What's driving the costs of policing, more broadly, is the demand for police services, and I would attribute that increased demand to a couple of things.
First of all, there has been a significant impact on police forces across the country because of government policy changes, some of which occur at the provincial level and others at the federal level. Frankly, whenever there's a decision to reduce service in one area, whether health, education, or social services, ultimately that ends up having an impact on policing because we've now become one of the few agencies available 24/7, 365 days a year.
In fact, what has happened even since I started in policing is that we're no longer the agency of last resort; we're the agency of first resort. People can phone us and they know somebody is going to show up and do something, whereas when they make the call to other agencies, they might get a recording or get deferred to someone else. That's one issue.
Secondly, in terms of the salaries themselves, the fact is that policing has become much more complex. I talked earlier about accountability. There's more accountability now than ever. We have higher recruiting standards, a greater obligation on training. We see more and more provincially-mandated training—training for crisis intervention and de-escalation; more training in how to deal with people suffering from mental health issues, people who are dual-diagnosed; and on how to avoid some of the tragedies that have occurred in this country over many years, where we have had inquest after inquest—all of which has resulted in greater expectations of police officers, higher standards.
Most of our police officers now have some kind of university-level education. Most have degrees. We have a lot more diversity in policing, more language skills. Policing in the 21st century is far different, I would argue, than it has been historically, and that in turn drives costs. If you want to attract the kind of people the public have said they want to see involved in policing—and Chief Phillips alluded to that in his remarks—then there will be a cost that goes along with it.