Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everybody. My name is Fred Priestley-Wright. I'm 83 years old. I live in rural west central Alberta. I am a professional. I am an aeronautical engineer by profession. I worked as an aerodynamicist on the Avro Arrow and then under contract t

Public Safety committee  Fine and dandy. My problem right now is the mental trauma. I'm having a terrible time with PTSD. Since that time, I've only been able to have four sessions with the specialist. I'm 83 years old and at a loss to rationalize the vindictiveness of this assault. I'm embarrassed to a

Public Safety committee  Yes, sir, very definitely. We had presentations from the local detachment of the RCMP almost monthly, giving out statistics, etc. I'd like to make a comment here. The RCMP response time is considered by some to be not adequate, but what happened to me happened in a matter of se

Public Safety committee  I'll call you Jim. The atmosphere was not what I thought it would be. The people were upset. They weren't upset necessarily at the RCMP or the system or anything else; it was more frustration, I think. For example, people were saying the criminal can come into your home and he h

Public Safety committee  I don't feel that handguns are of concern in rural Canada. They definitely are in the cities. In the rural areas, people just don't have that many handguns. There aren't that many out there. We have guns for protection. As you know, Jim, where I live and whatnot, when I go from

Public Safety committee  I have spent many hours sitting on hard benches in the Edson courtroom waiting to hear a plea from both individuals, waiting and having the situation set down to another court date, etc. I checked my records, and I believe I sat in the court nine different times waiting for somet

Public Safety committee  The RCMP would probably be the best to give you that information. It appears to the majority of us that the people who are doing the crime are not from the local area. In my case, for example, I believe one was from Edmonton, which is a two-hour drive from my place. The other w

Public Safety committee  I think the difference there is that, for us, we have more of a road network than you probably do in the area that you're talking about. It's easier for people to come from outside of the area and into our areas, the rural areas.

Public Safety committee  I feel that it's organized, maybe not tightly organized but loosely organized. They all have their connections. Whatever they steal they have a home for, so to speak. I'd like to make one comment, if I may. In most of our petty crime in rural areas, I believe the hoodlums use k

Public Safety committee  I have to apologize. They were both in remand centres. The one that is incarcerated is in the federal prison system. The other one has pleaded not guilty. I'm sorry. I'm not familiar with all of this terminology that's being used. In my observation, after sitting through probabl

Public Safety committee  Yes, I do. They had these two culprits caught within at least three days. Through fingerprints and whatnot they were able to identify them quite readily, because these two individuals had other records, so to speak. I felt that the RCMP worked quite fast on this one.

Public Safety committee  I think all of us in rural areas feel that the RCMP do a commendable job based on the staffing they have. They have to pick and choose a bit as well. They're not going to come and issue me with a warrant for driving 15 kilometres an hour over the speed limit when they have to be

Public Safety committee  I would suggest that everybody in my community has a long rifle and they know exactly where it is. Anybody who comes in and tries to beat my wife is probably going to be confronted with it, but—

Public Safety committee  For property, again, I feel that the job is being done as accurately or as completely as it can be with the resources that are available and the time limits they have for dealing with minor property crime.

Public Safety committee  As I indicated previously, these guys who are doing the thieving and whatnot, they are professional or semi-professional. They work so fast. They know where the police are. They know how long it's going to take them to get to the location that they have targeted.