Public Safety Committee on June 6th, 2013

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Okay, it's maybe the translation. I'll give it a shot in English. I normally don't do this, but I will give it a shot.

What I was saying was that you were mentioning that the funding wasn't adequate because it wasn't stable. It's hard for organizations to be able to plan. Even if the general budgets given for that type of service do get bigger, if there are some initiatives like the recruitment fund for the police and those are eliminated, you still need to fill the needs of those programs, and that might be one of the issues that you are pointing out. That's what I wanted to clear up. Is that a bit clearer?

[Chief Doug Palson]

Yes. The recruitment fund, the five-year funding that you were referring to—

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

That was one example.

[Chief Doug Palson]

—that ended on March 31, that very much affected my colleagues in Ontario. For us and my colleagues out west, that funding did go to the province. We didn't use it for actually hiring police officers and putting it right on the ground. We never saw that from the province. What they did with it I don't know. That's where it differs for Ontario.

The first nations police services in Ontario definitely used that to put uniformed police officers on the ground. That's what really hurt them when the funding finally ended. I'm not sure where that sits with the Province of Ontario right now, or what they're doing with that.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Fine.

In the course of your presentation, you said that caution would have to be exercised with regard to the kinds of responsibilities assigned to auxiliaries, especially those working in first nations communities.

Can you tell us a little more about that?

[Chief Doug Palson]

What I was referring to was the discussion around auxiliaries, volunteers, and what authorities they would actually have. Essentially, I know that in our province, they wouldn't have any authorities. They are even moving away from the band constable program; that's my understanding. They didn't have, really, any authorities—peace officer authorities or anything like that.

When you have folks working in those capacities, you have to be careful that they don't overstep what they are actually authorized to do. It's quite limited in what they can actually do. Essentially what the auxiliary programs do, often what I saw in Manitoba, is actually just simply putting another body in a car with the actual police officer. That body had to wear a uniform but none of the tools associated with the trade, really. In some of the larger detachment areas, maybe they did a certain number of paperwork-related duties in the detachment. But it was relatively limited in what they did. They would attend community events and things like that. But for the actual core policing functions, not a lot of that was to be done by auxiliaries.

It is a little bit different in some of the other provinces. For instance, in Saskatchewan, I understand, with their peacekeeper program in the File Hills area that they are experimenting with, they are trained at a different level. They are also given some authority through the provincial government under their police act. So it's a different model there, and we'll see where that goes.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Can my colleague ask a question?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

You would only have 10 seconds to ask your question. You'll get another chance.

I'll turn to Mr. Gill for five minutes.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also want to thank Chief Palson for being here today on this important topic.

One of the things I heard you mention in your opening remarks was about a conference in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

[Chief Doug Palson]

That was our First Nations Chiefs of Police Association. Every year we have a small AGM and conference. This year we had it here in Ottawa. We try to move it around the country a little. We discuss issues that are topical to first nations policing.

We had presentations this year, obviously, from the aboriginal policing directorate, the federal government was in to update us, and Senator White was in to discuss his experiences with restorative justice in first nation communities. Those are examples of some of the presentations we had. We also do association business, in the meeting portion of the AGM.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Were there any positive takeaways from the conference or the meeting that you were able to gain from having this annual meeting?

[Chief Doug Palson]

There are always lots of positives of getting together with colleagues. There is always a tendency to drift over into a focus on the negatives and the challenges and concerns, but we also share some of the things that we're trying to do in the various communities.

Much of the focus is on funding, as it always is. Many of our police services are going to be potentially running deficits, and we're trying to figure out ways to deal with some of those issues.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

The other topic I want to talk about is regarding a volunteer program. From what I understand, you currently don't have any. I guess there was one, maybe before your time, you said, and eventually it was eliminated and does not now exist. What is the main reason you would give for not getting the kind of participation that you would expect from any community to get out and help the community and become involved?

What we have heard in the past from other organizations and chiefs is that there is actually an overwhelming amount of interest in volunteering coming from the community, which they have a difficult time accommodating, and they then have to kind of pick and choose who gets in and who doesn't.

Why is this the case? Why is there hesitation in the first nation community, or why is this not being pursued?

[Chief Doug Palson]

We do pursue it. We look for opportunities. My colleagues from across the country and I are always looking for opportunities to get people involved and to do things differently and be as efficient as possible.

It's a good question. It is very challenging, in the first nation community environment, to generate the concept of volunteerism and to sustain it.

The other part of it is that sometimes we're working with limited capacity ourselves, and you have to have a certain amount of capacity to manage volunteers. We see that with our summer student program. They're not volunteers and they're only there for a short time as summer students, but you have to make sure that you have your mechanism in place to have somebody monitoring and working with them.

In many cases we only have one person working in a particular detachment, and they're busy doing other things. What a volunteer might be able to do in that particular community is limited.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

You mentioned that one of the advantages of having first nations policemen is that an officer could potentially be from the community and that this could obviously be helpful with such issues as language barriers. Honestly, I'm having a very difficult time understanding why the program doesn't exist and why there isn't an interest from the community.

Can you tell us what efforts are being made by you and by the organization to reach out and create awareness or employ different methods to encourage the community to volunteer? Obviously, we hear, there is a lot of day-to-day stuff that the volunteers are able to come in to help different police forces with, which ultimately helps over the long term—budget, the funding issues that some of these—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Mr. Gill, unfortunately, you've left no time for a reply to your question.

We will now return to the official opposition.

Mr. Rousseau, you have the floor.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will share my time with Mr. Rafferty.

I would like to know if you have any special units to fight organized crime and street gangs. Is this a big problem for you or in some communities? Do you have enough material resources, such as information technology, to fight this type of crime?

[Chief Doug Palson]

No. For an agency our size and the type of service we deliver, we don't have special units like that for organized crime, or anything like that. We're a relatively small agency. Our focus is on front-line, uniformed community policing.

Although we have been able to establish a dedicated criminal investigation member and a dedicated member for crime prevention, at our size everybody else is what you see, front line, uniform. In some of the other agencies, in Ontario, for example, the larger you get, the more your capacity is. Right? I believe, for instance, NAPS, at whatever they are, around 130 members, they're a big agency. They have the challenge of distances, but I think they are developing some specialty units. I know NAPS and Treaty 3 were doing some integrated stuff with the OPP specialty units.

That's something we could explore with the RCMP. We're looking at that now.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Okay, I'll pass it to John.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Mr. Rafferty, for the remaining three minutes.

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

I'd like to ask you for your thoughts about the other side of policing, which is justice. Things are very different in first nation communities in terms of justice and what justice means to first nations.

I'll just do a little preamble. The rest of the world has a number of.... I know Africa best, but they have traditional chiefs, some elected, some hereditary, who once a week have very successful courts in their communities to deal with non-serious items.

I know this has been tried with various success a little bit on the west coast over the years. I'm wondering if there was a real commitment from the provinces and the federal government to deal with a lot of the minor issues, and I'm thinking of things like vandalism in the community, for example, to be dealt with by a chief and council, in other words, to move that model forward in a very serious way right across the country.

First of all, what do you think about that? Second of all, would it have the added advantage, I suppose, of justice being meted out within the first nations, which I think could always be a good thing? Also, in terms of the economics of policing...freeing up your officers to not be dealing with a number of things that maybe could be dealt with at the community level?

I wanted to get your thoughts on that.

[Chief Doug Palson]

First of all, where do I get on this wagon? That's exactly where we need to go. It ties into restorative justice and crime prevention, and preventing crime and preventing stuff in the front end and dealing with it at the grassroots level, as opposed to pushing it up into the system and eventually these individuals ending up in the correctional system, in the jails, and so on.

I'm all for that. We're exploring trying to regenerate some of that stuff in our communities. In the past there had been varying degrees of success with some local justice committees with elders involved, and that sort of thing. I know in our service we're looking forward to trying to regenerate that, or rekindle that.

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

Do you think it would be easier if there was a commitment from the provincial and the federal funders to really push that with the ministries of justice, and so on, to set up a proper set of guidelines for chiefs and council to follow?

I'm thinking that if there were a real commitment to make that work from all parties, that it might very well be successful. Could we have, perhaps, your further thoughts on that?

[Chief Doug Palson]

Absolutely, and that's what is going to make it work. It will have to be all levels of government getting together and driving it. That's what is making the hub program work in Saskatchewan.

You have to be careful, as you move forward with that, that you create it more as a framework because each community is a big piece in this and each community is a little bit unique. They have to have the ability to have the model of their justice system, to have enough flex in it so that it suits that particular community. That's the ideal situation.