Evidence of meeting #64 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was pre-clearance.
A video is available from Parliament.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you, Minister.
With your indulgence, I'd like to squeeze in a few minutes for Mr. Spengemann before we end the meeting.
5:25 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister Goodale, my thanks for being with us, and my thanks to the senior officials who are with you today.
The Government of Canada is a government that has committed to making strategic investments to take our country forward, and it certainly has a strong mandate from Canadians. We've talked about infrastructure in your earlier comments in your exchange with my colleague Pam Damoff. You mentioned green infrastructure, social infrastructure, and transit.
The same is true on the public safety side. We've made significant investments in disaster resilience and public safety. These are public goods that Canadians cherish and value highly, with a view to building an open, inclusive, and diverse society, as you mentioned.
I want to take you to table 6 of the Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness expenditures on countering crime. The expenditures for 2015-16 were at $149 million and for 2016-17 are just over $210 million each year into 2017-18. I wanted to ask you about a program that's of significant interest to the community in my riding, particularly faith leaders, and that's the proposed office of counter-radicalization and community outreach. I'm wondering if you could update the committee on your latest thinking, on what you've heard recently from community leaders and people who are interested in this program, and on where you see it going in the future.
5:30 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
It's extremely important, Mr. Spengemann.
I had the opportunity to meet, not long ago, with the cross-cultural round table, which is a group representing the vast diversity of Canadian society. The membership changes from time to time, but the principle of the committee has been in place since about 2002 or 2003, somewhere in that period of time. Around the table, there were representatives of various faiths and ethnic and cultural heritages. They all made the point, I think unanimously, that a far more serious effort needs to be made at counter-radicalization to violence, and that there are interesting lessons to be learned from other countries and from academics about what works and what doesn't work. They applauded the government's commitment to create a new national office.
There are various local initiatives across the country. The City of Montreal has a particularly good one. Calgary has one. Toronto has another way of doing it, Edmonton, and so forth, but they all tend to operate in isolated silos. It would be more useful to the country if we found a way to link all these networks together, so we proposed to establish a national office. We are, hopefully, now in the final stages of attracting the senior adviser who will be the face and voice of that office.
The objective is to get the very best techniques from Canada and around the world that can help us identify who is vulnerable to being enticed into a pattern of behaviour that ultimately leads to a descending spiral, and at the end of it, violence. It takes a lot of good, solid scientific research, and we intend to fund that. It's an initiative that will be done in close collaboration with several federal departments and agencies, and also our counterparts provincially and municipally.
The goal is to make Canada the very best in the world at recognizing it and then knowing how best to intervene at the right place, with the right people, at the right time, to head off a tragedy before it happens.
5:30 p.m.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Minister, a related program, somewhat smaller in scope at the moment, is the security infrastructure program. I've had leaders from both the Muslim and the Jewish communities come up to me and say, “How can we apply?”, and we've relayed that information.
What is the latest on the state of that program, and how much response are you getting in light of your recent announcement to extend it?
5:30 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
It's huge. I believe it's overextended at the moment. It's a program that has proved its merit. The previous government had funded it at a certain level. We've doubled that amount and changed the rules to make it more accessible and to cover more things.
This is for communities—it might be a school, a church, or a community centre of some kind—that feel themselves vulnerable to hate crimes and other kinds of activities that are threatening and that create public safety issues. They can apply to the program for reasonably modest financial assistance to help them make their facilities more resilient. It could be fences, better doors and locks, or closed-circuit cameras. It could simply be the film that you put across a window that protects the window from breaking easily and at the same time obscures what you see through the window.
The uptake has been very good. What we are now proposing is that twice a year, in the middle of the year and at the end of the year, we issue calls for proposals and people are entitled to apply to the program. The Government of Canada will assess the application in terms of whether they are truly in a vulnerable position, and whether what they are proposing to do is likely to make them feel more secure. There are a great many people who maybe didn't know about the program before, or it just wasn't flexible enough, in its previous iteration, to do what they wanted it to do. Judging by the response, this is a program that—for a relatively modest amount of money, when you consider the totality of the federal budget—is hitting the target in terms of what people need.
5:35 p.m.
Liberal
5:35 p.m.
Liberal
5:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
We always want more.
What I would normally do is thank you, but instead I will extend the thanks of our committee and its respect and best wishes to both the commissioner and the director.
Thank you for your public service. Thank you for your willingness to come to our committee always when we've requested. On behalf of the committee, we wish you the very best in whatever chapter unfolds next for both of you. Thank you for your work.
The meeting is adjourned.