Public Safety committee  What's driving the costs of policing, more broadly, is the demand for police services, and I would attribute that increased demand to a couple of things. First of all, there has been a significant impact on police forces across the country because of government policy changes, s

Public Safety committee  Oh, absolutely.

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. I'll give you one concrete example of some work that we've undertaken at the Canadian Police Association. We just sponsored, an operational review of the Winnipeg Police Service. We brought in two academics, Dr. Curt Griffiths and Dr. Nahanni Pollard. Curt Griffiths i

Public Safety committee  That's a really good question, and I'm not going to profess to have the best answer. We are doing some research around how the multiple levels of oversight have driven costs in policing. It's not just the cost of creating and sustaining the oversight bodies, but it's also then

Public Safety committee  Thank you. I have a prepared statement, so I'll start with that, and then I look forward to any questions. Good morning, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. I see a number of new faces around the table today, so first l'd like to take this opportunity to welcome the new

Public Safety committee  No, I haven't received any feedback to suggest there was anything missing in the bill, and I'll just echo Mr. Townsend's comments and add that at the municipal and provincial level, I think that everybody has stepped up their game in terms of witness protection. Most provinces

Public Safety committee  I think any time you have children involved, it very much complicates things and makes them more difficult. It would be just as difficult as it is for any normal person who goes to a young child or a teenage child and says, “By the way, we're going to leave this community and g

Public Safety committee  What I would say generally that is if there were a situation where someone needed protection, we would take whatever steps we could to provide that protection. Having said that, when you're dealing with youth it's much more challenging, because there's a requirement to make sure

Public Safety committee  Yes, that's correct. You try to minimize the number of people who actually know why changes are being made. Those kinds of authorizations would come at a fairly high level. Then it would just be direction given to people who are processing the change, not knowing that in fact the

Public Safety committee  It is a very high-risk, high-stress type of activity. I'm not as familiar with RCMP policies, but I know that in municipal and provincial police forces we typically leave people in those positions for a short period of time, depending on the file they're working on. You try to ma

Public Safety committee  No, because witness protection is a very expensive proposition. Police forces across the country, including the RCMP, don't typically bring people into witness protection situations as a matter of course. I'll allow Staff Sergeant Townsend to comment on that. There has to be a si

Public Safety committee  One difference that I would mention—and of course none of us can predict how technology will change going forward—is how technology has advanced so much, and certainly in my career over about 25 years. When I started very few people had a cellphone, but were using voice pagers. O

Public Safety committee  The cost of an investigation is a factor that has a significant impact on the smaller agencies in particular. I think that in the context of this legislation, what would typically happen is that once a smaller agency realized they were dealing with a significant file where they n

Public Safety committee  Yes, absolutely. They can be, because they're often with the informants, particularly during the active stages of any investigation. They're with the informants on a regular basis. The informants are obviously targeted by these organized crime groups, which stand to lose a lot if

Public Safety committee  Typically, and particularly when you're dealing with organized criminal activity, the types of informants that we'd be handling and who would be part of a program like this are obviously people with a significant amount of information. That information, when used successfully to