Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Potter, for your testimony.
To you through the chair, one of the first things, of course, when we deal with the economics of policing—I've talked to police officers out in the field, as I did over the break—is that I assure police officers that the purpose of this study is not to look for ways to lay off police officers. It's not necessarily to do that and not necessarily to change the parameters, but to look specifically at how we can perform the function of policing across this country. The federal government is just entering this study to look at a pan-Canadian experience in an attempt to identify models that work.
My specific question will be as follows. It is my observation that one of the reasons—and you mentioned it in the body of your presentation—is issues surrounding mental illness and how we treat mental illness, along with issues surrounding young offenders and how we handle young offenders. Would you not agree with me that one of the reasons...? In Ontario specifically, and I suspect in other provinces, there's a regulatory regime that requires police forces to have specially trained investigators for things like sexual assaults, to have special domestic assault squads. Would you not agree with me that one of the causes of the increased costs of policing has to do with the increased demands that we as the public and we as legislators put on police forces in saying that they must have specific individuals to do specific jobs? Also, we as legislators give them additional work to do every now and then, and we tend to not increase the size of their human resource complement.
Would you agree with some of those statements? Do you have some specifics you can relate in order to better assist the folks at home who may be interested in this subject and are looking at the work of this committee?