Public Safety committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to appear this morning to discuss Bill C-51, which my organization, the Canadian Police Association, strongly endorses. I believe this is my sixth or seventh appearance before your committee, so

Public Safety committee  Yes. My perspective is that we're just adding layers of infrastructure and duplication of offices, computers, and all the things that go along with creating a new agency. The fact is that police officers are capable of investigating police-involved incidents. You need to have the

Public Safety committee  Yes. I think the government was quite clear that it was a temporary initiative. The unfortunate.... I think it was a significant investment by this government, I think it was unprecedented, and I think it was important. Unfortunately, our experience is that it was received differ

Public Safety committee  I take a bit of a different approach from a lot of people in the police sector and police community. The fact is that there have been a number of public policy decisions made across the country in different provinces around mental health and how to deal with it. Most of them in

Public Safety committee  I think we need to look at all models of service delivery and of utilizing different responses, but we need to be careful. Although there are programs in this country and other countries that rely on community safety officers and special constables, there really hasn't been a lot

Public Safety committee  I completely agree with your comments. We're right now engaged in a research project in which we are spending a significant amount of time looking at rural and remote policing so that we can address some of these issues, or at least start to have a conversation around these issue

Public Safety committee  What I would say is that I know your government has made a significant investment in policing through the police officers recruitment fund, and different provinces have used the funding they receive in different ways. In some provinces, including British Columbia, those investmen

Public Safety committee  The challenge when it comes to police agencies looking to generate revenue is of course that the priority for police organizations is public safety, not generating revenue. The challenge will always be the concern the public would rightly have that police agencies were getting in

Public Safety committee  I can give you one obvious example, from my perspective, in terms of duplication. I'll use British Columbia as an example, although Ontario is in the same boat, and I think most other provinces are going the same route. When there is an incident involving a police officer on th

Public Safety committee  That's exactly what the point is—and I alluded to it in my presentation—because for every one strategy that we undertake, a lot of the criminal groups, particularly on the organized crime or commercial crime side, cybercrime, will find new technologies to overcome whatever initia

Public Safety committee  That's correct. That's been the experience in the jurisdictions in the States that I referred to.

Public Safety committee  That's right. I mean, if we're going to have an honest discussion, I think we have to accept responsibility for some of the issues. In the policing community, I think one mistake we've made is that we've tied success too closely to crime rates and we haven't spent enough time t

Public Safety committee  In response to your first question, let me just say this. Here's the frustration. I represent front-line cops, and that's where my experience comes from. We're already talking about savings and reinvesting those savings. We're having a discussion around the economics of policin

Public Safety committee  My job is to bargain the best deal that I can for my members, but it has to be in the context of the challenges we are discussing here today and that taxpayers across this country are facing, which is why we have been working collaboratively with the Canadian Association of Polic

Public Safety committee  With the greatest respect, sir, in my presentation I included at least a couple of examples of recommendations we made at the federal level around changes that could be easily made and that would realize significant efficiencies and reduce costs. I think, though, that we need to