were never going to be the answer alone.

We looked at research and experience far and wide, and we looked very hard at our own systems and practices. What we have been able to do with that information is to fundamentally change the ways that the business of community safety is seen, understood, owned, led, and done.

You will no doubt have heard this referred to as hubs and CORs. I would like to take a minute to offer a bit of an explanation of what the movement is really about. It's not only about hubs. It's about risk-driven, collaborative, and immediate intervention by all parts of the human service system working effectively together. It's about learning as much as we can from those interventions to bring about the necessary changes to the system so those chronically recurring risk factors that lead to crime, social disorder, and a range of other unhappy outcomes, can be more effectively managed and reduced over time.

In essence, it is moving away from the traditional approach of “hard on crime”, such as arrest and incarcerate, or “soft on crime”—intervention and prevention—to smart on community safety. It is all about balance.

At the hub level, this means that every Tuesday and Thursday professionals from multiple disciplines sit at a table and bring to each other's attention situations in their community that have come to the attention of their own part of the system. These situations can include those of individuals without safe housing, children showing troubled behaviour in classrooms, people in pending crisis attending our emergency rooms, people in danger of lapsing in their addictions treatment, people at risk of becoming victimized in their homes, or people representing an immediate threat to public order on our streets. Within minutes, through collaboration and the proper and allowable sharing of information, multiple agency interventions and solutions are crafted and executed. Risks are reduced and, quite frankly, lives are saved.

At the centre of responsibility, or COR, this also means constant and rigorous analysis into what these situations are telling us about the nature of our communities and the effectiveness of our social systems. It's about how we can all do things better to more effectively meet the needs of our community.

I'd like to give you some insight into both parts of this process. First, I will provide some examples of what these immediate collaborative hub interventions have achieved in Prince Albert, a city that had witnessed steady years of increases in virtually every one of these indicators prior to adopting this model.

The hub in Prince Albert has been active for 27 months. In that time there have been 300 sessions and about 600 situations of acutely elevated risk—I think it's important to remember the words “acutely elevated risk”—brought to and acted upon at the table. It's important to remember that the average hub discussion takes six minutes, and interventions are typically executed, with multi-agency services being provided within 24 to 48 hours.

Over the past two years, violent crime there has come down. In the first year it came down by 11.8%. It came down a further 31.9% in the second year, and in the first quarter of this year, another 36%. Youth victimization was reduced by 28% in the first year alone, and by an additional 13% in the second year. Public prosecutions were down 12%, and an additional 18% in year two. The education system reports significant improvements in students being connected to services they need, and student attendance and retention are trending up. Health, mental health, and addiction services report they are providing more immediate supports and are more effectively bridging services to those in elevated risk circumstances. Our child and family services report that over the first full year they were able to divert 86 families to preventive services, thus avoiding over one full month's caseload of investigations in one year. They are tracking a similar pattern in the second year.

Finally, for the last two years running, police calls for service have gone down by 1.8% and 2.9% respectively, after doubling over the previous eight years. We all are professionals and all professionals know that if something is predictable, it's most often preventable. It's easy to see from this last statistic how this model links directly to the work your committee, the CACP, and many others are doing on the economics and sustainability of policing.

These outcomes are compelling, especially for those at the local level. In my role as a provincial deputy minister, the real excitement for me comes from what we learn, and from how these local experiences are informing our way forward. We now know, with absolute accuracy, that certain identifiable risk factors are driving the demands on our policing, criminal justice, education, health, and social services capacities. An analysis of a year's worth of hub situations tells us that the top seven recurrent risk factors in Prince Albert are substance abuse, criminality, victimization, mental health, missing persons, inadequate parenting, and truancy.

We know that many parts of the system are implicated in these at-risk situations in ways that have not been easily recognized in the past. For example, health-related risks have been a factor in 83% of all cases brought to the hub table, and child welfare issues have been present in over one-third of the cases.

It comes as no surprise that in our own government here in Saskatchewan, this risk-driven approach to community safety is pointing the way forward. My colleagues on executive council have collectively committed to moving forward together. My ministry is now supporting nine communities in Saskatchewan that are engaged in their own implementation of the hub model, and we expect to have over a dozen fully operational this year. We also anticipate operationalizing a second COR in the near future.

More than this, it's important to stress that this model is only one part of the broader chartered commitment that was announced jointly in 2011 by our premier, Brad Wall, and our police leaders in Saskatchewan. This is our strategy of building partnerships to reduce crime. It was a combination of research, practical experience, and experimentation that led us to Community Mobilization Prince Albert, and my ministry is committed to following that same path as we address a cradle-to-grave approach to risk reduction and better outcomes.

We have formed strong and active relationships with our two universities, and we recently announced the formation of a deputy minister's expert advisory council, a small group of leading-edge, international experts from academia and professional practice who will advise my executive team and me from time to time to ensure that our program across the full spectrum of criminal justice is anchored in solid evidence and research.

It is important to us, as I believe it should be to all who have a role to play in community safety, to ensure that the work reflects the best in emerging technological solutions and applies the most innovative methods as we tackle everything from road safety to drugs and alcohol, and from mental illness to literacy issues in our neighbourhoods and our correctional facilities.

We are currently reviewing our entire learning system for professionals, and we hope to develop a centre where, on the one hand, forensic studies can integrate more effectively with other parts of the system, and on the other hand, the emerging knowledge base can be shared widely through a Canada peer-reviewed journal dedicated to these studies.

It is important to acknowledge that these emerging approaches to community safety are no longer a Saskatchewan-only phenomenon. We have now exchanged visits with more than 15 cities and regions, representing nine provinces and territories across the country, as well as some from the U.S. and the UK. Five police services in Ontario—Toronto, Sudbury, Waterloo, Peel, and the OPP—have recently formed a working group to collaborate as they each work with their own local partners in adapting some of our experiences and making them their own.

We have delivered well in excess of 250 presentations on the mobilization model. We in Saskatchewan are proud to have been asked by Public Safety Canada to take the lead in writing one of the three pillars of the upcoming strategy on sustainable policing—the pillar that addresses new models of community safety.

I am pleased to report that following the discussions that were held in February in Ottawa, federal ADM Shawn Tupper will be leading a delegation to Prince Albert next week.

We look forward to more productive discussions aimed at increasing the federal role of our hubs and CORs. We have been very well supported by the RCMP's F Division throughout this process, dating back as far as our original visit to Scotland. We believe there are real opportunities for meaningful involvement by other parts of the federal system, especially as we move forward in our northern and first nations communities.

We have restructured the Ministry of Corrections and Policing in Saskatchewan, with the intention to ensure that we have a structure designed to focus on evidence-based practices, within a ministry that our partners can follow, one that is focused on meaningful outcomes.

We have just come up with an acronym that we use, VOICE. If you write in a column the word “Voice” as V, O, I, C3 with an “equals” sign under it, followed by E, the V is for value, the O for outcomes, the I for innovation, and the C3 for core business, client-centred collaboration, and the “equals” sign means that the way to get there is to follow the evidence, as in E.

Needless to say, I can go on speaking about this and many facets of this emerging approach to community safety—and believe me, I welcome each and every chance to talk about it. With the chair's permission, I would certainly welcome any questions.

As you can see, what we're now tracking is that there's a significant cost savings to a lot of this stuff, through all the ministries. It is a lot bigger than any one particular area that you study, such as wages.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. McFee.

We'll move into the first round of questioning. As a reminder to everyone, this is a seven-minute round.

We'll go to Mr. Norlock first, please, for seven minutes.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and through you to the witnesses for appearing today.

I read recently in a police magazine—I think it was Blue Line—that with a recently negotiated contract, in Windsor, Ontario a first class constable will be making $90,000 a year next year. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it goes to show that the costs of policing—and this is where my question is leading, which I'll be asking all three witnesses today about—are, based on my old experience, 85% to 90% strictly for pay and benefits. Could you just respond to this as succinctly as possible.

But I'll start my questioning with Mr. McFee and then move on to the deputy chief and the chief superintendent. I was very impressed by some of the statistics you gave us.

You ended your testimony, Mr. McFee, by saying that you have done a cost analysis, which was exactly what my first question was going to be. In other words, judged by your costs before you started the hubs and CORs program, have you put a dollar value on the savings this new program has provided?

[Dale McFee]

We currently have the university studying that right now, and we will have more in-depth numbers. But the real question here is that if you focus just on wages, the work needs to get done. You can find different ways to do the work more cheaply, or you can take a different approach and say that maybe a lot of this work shouldn't be on the table. If you look at that, you have a whole bunch more money to look at, because then you are looking across sectors.

I'll give a quick example. My government wants to create 60,000 jobs in Saskatchewan by 2020. It's a great idea that is very ambitious and job-focused. I will put this in a corrections perspective. If you take those jobs and say that these are $50,000 jobs—which you know they won't be, but some of them will be—a $50,000 job creates roughly $4,000 of provincial income tax. What that means is that it takes 12 jobs to pay for the housing of one inmate.

With our inmate growth last year, it would take 2,340 jobs to pay for inmate growth alone. Out of those 60,000 jobs, it would take 16,380 of them just to pay for inmate growth over that same timeframe. That doesn't include policing, it doesn't include the court system, and it doesn't include the health system.

I think the answer to this is to look more comprehensively at where the big savings are. The wages are dictated by the market. That doesn't mean that you don't have controls in place, but in my opinion, there is a bigger question to be asked.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you, Deputy Chief.

I have some comments surrounding my question and your recent.... I live not too far from Toronto so I get CFRB and all the news out of Toronto, and I know some of the challenges you've had recently from a budgetary perspective. I wonder if you'd comment on Mr. McFee's statement and some of the things you're doing to reduce costs and look at your operation.

[D/Chief Michael Federico]

Thank you, Mr. Norlock.

I would echo what Mr. McFee has said about the cost of policing, because in my opinion it's really reduced to what level of service the community is prepared to accept, because these are the cost drivers. At the same time, our institutions have to be mindful that there are some economies that can be achieved through the use of alternative methods of delivering policing. For example, I mentioned that technology may in some small way relieve the burden on the number of police officers needed to carry out a particular task. There's some conventional thinking, of course, that perhaps we can acquire some lower-cost employees to carry out the functions.

But as Mr. McFee mentioned—and I support this—a thorough program evaluation of the nature of the work that gets done in our community will help reduce the demands on the services. For example, in the area of mental health and challenges for social services, supportive housing is often cited as one of the foundations upon which we can grow a healthier community.

I would encourage our community to look at policing as an investment. Where we have demonstrated a closer collaboration with community agencies, we are in fact building an investment in that community through social development. I like to use the phrase “crime prevention through social development”. The police services in every community have a strong role to play in providing a greater capacity in the community to resist the harms they face, including reduction in crime.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much.

Chief Superintendent.

[C/Supt Gary Couture]

Yes, sir. Thank you very much.

I certainly agree in all respects with what I've heard so far. I think we'll agree that anyone in public services and public safety will understand that the complexity of policing has climbed incredibly quickly in the last few years. The expectation in the community has continued to grow. The resources have remained—I'm speaking for the OPP—reasonably limited within the confines that we have. We always focus on efficiency. We continuously strive to deliver the best we can within the parameters we have, while responding to the expectations of the community.

There's been a lot of discussion nationally in regard to crime rates and reductions, etc. For those contracts that are renewed, where we can, we sit with the community. We assess the required resources and respond to the appropriate levels required at that time. That's a luxury we have in some locations.

What remains, as everybody has commented on, is that we need to look forward to alternatives to certain issues and instances that we address as a police service. The police are often the first call for all issues. In Ontario, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police is beginning to develop their community engagement and mobilization model, which I think is what Mr. McFee was referring to, which engages all agencies within a community to work towards community safety issues and social issues, to perhaps defer some of the issues that are weighing down policing to other types of agencies.

If I can give you just one quick example, in the last two weeks our region responded to a tactical call concerning a mental health issue and we found that there were a hundred incidents on the system related to this individual's mental health issues. Our concern is that we are always the first responders to this type of issue, and it's already been pointed out that there are other community agencies that can address these types of issues, instead of always having the police as the first response.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Norlock.

We'll now move to Mr. Garrison, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all three of our witness who are here today. In particular I want to go back to Mr. McFee, who I think has done us a very useful service in both of his appearances here by drawing our attention to some of the broader issues regarding costs of policing.

My specific question is that it would seem that the transition into this new model would require some shifting of funds. In other words, other agencies may have to pick up some of the costs, even if down the road everybody would save money.

Can you say a little bit about how that transition is working with this model?

[Dale McFee]

Well, that's a very good point. How we got operational in Saskatchewan was by trying to develop a model that is very similar to what a lot of folks would know as a franchise, which can be replicated. So you build your processes and get everything in place, dot your i's and cross your t's, but at lot of this work is about redirecting or having a paradigm shift in your thinking on how you use the lot of money that is in the system.

So as a police chief back then I had to make a committed decision to move some of my resources into this, and that was my commitment. The provincial government came in with $450,000 for each CORs. The provincial government's role was to pay for the brain piece. They paid for an executive director, executive support, and two analysts. With analysts, obviously, what gets measured gets done, and we had one tactical analyst and one analyst trained on social return on investment. Every other agency had to bring in their staff plus $25,000 worth of operating money, which is very, very affordable with the types of budgets we're talking about. But that was a conscious decision that we were going to try to do business differently.

The piece that we're missing is the federal government's role in this. In short, what is the federal government's role in this? We're still trying to flesh that out. There's no question that if you're going to build the right formula you need to have everybody at the table. As we've often heard, there's one taxpayer and the reality is there's also one client that we're trying to deliver these services to. So that seed money, I think, is imperative to shifting how we think. But I don't think this is a money issue, by any stretch of the imagination: it's about trying to look at some things differently.

Let's not mix this up with totally going prevention-intervention.... We all sat around our TVs and watched the unfortunate incident yesterday in Boston. We're not going to arrest our way out of our troubles, but we're not going to stop arresting. There are people, quite frankly, who need to go to jail and we can deal with those. We do a very good job in relation to rehabilitation and recidivism. But what we need to do is that balance piece, in my opinion, that we're doing it collectively all together. As in any business, you leverage results and you increase your gains by multiples.

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

Thank you very much.

I want to ask a more specific question, maybe first to Chief Superintendent Couture and then also to Deputy Chief Federico, concerning the use of special constables.

Can you tell me about public accountability for special constables? Are they fully covered by the public complaint process, or is that accountability for them solely an internal police matter?

[C/Supt Gary Couture]

Actually, sir, the special constables would be more subject to our internal accountability aspects. As I referred to earlier, when we engage or hire a special constable there would be certain criteria in place related to their contractual agreements, and that's where we outline the expectations of that position.

On the conduct aspects, we don't have the same parameters we would have with a constable.

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

So would it be an internal investigation by your police force if there were a complaint from the public?

[C/Supt Gary Couture]

Yes, sir.

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

What kind of discipline is available to you, then? Is it only what's specified in the contract?

[C/Supt Gary Couture]

In that respect, for us, we would be controlled by the Ontario public service guidelines with regard to the civilian side of our employees. It goes through levels of reprimands—verbal, etc.—and we can and we have with civilian employees reached points of termination. So there are varied levels but it's very different in regard to our constables and the Police Services Act.

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

Deputy Chief Federico, I presume things might be similar for you. Can you comment on that?

[D/Chief Michael Federico]

Yes they are. There are two classifications of special constables. One classification represents employees of the Toronto Police Service. Others are in other sectors, universities, for example, hospitals, and maybe Toronto housing. They are subject to our police services board scrutiny. They face the same jeopardy as any other person who might engage in misconduct. So they're subject to provincial law, they're subject to criminal law, and of course they're also subject to their employers' rules and regulations.

So internally like the OPP, while the special constable may not be subject to the provisions of the Office of the Independent Police Review Director or the Special Investigations Unit, he or she is subject to the same scrutiny and discipline, but it's applied by Toronto Police. Here the penalties for civilian members, of which our special constables are part, include dismissal for serious misconduct. It is summary dismissal and it's not subject to a hearing that a police officer must be subject to. The due process for a police officer is encoded in the police act in Ontario, whereas the due process for a special constable is subject to the Employment Standards Act and Ministry of Labour conditions, that is, the normal employer-employee conditions that are recognizable across most sectors.

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

Maybe in reverse order, I'll ask a question about training for special constables. Can you tell me what kind of training the special constables would receive? Let's go first to Toronto.