One of my priorities as the president of the Canadian Police Association is to shift the—and I hate using the trendy buzzwords—dialogue or the discussion or the paradigm—that's the word people like to use all the time—away from an “us and them” approach to a more collaborative discussion such as you're describing.
One of the reasons we took on this WPS, Winnipeg Police Service, operational review and funded the entire review—which was pretty expensive actually and unusual for a police association to take on—was to do just that: to sit down and say, “Let's see what we're doing today and how we can do what we're doing today generally with the same level of funding but better and more efficiently so we can get better outcomes.”
The intent is to use that operational review as a template that our member associations could look at when they're dealing with their own organizations to say, “This is how we should examine our organization and these are the steps we might want to consider in terms of moving forward”, because the operational review I'm referring to includes some really concrete recommendations around how to realize those efficiencies in your workforce.
We've also produced a booklet, which I'd be happy to provide to you. It talks about some of these issues and how we do some research. We make some recommendations, and we take a position as an organization around either community safety programs or body-worn video or whatever. There are a number of hot-button issues we've taken a position on and made some recommendations on, and we've given our member associations the tools they need to go forward within their own organizations to engage in those kinds of conversations.