Public Safety committee  First of all, where do I get on this wagon? That's exactly where we need to go. It ties into restorative justice and crime prevention, and preventing crime and preventing stuff in the front end and dealing with it at the grassroots level, as opposed to pushing it up into the syst

Public Safety committee  Absolutely, and that's what is going to make it work. It will have to be all levels of government getting together and driving it. That's what is making the hub program work in Saskatchewan. You have to be careful, as you move forward with that, that you create it more as a fram

Public Safety committee  As far as best practices are concerned, from our perspective we're quite proud of some of the cadet programs and youth programs that we've established. Again, each community is different so we let them massage it in as we work with it. In one program it's called the cadet program

Public Safety committee  We do pursue it. We look for opportunities. My colleagues from across the country and I are always looking for opportunities to get people involved and to do things differently and be as efficient as possible. It's a good question. It is very challenging, in the first nation co

Public Safety committee  No. For an agency our size and the type of service we deliver, we don't have special units like that for organized crime, or anything like that. We're a relatively small agency. Our focus is on front-line, uniformed community policing. Although we have been able to establish a d

Public Safety committee  Yes. The recruitment fund, the five-year funding that you were referring to—

Public Safety committee  —that ended on March 31, that very much affected my colleagues in Ontario. For us and my colleagues out west, that funding did go to the province. We didn't use it for actually hiring police officers and putting it right on the ground. We never saw that from the province. What th

Public Safety committee  What I was referring to was the discussion around auxiliaries, volunteers, and what authorities they would actually have. Essentially, I know that in our province, they wouldn't have any authorities. They are even moving away from the band constable program; that's my understandi

Public Safety committee  That was our First Nations Chiefs of Police Association. Every year we have a small AGM and conference. This year we had it here in Ottawa. We try to move it around the country a little. We discuss issues that are topical to first nations policing. We had presentations this yea

Public Safety committee  There are always lots of positives of getting together with colleagues. There is always a tendency to drift over into a focus on the negatives and the challenges and concerns, but we also share some of the things that we're trying to do in the various communities. Much of the f

Public Safety committee  Yes. There's a capacity piece to it, and also the political will.

Public Safety committee  The politics in first nation communities can be very raw at times; that's in flux too, and ever-changing. To have a well-designed hub program, you want sustainability, and it has to be able to withstand changes of leadership. You also have to have the other bigger players—i.e., t

Public Safety committee  Again, I'm basing that a little bit on my experience and speculation. I don't think it's something we should be afraid of trying, but there are certainly unique challenges. That's all I'm saying.

Public Safety committee  I'll use our situation as an example. We're a program under the tribal council, but each of our communities is a unique community. They're their own community, and they have their own chief and council. For their issues, for instance, or for their identified people in need in tha

Public Safety committee  No, in my world it's the RCMP. But in Ontario and Quebec it's the provincial police for those provinces. There are a lot of first nation communities being policed by OPP or by the Quebec provincial police.