Thank you for that question. You've touched on a number of important elements, and I'll just cover a few of them, if I may.
With regard to the issue of police officers' salaries, I'm well aware that's extremely sensitive. I think it's definitely not the role of the federal government to tell provincial governments and municipal authorities what they should be paying their police officers. I think police officers do tremendously challenging work and need to have very comprehensive training to deal with a wide range of possible scenarios whenever they go out to a call. It's that unique capability, which police in Canada fulfill tremendously well in almost all instances, that makes them, I think.... In order to attract and retain those types of individuals with the wide range of skills they need to have, you need to pay them well. I think if you want to have good-quality police officers, you need to pay them a good, reasonable salary.
I don't think the debate is about layoffs or necessarily about reducing officers' salaries; it's far from it. I think it's about recognizing that 80% of a police budget is typically for labour costs, so how can you most efficiently use that spending envelope? How can you deploy those officers most efficiently to achieve the objectives you're trying to achieve in terms of public safety outcomes?
I don't think the debate is about whether officers' salaries should necessarily be higher or lower. However, there is a reality in certain jurisdictions that police officers' salaries have been rising well above inflation due to the ratcheting up of those salaries through collective bargaining and arbitration processes. We are seeing a little bit more of a flatlining of those salaries happening across the country as a result of the recession and as a result of the fiscal situation in many parts of the country. I think that issue of salaries rising relative to the average Canadian salary is being brought under control just as a result of the economic and fiscal situation.
Regarding the broader point you raised about the demands on police, when we look at the number of calls for service, which is often a better measure of how active police are in our communities, it's been rising steadily over the years, and when you look at the nature of those calls, as was mentioned, the majority of them are non-criminal. We as a society are asking police to take on more tasks and more responsibilities, particularly with respect to individuals with mental health and addiction issues. Increasingly, they are dealing with quality-of-life issues, ensuring that the communities are safe, that residents feel safe in their communities, and that there is a visible police presence in certain types of communities that are experiencing challenges with disorder or with mischief.
As a number of you know from your direct experience in policing and from talking to police officers, they are often, as Chief Chu said, the call of first resort. They're available 24/7/365, and they're really the only agency out there that is. So often whenever there's a problem in a community, it's the police who are called.
They are tremendously busy responding to a whole range of calls. How efficiently can they do that? In most cases police have made a lot of gains in deploying those resources. Often the first challenge when you look at how to improve the efficiency is demand management. How are you responding to the demands of your community? How are you scheduling your officers? How are you deploying them—in crews of one or two—and so on? These are key questions they look at when they delve into how efficiently they're responding to these growing demands.
Perhaps I'll pause there and allow for further questions.