Thank you.
I'm not sure if it's Mrs. or Ms. Jolibois, but we'll just leave it at that: colleague.
Your points are very well taken here. Having spent 35 years in aboriginal policing, from day one until the end, I feel what you're saying. It takes a special police officer to have good liaison with the community that he's policing, especially an aboriginal community. It takes a person who needs to want to work and interact with that community. As well, it takes outside resources, other than police officers, to make things work.
Someone just talked about resources, and I'm going to throw some figures at you.
If you look at the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, their policing numbers are 333 per 100,000; 411 per 100,000; and 353 per 100,000 population. Therefore, there are a lot of police officers per the resources. Then you go to the rest of Canada, including Saskatchewan, and we're all sitting at between about 175 to 200 police officers per 100,000 population. This is the situation that you are talking about, getting people out to the rural areas, the remote rural areas, and the remote areas that require going through to Regina to get a police officer.
It's totally relevant when you look at those numbers, extremely high numbers, 411 to 100,000 in the Northwest Territories, paid for by federal funding. If you look at those numbers that are paid by federal funding, they're very high. Then you look at where they're paid for by the provincial governments, and they're all, in some cases, half of what the federal government is supplying.
If you look at the crime stats over the last year, Northwest Territory, Yukon and Nunavut went up 1% and 2%, whereas if you look at most of the provinces, they went up anywhere from, on average, 5% to 6% with the lower number of police officers per 100,000 population, so it's a very clear picture.