Public Safety Committee on April 23rd, 2013

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It's been very interesting and I think it's brought some good ideas into the spotlight. The big challenge for us will be to make recommendations on how the federal government can act to improve matters.

Chief Hanson, maybe you can answer this. I think we all feel this. What we're seeing is that cybercrime of the type you described is expanding at a great rate. It's putting a lot of pressure on police resources. As one of you said, the police forces have to become more expert at dealing with these kinds of technologies. No doubt that means hiring people who are very skilled in and knowledgeable about these technologies.

I agree completely, but don't you think that will add some costs to policing? I don't see how it cannot add costs, personally, which is fine—we need to support these efforts. If the government wants to keep a cap on expenses, on the costs of policing, what's going to give? We can't have fewer regular police officers.

Is there any room for maintaining costs, or are we inevitably on a path toward increasing costs?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

That's a great question. You asked one question that I'd like to answer later on if somebody else asks it. What can the federal government do? I'd like to address that one, but you asked a specific one here.

First of all, I'd like to tell you—and I'm sure that Deputy Sloly will also support this—the relative cost of policing has not gone up. I pulled the numbers from when I started in policing in 1975, and the same percentage of the city budget goes to policing today as it did back in 1975.

Second, the salaries are equivalent to the increase in every other indicator, including other people's salaries. Third, the police-to-population ratios in Calgary have not changed. Across Canada, the 10 major cities, we rate eight out of 10. In other words, we have fewer cops policing more people than in the seven other cities that are in front of us.

So what we have done well over the years, and this is what is frustrating. It was frustrating that the conference in January on the economics of policing did not acknowledge two things. First, the cop-to-pop or cop-to-population ratio shows that we've adjusted to huge changes in policing over the last 35 years. Do you guys want to go for a beer afterwards and talk about what policing looked like 38 years ago? I'll tell you, it's nothing like today and nothing like what we're doing.

We have adjusted our resources to reflect community needs, partnerships, all kinds of things that have actually reduced the cost. When the economics of policing conference was going in January, CBC actually put on its website that Canada has the least number of police officers to population of the G-8 countries. That includes Japan—and people say Japan is some kind of nirvana—as well as the U.K., the U.S., and every other G-8 country.

The reality is that we adjust. When things like cybercrime come up, you're right, we have to adjust our resource base. As the city grows—and all cities are growing in this country—as long as we keep that cop-to-pop ratio, then we will make the adjustments, because we're partnering very effectively with community groups.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

It just seems to me that there's no room to reduce the police-to-population ratio, yet there's going to be a huge demand for technical experts to deal with cybercrime.

I have one question that flows from a scenario you've painted.

What happens to some kid who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a package of drugs somewhere? Somebody asks him to deliver this for 20 bucks. What happens to that kid if he's caught doing that? What are the steps? Where does that kid end up? Is there any going back?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very quickly, our time for both Mr. Scarpaleggia and for the first hour are just about up.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

You always have an alternative resolution through the court process. If the kid is under 18 years of age, you have different options, but the real, social issue that's associated with that is that he comes home a hero because he has money in his pocket now.

The issue is one that's very much associated to the positive reinforcement that comes from criminal activity, as opposed to the consequences of criminal activity.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much to Deputy Chief Sloly. I think Chief Hanson is going to stick around for the second hour as well. We want to thank you.

We're going to suspend momentarily.

To Mr. Sloly, I would say we appreciated your appearing. We're looking forward to Deputy Chief Federico's presentation. Even in your consideration of what you've said in answer to questions, or your presentation, if you would like to enlarge on any of it, please feel free to contact our clerk and he will see that it gets circulated among the members.

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We're going to suspend for about 30 seconds to make sure we have the network set up with our next guests....

All right. I'll call the meeting back to order. This is the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. We're in our second hour, where we're continuing to look at the economics of policing in Canada.

Appearing by video conference, we have Halifax Regional Police Chief Jean-Michel Blais. Also appearing by video conference, from British Columbia, we have Chief Jim Chu, chief constable of the Vancouver Police Department.

Our committee thanks these two police chiefs for appearing this morning and helping us in our study of the costs of policing in Canada. Our committee also wants to recognize the good work performed by both of these police forces in Vancouver and Halifax.

We have as well from the first hour, Chief Rick Hanson from Calgary, who will stay around. Although he won't have another opening statement, he will be here to answer questions that we may have as well.

Welcome.

Perhaps we will move, first of all, to Chief Constable Chu, and if you have an opening statement, we would like to hear that at this time.

[Chief Jim Chu, Chief Constable, Vancouver Police Department]

Good morning. Greetings from Vancouver. The sun is just coming up in the city right now.

Greetings on behalf of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which I'm very proud to represent and head.

My understanding is that this morning a number of topics are going to be discussed, but that I am to talk about mentally ill offenders and policing. In Vancouver, the calls we deal with that involve people with a mental disorder are a significant problem.

We've been talking about this since 2008, when we released a report. The title of that report pretty much described the problem. It's called “Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver's Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources”.

We researched the issue of how many calls we deal with involving people with a mental disorder. City-wide, up to 30% fit into that category. In certain areas of the city, they are up to half of the calls. When I say “certain areas”, that includes the downtown eastside, which is the lowest-income part of Vancouver, where we have the most drug addiction.

To give you an example of how many mentally ill people we're dealing with, and how it has changed even in the last 10 years, we do something called a Mental Health Act apprehension. If someone is a danger to themselves or others and is suffering from an apparent mental disorder, we call that a section 28 apprehension. In 2002 we were doing about 1.5 per day. In 2012, when we looked at our stats, we were doing about seven per day. That's a fivefold increase in the number of people we're taking into care to see a doctor because they're suffering from a mental disorder and they're a danger.

What has caused all of this?

One thing is that we've had deinstitutionalization. While that was fine for some people, it's our belief that it went too far. There are many people who are now in the community and cannot cope on their own. For one thing, supports that were promised to support these people in the community never materialized, and some people just can't cope without being in custodial care.

For example, when Riverview, the local health facility that cared for the mentally ill, closed and people ended up out in the streets, a lot of them went to the lowest-income parts of the region, which includes Vancouver's notorious downtown eastside.

There, of course, the first person they meet is their friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. Now we have someone who is mentally ill and addicted to illicit drugs. Because they don't have the ability to hold a job or function, a lot of them end up as homeless people, so you have those three problems to try to deal with. Not only do the people who were deinstitutionalized gravitate to areas like the downtown eastside, but also a lot of young people do when they have problems, and they can become addicted quite easily.

In terms of recent violence—I'll talk about that and conclude with what we're going to do about the problem of the mentally ill in Vancouver—we've been tracking 35 incidents since 2012, at the beginning. These involve death and serious injury. Most of these incidents involve males. About 90% of these situations involve males who either were released from hospital or were apprehended under section 28. I'll give you some recent examples.

In October, a man who was severely disturbed rode our Canada Line to the last stop in downtown Vancouver, got out, and with a gun in his hand, decided to barricade himself in the lobby of a very luxurious Vancouver hotel, scaring the staff and guests. There was a 12-hour standoff with that person. He ended up being taken into custody after being shot with a rubber bullet and is now in psychiatric care.

In December, a man who who was emotionally disturbed arrived from Edmonton. He said to the police officers who he encountered in the street, “Please take me to the hospital. I don't feel right.” They took him to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I guess nothing was done for him, and he was back on the streets. He then attacked three elderly women right outside the hockey rink. He just randomly walked up to them and started striking their heads against the pavement. A fourth woman was potentially a victim of a carjacking, but the police arrived and arrested him.

In February, in a downtown apartment building, a person who was here from France and had been in the hospital system went berserk and attacked seven people in the building with a knife and a hammer, causing very severe injuries. He attacked the police officer who tried to arrest him.

To give a couple of other quick examples, in February, again near the hockey rink downtown, a man stabbed three people, including a woman who was walking her dog. Then he laid down on the ground and started yelling and screaming. When the police officers arrived, they thought he was a victim of a stabbing because he had blood on him and was lying on the ground, but he was clearly mentally ill.

The last incident was in a 7-Eleven just last month. In the early morning hours a woman was waiting for the cashier when buying something, and a man who had just finished serving a five-year sentence for aggravated assault and had been under psychiatric care by the correction system went berserk again and stabbed her in the head with a chip of the knife breaking off in her skull.

Fortunately, all these victims survived, but there could have been much more tragic consequences.

Let me conclude by just saying what we're doing about it in Vancouver. This has created lots of calls and workload for Vancouver police officers. We've been trying to address the upstream drivers by talking to our partners in the health system, saying, “You need to do more. You can't just let people who have an inability to function out on the streets”.

We've talked to our officers and we've explained how serious this problem is, but we've also said that it's mandatory that each front-line officer undertake a crisis intervention training program. It's a week-long program. We bring in psychiatric experts. We bring in mental health professionals. Our goal is to de-escalate situations. We don't want to use force. We don't want to criminalize the mentally ill, and we're trying to resolve these incidents with dialogue and other tools we can use to de-escalate.

For about 30 years now in Vancouver we've had a full-time unit called Car 87, which has a psychiatric nurse and a police officer. They take calls from both the police and the health system and they deal with lots of people who have issues.

Since the beginning of 2012 we've partnered with our local health authority on what is called ACT, assertive community treatment. I mentioned before that a lot of people end up in the community without support. This program does try to give those people support. The term “assertive” is in there because sometimes somebody who is not well mentally may say, “I'm feeling better today. I'm not going to take my medication”. One of the goals of this team is to make sure that people are taking their medication because, if they're not, they will perhaps be a danger to themselves or others.

We are going to expand the ACT program. It's been a good model and is used elsewhere in North American and in the city of Victoria as well. Also, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are going to convene a national conference to talk about this. I've also talked to Senator Vern White, who is considering a study on this as well.

But a lot of the calls we're dealing with in the city of Vancouver involve those with a mental disorder, and it's creating a lot of work for our front-line officers.

That's my opening statement.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Chief Constable Chu.

We'll move to Chief Blais. You have 10 minutes.

[Chief Jean-Michel Blais, Chief of Police, Halifax Regional Police]

Great. Thank you very much.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

I want to thank you for this opportunity to present a few highlights on the current state of policing in Canada, particularly in the Halifax Regional Municipality.

I will be presenting in English but, of course, I will be happy to answer questions put to me in French .

Thank you very much for the opportunity today. I'd like to focus my comments on four major themes, not in any particular order of importance per se but hopefully in an effort to contribute more fully to the understanding of what we are facing right now. The four themes that I wish to focus on are: the mounting complexity of policing; financial pressures; union and generational divides; and the redefinition of core responsibilities in the management of public expectations.

The first point is the mounting complexity of policing. We've heard over many years that since 1992 crime has been diminishing. Of course there are many reasons, and I won't get into what they could possibly be. But I will comment that if crime has indeed diminished, as statistics would have us believe, it would make sense that the cost associated with policing would also diminish. Unfortunately, as we all know that hasn't occurred.

Since 1992, as a basic takeoff of the post-Soviet bloc era expression about the “peace dividend” that we saw in the 1990s, we should have technically experienced a “crime reduction dividend”. Unfortunately, the gap between mounting costs and reduced crime has been absorbed by many things, among which are increased accountability measures and requirements for both internal and external oversight; judicial complexity, including disclosure; undelivered benefits of technology; and ever-increasing police compensation packages. I'd like to comment on these things a bit later on.

The ever-increasing judicial complexity equates to tasks taking longer and requiring more resources than in the past. When I lecture to master's-level students on the single decision that most impacts policing, I always of course refer to the Stinchcombe decisions. Included in that group, of course, are the Askov, Collins, Feeney, and McNeil decisions. They have all had significant impacts upon the way we do investigations. As a legally trained police officer, I do not lament whatsoever the inherent wisdom of these decisions, but I recognize the added burden of each one of these decisions, which have added to what was already a challenging profession.

For example, it take us longer today to charge somebody with impaired driving because of additional legal requirements, including, of course, disclosure. Warrants, as has been discussed earlier on here and I'm sure in other fora, are also considerably more complex and take longer to write today than in the past. It has indeed become—as we saw in the film of that name in the 1970s—a paper chase. I recognize as well that some of these cases have not only added additional burdens to the criminal side of policing, but also, in my past life as a disciplinary adjudicator, they rendered more complex the application of administrative law to policing. All this complexity increases the time spent on policing, and as we all know, time is of course money.

With regard to financial issues, the most evident factor affecting the economics of policing is the escalating cost of salaries and benefits. We are a human resource-rich environment. The cost of policing has skyrocketed over the last number of years, almost exclusively because of compensation. In fiscal 2012, compensation comprised more than 92% of the Halifax Regional Police total operating budget. It's no longer possible to reduce budgets using innovative strategies, quite simply because there is so little room left for reductions to impact upon, that being the remaining 8% that we have.

I'd like to share some interesting numbers with you. Sworn and civilian employees' salaries in Halifax Regional Police have increased 45.92% since the signing of our 12-year collective agreement in 2003, which ends in 2015. It's clear that we need to slow down salary increases to a more reasonable pace. In fiscal 2014, my staff sergeants, and this is without overtime, will be making more money than my first-level commissioned officers. Overtime is another major issue, amounting to another 3% of the overall operating costs in the budget.

Court time, when we have individuals who go to court and are not required because, for various reasons, the crown has decided that they cannot proceed, is another major concern that we have. The increased costs can only be managed fiscally to a certain point, and often that management has proven to be a band-aid solution. One of the major things we've been seeing, I guess in the last two years, and we've seen it as a result of what has been happening in Great Britain, is that fundamental changes to the way policing is delivered in a municipality must be considered in order to improve policing from an economic perspective in future years.

The union and generational divides are an issue related to financial pressures such that our unions and especially our employers are not necessarily abreast of the realities of the economics of policing. We define this, as mentioned before, as a union and generational divide or expectation gaps. It's almost as if we've become victims of our own success. As an example, our wage model has generously offered our employees roughly 15 wage increases in the last 15 years. One of these annual wage increases alone equalled 5.39%. Last year, it was 3.7%, and of course this is all cumulative. As a result, employees hired in the last 10 years or so have never been confronted with tough economic situations that others before them have experienced, such as wage rollbacks or wage freezes. We're faced with a workforce that doesn't understand the current budgetary realities, and the economic prosperity they've been afforded has fostered a culture of entitlement, which is resulting in economic instability and unsustainability. Quite simply, all municipal services are vying for budget dollars, and there are simply not enough to go around.

We need to be thinking strategically about how to cut costs, which unions and employees fail to fully understand. This is further compounded by the fact that they believe it's a management issue and not a union or an employee issue. We have divergent views and are incredibly far apart when we meet at the table for collective bargaining. Employees need to understand the realities of the economics in policing, particularly leading up to and during negotiations. That of course is a major responsibility of ours as police leaders.

The fourth and final point is the redefinition of core responsibilities and management of public expectations. One of the things that we've seen is that in the past, we used to be the responders of last resort. Today, for various reasons, we are the responders of first resort. We're the only 24/7 social agency around. When I lecture, whether it's before M.B.A. students, police officers, or committee members, I've asked them to define policing. It's not serving and protecting, even though that's an important part of it. We're more problem solvers. I believe that the deputy chief from Toronto had spoken about the importance of problem-solving models earlier on. We solve those problems that people themselves cannot or will not solve. As such, we are the consummate problem solvers and consummate servants of the public. This leads me to believe that from a systems-wide perspective, we should no longer be talking about the economics of policing but rather the economics of public safety.

Within the context of the sustainability of our present public safety model, we need to redefine the core responsibilities of police so that we're no longer the responders of first choice on a 24/7 basis. Mental health fits squarely into this discussion. We have become social workers and mental health providers all in one. We believe this is partly a result of, as Chief Constable Chu had mentioned, deinstitutionalization due to the increased costs of hospitalizing those with mental health issues.

We've seen significant increases in mental health-related calls for service, just as every other city across the country has. To give you an idea, we received 638 mental health-related calls for service in 2007. Just to give you an idea further, the overall population in Halifax that is served by the HRP is about 300,000 people. We received, as mentioned, 638 calls in 2007, and in 2012 we received 1,193. Of those calls, 223 people were taken into custody under the Nova Scotia Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act and taken to hospital by police.

To deal with the marked increase in this cohort of individuals, Halifax Regional Police has developed a highly trained mental health mobile crisis team compromised of police officers and mental health clinicians. Every month for the past few years, more than 1,000 calls related to mental health issues have been made by the public.

Of those calls, more than 80% are made directly to our crisis helpline. That was in an effort to bypass police dispatch. The remainder are dispatched to the mental health mobile crisis team. They also respond to wellness checks and section 14 calls. Those are instances where an officer has the right to take a person to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. This gives uniformed officers the ability to attend other calls for service.

We are attempting, and we've had some fairly good success, to invest in the front end with our mental health mobile crisis team as a preventive measure and as a way of averting what could become more serious calls had we not responded. Chief Chu had mentioned self-medication and the challenges that we have out there.

I was reading a report recently that stated that in 2012 there were 357 deaths attributed to drug misuse and overdose. When I talk about drugs, I'm talking about medicinal legal drugs. This is an issue that we're dealing with more and more in Nova Scotia.

Over and above the issue of mental health—and I'm cognizant of time here—we've also accepted a lot of non-core policing functions over the years. They have been downloaded for one reason or another from other agencies, such as animal or bylaw control. We need to agree on what is important for us to do and to eliminate the non-core functions, keeping in mind that there may be some contractual issues to contend with in the interim.

Ultimately, I guess this raises a fundamental question of who responds if we do not respond to a particular call for service, especially when it comes to mental health. It begs the questions of what alternative responses there are that cost less than policing today. This conjures up concepts of two-tiered policing, public-private policing partnerships, civilianization, subcontracts, outsourcing, along with associated protocols that would allow us to achieve such options.

The biggest challenge is to look at what police officers contribute to the community. First off, police officers have three particular attributes. One, they have certain authorities that you, as legislators, have provided. Two, they have specialized training, and three, they have access to specialized tools. If just one of those attributes is not required in any intervention, then considering the costs, we should and we must look at someone else fulfilling the role other than a police officer.

Those are my comments to this point. Of course, I'm open to answering questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll move quickly into the first round.

We're going to have to cut this a little short because we have some committee business. We're going to go to six-minute rounds.

Mr. Leef, please.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you very much, gentlemen.

There has been a lot of discussion in past testimony, and a fair bit in this one, about the upstream issues. I think we'll definitely hear some questions on that. We had lots of great input during the last round of witnesses around the upstream issues of policing.

I want to talk about some of the downstream solutions we could have, to see if you have any particular recommendations.

Chief Blais, you did talk a bit about the complexity of policing around the judicial requirements and technology, the sorts of things that are placing burdens on budgets.

Is there a way that each of you have had an opportunity to measure the administrative costs of policing in respect to value for service, for lack of a better term? When I say that, I think the community would measure that in hours per shift that officers are out in the field. How much time are they actually spending in the community doing that crime prevention work, which is a primary function of their duty, versus the administrative burden that the municipality or the police organization or legislators put on them?

As a former police officer, I spent a lot of time making sure that I was compiling statistics for Stats Canada, doing data entry. We always felt, of course, that we could have spent more time in the field.

From your perspectives, are there recommendations you could make to improve hours per shift in the field? Are you able to measure that at this point, and what's your perspective on that ratio?

We'll start with Chief Blais, then Chief Chu, and then Chief Hanson.

[Chief Jean-Michel Blais]

Thank you very much.

Actually I would have preferred if Chief Chu spoke first because I know he has been looking at some of those things.

Nonetheless, we've been caught up with the whole notion of technology and RMS, the records management system. We use a system called Versadex, which allows us to capture information directly from terminals within police cars. The expectation would be to have the office on the road, as opposed to having our police officers going back to the office.

Mr. Leef, you spoke in regard to—without perhaps mentioning it—performance measures and being able to determine how much time is spent on the administrative functions as opposed to the actual policing functions. I can only speak, of course, for HRP.

We have not gone that deep into the development to determine exactly how much time is spent on particular functions, and part of the reason for that is the nature of policing. As you mentioned, there are so many other things to be done that we don't get a chance to properly measure this.

We find that very often our police officers are becoming more and more frustrated by the sheer mass of information that is being thrown at them. We all looked at e-mail traffic as being a panacea back in the late nineties, when it became more and more mainstream. What we're seeing now is that our police officers are asking that less e-mail messages be sent out.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything specific, but I'll leave it up to the other chiefs to add their input.

[Chief Jim Chu]

In Vancouver we've looked at all of our patrol operations in quite extensive detail, because our most expensive resource is the officers who are out there on the streets. We've looked at a number of key performance indicators, but we've boiled them down to a couple of pretty important ones. One is response time to priority-one calls. At one point in time it was 13 minutes to a call in progress, a crime in progress, and we've managed to get that down to about nine minutes or eight minutes.

We also aim for a 50% proactive policing time ratio, so when officers are going call to call, whether it's a routine burglary report or whether it's processing an impaired driver or arresting somebody for a violent crime, they're tied up on a call. We're trying to get them free from that tied up status to about half of their time in which they're engaged in proactive policing, which is preventative patrols, street checks of gang members, or walking into high-crime areas.

More specifically, it's not 50% of the time in which they do whatever they want. Because we're reviewing crime hot spots in our latest data on a temporal and a geographical basis, we will instruct our officers what areas they need to focus on during that proactive policing time we're aiming for.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Chief.

Chief Hanson, please.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

There are a few things here and I thank you. The legislation that you mentioned would be hugely beneficial to freeing up the time of officers, particularly lawful access. We already talked about that, but also legislation around random breath testing, or RBT. If that could be brought on I will tell you that the amount of time spent on impaired driving would be cut by probably 70% with RBT, and it would drop court time. Court time is a huge cost of policing.

Secondly, on the technology side, we have what we call our intelligence-led software. It's Palantir, a company out of the U.S. that built this new software project for Homeland Security. It does an amazing job of not only accessing instantaneously your vast pools of data but analyzing the data. It's going to save not only resources on analysts' time, but it will also allow our officers to do a better job on investigations.

I want to talk a bit about body cams. We have in-car cameras, but body cams on the pilot project. We have saved time, not only with professional standards investigations because the videos are right there but also in pre-charge, pre-court appearance resolution, because when you can show the defence lawyer what this idiot was actually doing instead of what he said he was doing, it frequently results in, “I'm not going to court”.

Of course, there are the crime management strategies that have been implemented district-wide in Calgary. These are about analyzing the data and focusing your resources for maximum effect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you. Your time is up.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

And yes, it's 30% proactive time for our officers that we shoot for. That measurement is 30% in Calgary.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Rafferty, please, for six minutes.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much. Thank you to all three of you for being here. Thank you, Chief Hanson, for staying.

I have a number of questions, but let me start off with one that I'd like each of you to answer, and it probably won't take very long. I was wondering how much your police services have saved with the elimination of the long-gun registry.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

Would you like me to start?

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Chief Hanson, sure.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

As far as a policing issue we have seen no financial benefit one way or the other to the police side of that. The reality is that it was the unregistered guns that were committing the vast majority of crimes in Calgary, the vast majority of crimes.

As far as our guns and gangs, our anti-gang strategy, we're still devoting big resources into the suppression of those things. The actual time saved by the elimination is an administration function. Probably the cost savings were elsewhere other than in policing in Calgary.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Chief Blais, please.