First of all, thank you for your kind words and for giving me the opportunity to add to what I was saying.
In fact, we are adding solutions that require larger budgets, when they are not effective. To answer the question I was asked, reinvestment in community workers, in the fight against drug addiction and in urban planning will, in my opinion, make it possible to do prevention.
Now, there’s a lot of talk now about training on unconscious bias, among other things. This training is, to some extent, relevant, but, given the repressive impact of the police, I think we need to go a little further, as Ms. Michel was saying. We cannot rely solely on training. So I will not get involved as a police training expert. However, in the United Kingdom, for example, police officers who conduct street checks do not carry weapons. Could we explore this possibility in Canada and reserve weapons for emergency response units, which, where warranted, will carry a weapon? That would have prevented the deaths of people like Nicholas Gibbs, Pierre Coriolan or Alain Magloire, who were killed at close range with a rifle or other weapons, such as clubs.
Disarming the police in this context seems important to me. I have already had a conversation with a police officer about this. He told me that we need to understand the stress a police officer feels when he is holding a gun and feels threatened. Well, if he’s too stressed, let’s take his gun away from him. I think we have to consider that elsewhere in the world, people have found other ways of interacting, and that’s where I think we need to go beyond training. How could the funding allocated to the police be allocated to other types of interventions? That’s where I think we really have something important to do.