Thank you for the question. It's a really good one. I don't think you would speak to any police association leader out there today who would talk about having adequate resources, whether it would be Vancouver, Calgary or the OPP. Recently, the OPP published a report that said they were a thousand officers short. So it's not unique to the RCMP. I have to make that very, very clear here.
Part of it has to do with improving the lustre of a career in policing and public safety, whether it's from the RCMP or any municipal police jurisdiction. When I speak about adding resources, a lot of it has to do with looking at the current state of affairs in the RCMP. If you look at our budget submissions—the third one is upcoming—COVID has had an impact on our recruitment and our graduation of recruits. We graduated only 16 troops in the fiscal year of 2020-21. We were supposed to graduate 40. A lot of it is because of shutting down for COVID and then a staged reopening of the depot in Regina. That has led to almost a 1,200-member deficit across Canada. When you talk about 20,000 police officers in our bargaining unit, we're talking about 5% right there. We're not talking about hard vacancies or soft vacancies for family-related leave or daily injuries.
Then add in the buyback program: Who's going to go and pick up those guns after they've been sold back to the government? It's going to be your police of jurisdiction. Do we have the resources to increase that mandate and do that? I don't think we do. So it's a challenge.