Sure. In some ways the costs are greater and in some ways they're less. I look at my time with the RCMP. Many of the challenges were policing in isolated communities and our folks needing the same equipment, the same training, etc.
I know to keep a member in Iqaluit fully trained, often they have to fly out for their training. There are costs attached to that. The fact that you have to have so many police officers...there are safety issues for our police officers that require us to staff at higher levels in those smaller communities, although the workload may not be there to justify that. Those are great challenges.
The nice thing about the national police service is that we have the resources you can deploy into a particular situation; whether it's an emergency response team, specialized equipment, a helicopter, a plane, or whatever else, you have that accessibility. Again, it's often far away and at an increased cost.
In municipal policing we're very lucky, to the extent that we have immediate accessibility to backup and related equipment.
There are advantages to centralization and decentralization. We have to do a better job of finding what that balance is. We are integrating better in police services, much better than we did ten years ago, five years ago. I still think there's a lot of opportunity to integrate more, to leverage it among ourselves.
I know here in Edmonton we're working a lot more closely with the RCMP because our jurisdiction is surrounded by theirs. We're looking at the potential of sharing a helicopter, a tactical team, an emergency response team. We can collaborate on that, and we can save the taxpayers money by investing municipal, provincial, and federal resources into one pot for the benefit of all citizens.