No problem.
I'm proposing that the assortment of changes forwarded under the banner of defunding the police are the most appropriate toward meaningfully addressing the issue of systemic racism in Canadian policing. Ending systemic racism requires that we undertake changes to minimize and reduce people's encounters with the police in a variety of ways. Only reducing policing can reduce the harm in policing.
I will now briefly turn toward articulating what this means. Of course, much of what is being articulated at this time is related to public budget allocation, looking at the grossly disproportionate amount of public money and taxpayer money that is spent on policing each year compared to other vital issues, such as shelters, long-term care, public education and social housing.
More broadly, there is also within this call a move to decrease, minimize and move away from a reliance on police in a way that is vastly more substantive. Reducing the budget, reducing the scope and reducing the power of policing are matters in which we are able to address the issue of systemic injustice more broadly. Reducing the scope, for example, is about minimizing areas where policing has been found to be most harmful.
For example, we can see the removal of police officers in schools in the Toronto District School Board, now seen as well in Hamilton, and there is important work being advanced in this regard in Winnipeg and Vancouver.
Reducing the scope has also been a push to ending police responses to mental health calls, given the tragic deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Deandre Campbell-Kelly, and other Black and indigenous and other people killed by police in the context of a mental health crisis.
Ending police accompaniments to drug overdose calls has long been advocated by harm reduction practitioners as a way to reduce overdose deaths, and ending policing collaboration with the Canada Border Services Agency. These are all ways to reduce the scope of policing and the reach that it has in its harm over people's day-to-day lives.
Another element of this is reducing—