Public Safety committee  Good afternoon, members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to provide some testimony. My name is Jeffrey Schiffer. I'm a Métis person. As the chair has said, I'm currently the executive director of Native Child and Family Services of Toronto. I want to start by ac

Public Safety committee  Is it the same question about actions that could be immediately taken?

Public Safety committee  Fantastic. As my colleague just said, a world of community relations can be taken down by one negative case. What we are seeing, particularly in the indigenous community, is that a lot of the cases that go wrong happen when we have law enforcement officers trying to intervene ar

Public Safety committee  Yes, I'd be happy to. Thank you. A few years ago, I did lead the Office of Indigenization at the Justice Institute of British Columbia, which is responsible for training every municipal police officer in the province of British Columbia. During my time there, I did have the oppo

Public Safety committee  That's exactly what I'm saying. I'm saying that we need to put some thoughtful consideration into what police do well because we need them in our society, and there are many things they do very well. However, there are also other things that they're just not set up to do and aren

Public Safety committee  I would agree with what's already been said. I can really only comment around indigenous peoples, but I would say that each first nation, along with Métis and Inuit people, has very long traditions of justice and public safety within their own cultures. For thousands of years bef

Public Safety committee  I do think that training is important and it is effective, but it's not effective when that's the only strategy that's utilized. There are some studies that have shown that, if you're going to put all your eggs in the basket of training, you shouldn't expect it to yield many resu

Public Safety committee  The only other thing I would add is that we should probably take a look at whether or not we want police doing everything they're doing right now, and whether we want to reallocate some of the services to other community organizations, because that obviously would change any trai