Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and through you to the witness, thank you for appearing today.
As I'm listening to you, I go through some 30 years of policing and come up with a couple of suggestions.
The citizens of this country are the consumers of public safety, and to me you have to look for a model out there that serves their customers best and find out how they do it. A lot of it comes down to some of the examples you used.
I use the example of Walmart. Go to a Walmart store now and you can get your prescription filled, or you can get your photographs done. You buy your groceries, buy your clothes, or buy your electronics. It's one stop.
I think if we look at it, you're basically selling a one stop when it comes down to records management. When it comes down to records management everybody wants somebody else to pay for it, and I'm talking about different levels of government. How I would sell it is that I'm prepared—at least I think I'm prepared—to look at that as a central location for records. But the people who currently pay for that, in other words, municipalities pay for their large, city police forces to have this records management....
You should sit down with the people who want you to manage their records system, and they're going to pay for a share of that. So it shouldn't be the big federal government paying for everything. It should be currently you incur certain costs so you will incur the percentage of costs on the amount of data you put into this database, which is a records management system. I say this because we have different people who want to push in different directions, and it should be that the users of that system pay.
When you talk about how policemen shouldn't do everything, the customer will decide what they want the police to do. I'll give you an example.
In the OPP, we decided to reduce the number of officer calls. Mrs. Jones or Mr. Jones has their car stolen, and after the telephone triage of the incident, the OPP say, why do we send an officer to go to that door 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 kilometres away, just to verify there's no car in the driveway? Mr. Jones has never called the police in his life for anything. He pays his municipal, provincial, and federal taxes, and the one time he needs a police officer to come and at least share in his disappointment, we're not sending somebody. So there's an expectation that the provider of the service has to accommodate.
I wonder if you would make some comments on what I have just said.