Thank you.
I have a prepared statement, so I'll start with that, and then I look forward to any questions.
Good morning, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee.
I see a number of new faces around the table today, so first l'd like to take this opportunity to welcome the new members of the committee, including you, Mr. Chair, and congratulate you on your election. As well I'd like to welcome Ms. James and congratulate her on her recent appointment as parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Safety.
For the benefit of the new members, the Canadian Police Association is the federal voice for over 54,000 front-line civilian and sworn personnel from across Canada. Our members serve in the country's largest cities and smallest villages as members of federal, provincial, and municipal law enforcement agencies as well as first nations police services.
To also give you a bit of background about me, I have had the privilege of serving as president of our association for the past two years, and I also serve as the president of the British Columbia Police Association and the Vancouver Police Union, where I began my career as a police officer in 1990.
My opening statement this morning will be quite brief, since this is my second opportunity to address your committee on this important topic and I want to leave as much opportunity as possible for questions. But I want to provide some updates on a few of the issues I had raised during my first presentation back at the beginning of this year.
First, l'd like to offer my thanks to the Department of Public Safety, and particularly Mark Potter—I understand he appeared before this committee quite recently—and his team for the work they've been doing on the “Shared Forward Agenda”. One of the CPA's key recommendations has always been to increase the amount of valuable research being done within the police sector and to help facilitate the spread of that information. With the recent launch of the public safety index of policing initiatives, we can start to see the seeds of this information sharing being planted, and that will, no doubt, have a direct impact on the costs of policing as we will, hopefully, see more best practices coming into effect more consistently across the country.
The second area our association has focused on has been around the need to find efficiencies within the policing and justice systems. While we seem to have achieved broad consensus over the past year that those efficiencies exist, l'II admit we haven't seen as much movement to address this problem as our members would like to see.
There are two major factors that would help tremendously to alleviate much of the duplication and redundancy that is a large driver of police costs, particularly the cost of forced overtime, which puts a strain on law enforcement budgets.
The first relates to oversight and accountability. Let me be clear, effective oversight is a necessary component of the trust that Canadians put into their police services, and the CPA would never suggest skirting those levels of accountability. However, in most provinces now each police service is subject to multiple layers of regulation, both internal and external. Eliminating some of the duplication, while still maintaining the necessary oversight, would improve the job quality of our police personnel while introducing important cost savings into the sector.
The second area of efficiency relates to the need to streamline the processes that currently keep our officers tied up doing administrative work behind their desks rather than having them out on the street, where the community expects them to be. As you have no doubt heard by now, changes forced on our profession by well-meaning judicial decisions have led to increased workloads and processing times for some of the most basic charges our officers lay.
As I said, I wanted my opening statement here this morning to be brief to give us as much time for discussion as possible, but I do want to close by saying that while there are some very serious concerns regarding the economics of policing, the situation is not nearly as ominous as some vested stakeholders would have you believe.
While I understand this committee has heard from law enforcement agencies in other countries and in other jurisdictions regarding some of their solutions and suggestions to help make public safety funding more sustainable, I also have spoken with my counterparts in countries such as the U.K. and Australia where deep budgets cuts have taken effect. The message they give to me and that I pass along to you is that Canada shouldn't be learning from their mistakes, but should be leading with our own homegrown solutions.
l've been encouraged by the fact that all levels of government, along with our colleagues with the Chiefs of Police and the Canadian Association of Police Boards, have been engaged from the very beginning to work constructively to address our funding issues. I look forward to this committee's final report, which l'm certain will help to shape the discussion going forward.
Thank you again for the invitation this morning. I look forward to your questions.