[Technical difficulty—Editor] Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, CACP, is to lead numerous efforts to promote coordination and collaboration amongst Canada's law enforcement community to address threats to national security. As part of these efforts, the CACP has implemented structures to help manage incidents and share information in support of a mutual goal to protect the safety of Canadians.
The counter terrorism and national security committee, which is part of the CACP, has a mandate to harmonize the work of Canadian police agencies throughout the country in identifying, preventing, deterring, and responding to criminal activities related to terrorism and national security threats.
This committee has five priorities or objectives: one, to “promote collaboration and integration among law enforcement agencies and with appropriate public/private security and intelligence partners”; two, to “improve ability to operate in a cooperative and integrated manner” with a view to addressing emerging trends with respect to counterterrorism and national security; three, to “develop processes and facilitate strong communication at all levels”, so at the municipal, provincial, and territorial levels; four, to “recommend legislative reforms”; and five, to “promote education and training in matters of counter-terrorism and national security”.
There have been a number of initiatives that the committee has worked on over the past year. I'm going to focus on three for today's presentation.
The first initiative is the provincial and territorial counterterrorism guide. This guide is designed to support the efforts in developing counterterrorism strategies at the regional, provincial, and territorial level.
There are 11 key activities within the guide that are focused on four key strategies. The first is to prevent individuals from engaging in terrorism. The second is to detect the activities of individuals and organizations that may pose a terrorist threat. The third is to deny terrorists the means and opportunities to carry out their activities. The fourth is to respond proportionately, rapidly, and in an organized manner to terrorist activities and to mitigate their effects.
The second initiative is the provincial and territorial integrated response structures. The co-chairs of the counter terrorism and national security committee have met with provincial and territorial chiefs of police across the country in an effort to encourage and develop an integrated provincial and territorial approach for each province and territory to investigate and respond to terrorist activities.
The third initiative is the subcommittee of the counter terrorism and national security committee, the countering violent extremism sub-committee, developed in August 2015. The subcommittee is focusing on building training material that's consistent, that addresses previously identified research gaps, and that has a built-in evaluation tool to determine the efficacy of the programs that we are rolling out.
Those are the three key initiatives.