Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
National Security and Defence
Issue 5 - Evidence - Meeting of February 25, 2008
OTTAWA, Monday, February 25, 2008
The Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 4:03 p.m. to examine and report upon the national security policy of Canada. Topic: Emergency Preparedness
Senator Colin Kenny (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: This is a meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. We are pleased that you are with us, and we are pleased that you are with us, Mr. Zaccardelli. Before we begin, I would like to briefly introduce the members of the committee.
[Translation]
On my left, Senator Pierre Claude Nolin from Quebec. He is a lawyer. He was called to the Senate in June 1993. Senator Nolin is currently Deputy Chair of the Special Senate Committee on Anti-terrorism and also Deputy Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources.
[English]
Senator Hugh Segal, from Ontario, has served in the Senate since August 2005. Senator Segal is a well known public policy expert. He holds an honorary doctorate of law from the Royal Military College of Canada and sits on the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples and Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
Senator Rod Zimmer is from Winnipeg. He has had a long and distinguished career in business and philanthropy. Senator Zimmer has been a member of the Senate since August 2005 and sits on the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications.
Senator Tommy Banks, from Alberta, was called to the Senate in April of 2000. He is known to many Canadians as an accomplished and versatile musician and entertainer. He is the Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources and is also a member of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Joseph Day, from New Brunswick, had a successful career as a private practice attorney and has served in the Senate of Canada since October 2001. He currently chairs the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance and is deputy chair of our Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs.
Senator Wilfred Moore was called to the Senate in September 1996 and represents the electoral division of Stanhope Street-South Shore in Nova Scotia. He has been active at the city level in Halifax-Dartmouth and has served as a member of the board of governors of Saint Mary's University.
In March of 2004, the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence published a comprehensive report on the state of Canada's nationwide readiness to respond to manmade and natural disasters. The report clearly indicated that Canada was not well prepared to deal with national emergencies. The committee has undertaken a review of the current state of emergency response capabilities to check on the pace of progress at all levels of emergency response organizations, from local to federal.
Our first witness today is former commissioner of the RCMP Giuliano Zaccardelli. Mr. Zaccardelli is here today to comment on resource requirements for key police programs and initiatives from a federal perspective. We also hope to hear his opinions on how resources, or the lack thereof, impact the RCMP's ability to deal with emergency management and organized crime.
Giuliano Zaccardelli, as an individual: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, honourable senators. Thank you for inviting me here today to discuss with you the situation in relation to policing in this country.
I will preface my remarks by saying that although I resigned from my post as commissioner of the RCMP approximately a year ago, I have not resigned my perspective or passion for improving the safety and security of communities of citizens across this country. From the outset, let me assure you that my perspective is that we are approaching a crisis point, and we may already be there in certain parts of the country. This crisis requires extensive integrated effort on behalf of all the key stakeholders in the police sector.
If I can focus our discussion, and I know you will hear similar stories from Commissioner Fantino and Chief Boyd, I suggest I can comment on three key issues. The first is resources for policing activities; second, the RCMP response to the Brown report; and third, the lack of leadership by governments accountable for policing. I will try to provide you with both the facts, as I know them and then my perspective on what those facts tell us about policing and security.
Let us start with resources and the big picture. Public policing in this country employs over 89,000 people. There is also at least that number again working in the private security sector. However, I will leave that discussion for another day.
Of the 89,000, 64,000 are sworn officers and about 30 per cent, or 18,000 officers, are members of the RCMP. The other approximately 222 police services employ the remaining 46,000 officers. Over 85 per cent of those are small services employing fewer than 300 people. Over half of those have fewer than 25 employees. Therefore, what we have in Canada today is nine large police services employing over 1,000 people with four larger ones employing in the range of 5,000 plus officers and then the RCMP. That means there are over 170 police services that are quite small and insular and have no resource flexibility.
I make these points that so that you understand the landscape — one very large, a few larger services and most are small town or hamlet police services barely keeping pace with the cost and workload in policing today. That is not a model that ensures that every Canadian in this country is safe and secure in their communities or that there is a common standard of policing.
Canadians spend almost $10 billion on community policing which is just over $300 per year per Canadian for their security. That $10 billion does not include expenditures at the federal level on federal statutes from the RCMP, customs, immigration, transport, corrections, et cetera. Nor does it include the amount Canadians spend on private security. If you add all these other expenditures together, you might get into the neighbourhood of $30 billion.
That might seem like a lot. However, put this in the back of your mind. The question is whether it is being well managed and is it the right model of policing for Canada today?
You will not find a single police chief who has not gone to his board or mayor and asked for 10 per cent or 12 per cent more than he or she received last year in order to ensure the safety of citizens in their community. After much negotiation, the chief might walk out with a 3 per cent or 4 per cent raise.
My question is what are they dropping to get from the 12 per cent budget increase they demanded to the 3 per cent increase they received? What is not getting done to meet budget targets? Is there any citizen in this country that would not be willing to spend more than $300 a year to ensure the safety of their property and children?
That expenditure amount has been increasing at about 3 per cent per year over the last 10 years. However, this does not get policing back to the strength it was at in 1975 when there were 206 officers for every 100,000 Canadians. Today, there are 195 officers for every 100,000 Canadians. That is the smallest number of police officers to population ratio in any of the 25 major developed countries in the world.
The reason is public policing budgets follow the peculiarities of the public purse. In the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, governments cut expenditures and cut parts of policing. However, crime did not take a cut. Budgets are not based on need or demand; unfortunately, they are based on politics.
The bottom line is that there has been a 10 per cent reduction in real capacity to do police work over the last decade. The cost and workload of policing has outpaced any budget increases. Organized crime has grown; policing has not.
You might remember the headlines I had a couple of years ago when I said the RCMP only had resources to investigate about 30 per cent of the known organized crime organizations. That was the known crime. What is the potential impact on our lives of what we do not know? What are we doing about it? I do not want to bore you with statistics. However, let me underline the point about real capacity decline by offering a couple more bits of information.
Every time a piece of legislation in Canada is passed, policing becomes more difficult. A recent study showed that police are increasingly doing selective response. Why? Every time there is new legislation, every time there is a new court decision, it puts pressure on and increases processing time for the police.
Consider that over the last 10 years the average time it took to process a break and enter investigation increased by 58 per cent; an impaired driving charge increased 250 per cent; a domestic assault increased 964 per cent. No corresponding budget increases were given to the police every time a court decision or a new piece of legislation increased the processing time. All of this took place in a policing environment of more public oversight, more media scrutiny and more public expectations for an accountability bar set higher than any other profession.
If that does not cause you concern, let me add what a report to police leaders stated the following challenges. It states that police will have to prepare for massive turnover in leadership ranks and compete for, attract, develop, and retain the next generation of talent in a highly competitive labour market. Police forces will have to improve the sector human resource forecasting and planning capacity, improve labour-management relations, and increase the funding for those functions.
That report came out seven years ago. That was before 9/11 and since then the police role in protection against terrorism has increased exponentially.
A more recent study called a National Diagnostic on Human Resources in Policing gave exactly the same message to police leaders. In that report, the consulting firm wrote that before the sector can actually do things it must first develop governance processes, acquire the resources and build the infrastructure and the facilities that would enable it to move into real program and implementation work.
The firm noted that without this kind of transformation, six years from now someone else will redo our study and arrive at the same conclusion and by that time, it will be too late.
The Police Sector Council, a new collective of police leaders looking at the long- term sustainability of policing, calls this information the perfect storm for policing and considers it a call to action. I also consider it a call to action. It consists of three low-pressure systems that create the storm. First, you have the changing face of policing demographics. In the next short while 40 per cent to 59 per cent of senior leaders in policing will be retiring. Second, less than 3 per cent of a diminishing youth cohort is interested in policing today. Third, the changing work, increasing demands, complexity of crime, changing management, budgets, governance are other factors.
Honourable senators, a fully equipped police officers cost Canadians $67,000 in 1993 compared to $107,000 in 2003 and almost $150,000 today in urban centres. The question you should be asking is this: What has been done and what is being done?
This situation has been getting worse for the last seven years and the future is not looking bright.
This is what the consultants wanted police leaders to hear: The public expects more. In fact, the public believes that a profession with 80,000 members must surely already have in place a national HR strategy and plan. The public expects an organization resourced with professional staff funded by a national coalition of police services, supported by various levels or areas of government, unfettered by narrow self-interests, working seamlessly through well-oiled processes to produce effective programs for the collective good of the citizenry of this country.
The report goes on that if the status quo does not change, the public may come to this realization through a failure of policing. Such a collapse may not happen tomorrow, it may happen in a couple of years, but it will happen. It will be brought on by a failure to take collective and timely action to solve the HR issues that have eroded the effectiveness of police services for the better part of the last decade. When this happens, the public will demand solutions from senior levels of government and those levels of government will impose a solution.
Now, for some tough questions: Do we want every police service to be fighting or poaching each other for best candidates? What happens to all those 170 small services? How do they keep pace? Do we as Canadians want have- and-have-not policing depending on where you are lucky to live in this country? Policing is jurisdictionally silent; crime is not. Why is it we can collaborate on operational files and joint forces operations but we cannot collaborate on a strategic framework for policing, or even consider a new model.
The federal government in platform speeches suggest they were embracing a law-and-order agenda. Where is the meat? They offer 2,500 new officers on the street but we need 5,000 in the next three to five years just to replenish the retirements let alone deal with increasing transnational, organized and technology-enabled crime.
In what I would call a ``superficial report'' at best, David Brown in his review of the RCMP offered 49 recommendations. Most of the issues raised in the report were known by the RCMP and were actually being addressed by the RCMP before the task force was put together. Hopefully, the RCMP resource shortages identified in the report will be taken seriously by the different levels of government concerned.
Let me wrap up by asking one more question: Where is the leadership?
For many years, I have pushed an agenda of integrated policing. This country requires federal and provincial government leadership working with municipalities, chiefs of police and police boards on an integrated agenda. It requires leaders in all these stakeholder organizations to come together and envision a new model of policing for Canadians. As citizens we expect no less.
Senator Banks: Hello, Mr. Zaccardelli. It is nice to see you again. You have outlined a list of problems facing police forces. You were careful to make clear you were talking about not just the RCMP but also all police forces. To your knowledge, to what extents and how is the RCMP itself prepared, able or doing something to address those issues?
Mr. Zaccardelli: That is a very good question, senator. As I said, I have tried to focus on the need to tackle this from a holistic, national perspective. No solution to policing in this country can be done by simply fixing one level. It requires a comprehensive and integrated approach from police leaders and including police boards and all levels of government.
Senator Banks: In all three levels of government?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes, they are all equally important. It is only when they all work together with the different police chiefs and leaders that you are leveraging your collective resources. Whether one police force is small or large, whether one level of government is more important — some people say — it is not true. It is when they come together with a common interest to make Canada a safer place does the whole become greater than the sum of its parts.
That is the great challenge. We tend to want to operate in our own area because we are so pressed. Every police chief will tell you, ``I am so inundated with my challenges. How can I think about another part of the country 1,000 miles away, let alone another part of the world?'' That is exactly why we have to come together to deal with those issues. What is happening in one part of the world is affecting us today; what is happening in one part of the country is affecting another part; and when you collaborate and work together you have a better chance of minimizing the risk and maximizing the security.
Getting back to the RCMP, you are absolutely right. The Brown report clearly reiterates and lays out one of the major issues, which is the shortage of resources. When you look at the resources, the mandates and the responsibilities that they have — as well as the growth and demand for those responsibilities — the gap has actually widened even though governments have honestly made efforts. This government and the past government have put real monies in there; however, the reality is that the gap has widened because of the nature of the threat. That is how you must judge what type of budget and resources you give. You cannot simply say, ``We are asking to give you so much money'' or ``We will just give you 2,500 police officers.'' What does that mean in relation to what?
I was never asked whether we need 25,000 or 25 police officers. It was thrown out there. I am glad we are getting more resources but it has to be done in an intelligent, strategic way. For the RCMP, given the mandate, the gap has widened. The RCMP has done well, given what it has. They have been very effective with what they have been given. Improvements can be made there, however.
The RCMP has been very effective, but that does not at the end of day deal with the problem of the gap that exists and the gap that is widening. In 1975, I said we had more police officers in this country per 100,000 than we have today. Just look at the nature of organized crime and the impact of the threat of terrorism, let alone the level of sophistication of the crimes. In 1975, the notion of gangs drawing huge amounts of resources from our municipal police forces did not exist; today, it is a serious component of the crime in our communities.
We simply have not kept pace. I think we can do a better job if we all come together and recognize the challenges and work together to overcome them. That is what I am saying.
In this country, we provide a service and policing that is next to none when you put it all together. However, the challenges and threats are there and they are increasing. That is what I am sure Commissioner Fantino and Chief Boyd will tell you. We are doing a good job but the challenges are widening the gap. The RCMP is doing a good job.
Senator Banks: Let us assume there would be great efficiencies if a magical cooperation could be brought about on a basis that is even more integrated. It is done now on a situation-by-situation basis; we all know about the success of joint operations as between police forces in the three orders of government. However, they are done on an ad hoc, ``let us get together on this particular matter'' basis. Is there more integration than that? Is there a systemic integration that is beginning to happen?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I would say 9/11 brought the whole philosophy and practice of integration to a new level. We were integrated but on an ad hoc basis. Today, we have established consistency in the way we operate with integration. It is not something that happens once in a while. It is there, throughout the country. You have integrated units for all different types of crime. It is there in spades. It could get better because there is always room for improvement.
We can make serious gains in efficiencies is in HR. When I talk about the police sector council and what I refer to which was the Hays Group, a very professional analysis of the whole HR system, I said we are integrated in operations but on the HR side, things are lacking. For example, the RCMP has its own HR systems but every other major police force has the same system and they are not integrated.
As another example, we are all facing a serious challenge in recruiting, yet every police force is spending money hiring people. I think we could do better if we were able to integrate and have one body that does all the background analysis and research we need. Why does every police force have to hire experts to do research on recruiting when it could be done in one area?
Strategic planning, the succession planning process and all the HR systems have not really been integrated. That is an area where we could bring about substantial efficiencies. I think that is the next big area.
Senator Banks: Can you think of a model in intergovernmental relations between the three orders of government in which there has been a successful integration of that kind? I cannot think of one.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I am an optimist, senator. The fact that maybe there has not been one does not mean we should not do it. I look at the challenge.
Years ago, when people like Chief Boyd, Commissioner Fantino, myself and others started on the track to integrate operations, there were people who said it could not be done because no one else was doing it. We did it. We are a model for the rest of the world because the rest of the world has been coming here to study our model.
Senator Banks: We have heard that from the Americans.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I think we can do this and necessity should drive it. Why would the RCMP not want to borrow a best practice from Edmonton or why would Edmonton not want to borrow one from Vancouver? We need one best practice in the country, not 15 or 20. If we make a little bit of investment in that best practice, we will all benefit.
Coming from where you come from, a perfect example is Wayne Gretzky. He got more goals and assists than any other player in the history of the game. Why? Because he believed if you give the puck away, you get more return; if we invest a little, we get so much in return.
Why would I want to have all my HR system uniquely packaged to meet RCMP needs, when I know every other police force needs the same thing? Do not buy into this notion that we are a unique police force; we do not want to be like the RCMP or like Montreal. We are all facing the same thing; policing is constant throughout the country.
The police forces and the police boards need help, direction, leadership and a little push from maybe the two other levels of government. I really believe they need that. There is a leadership role that can be provided, and I am hoping that can be done — certainly at the federal level. There is, I believe, an opportunity there at the provincial levels as well. Those are the two main levers that can do that. It is not to direct and tell people what to do, but to provide that coordination and facilitation, where centres of expertise can be set up for the benefit of the whole country, as opposed to having 20 centres of expertise.
Senator Banks: Has the propriety silo thing — do not tread on my grass — gone away enough to do what you are talking about?
Mr. Zaccardelli: It will never go away, but leadership is about ensuring you reduce that to the minimum. Sometimes that takes an autocratic style once in a while. I was accused of trying to do that, but you have to do that; if you do not push, sometimes people like to stay in that ``comfortable pew,'' as some famous Canadian author once said.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Good afternoon, Mr. Zaccardelli. Whenever we see each other, we discuss staff relations. We are both so fascinated by the subject!
In December last year, the Brown report was published and — for the benefit of the people listening to us — the task force's investigation dealt with RCMP governance and the need for a change in its culture. One of the task force's recommendations was to make the RCMP separate, to give it the status of an employer as the Treasury Board is at present.
If you could give us your view of that suggestion, I think it would help my colleagues to grasp the scope of the problem from the outset.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Thank you.
Senator Nolin: You may answer in English if you prefer.
[English]
Mr. Zaccardelli: I will answer in English. On the separate employer status, the recommendation of the Brown report is a good one. I examined that particular issue while I was commissioner. We did an in-depth study and made a proposal to Treasury Board.
There are two important issues when talking about separate employer status: the ability to control your own finances and the flexibility that comes with that ability; and the ability to have your own HR policies to give you the flexibility, given the unique nature of your organization.
We examined it and we went ahead; I was in favour of that. To comply with the chair's guidance here, Treasury Board refused us. I believe that is a good idea. I would want to see the full details, because I was not satisfied — Treasury Board would not give us the financial flexibility and the policy flexibility on HR to go ahead. They refused. I think that was a mistake. I am glad to see the Brown report is re-examining that because there are opportunities there because of the nature of policing, especially the way the RCMP has to police in many parts of the country; the policies that apply generally across the board simply do not fit. I will give one little example — the isolated posts and limited duration posts. There is a committee chaired by Treasury Board, which represents the various sectors of the federal government that sit on that. The RCMP has approximately 80 per cent of the isolated posts or limited duration posts, so we are the major player in that. We are not allowed to sit at that table. We have to accept decisions they make and they do not even know what we do.
The reason we cannot sit at the table — and I say this with the greatest respect — is that the union representatives that sit there do not like the fact that the RCMP does not have a union. Therefore, they blocked us from being there.
It is a small example but it has a huge effect. Mr. Brown talks about northern postings and the need to deal with that. That is one area where if the commissioner had the flexibility, he could have incentives and do different things to attract members to the North.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Do you think that Commissioner Brown and his colleagues have given a fair assessment of the RCMP's unique situation with regard to postings in isolated regions? The isolation experienced by your former officers and so on; is Commissioner Brown's assessment a good one?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Because of the number of questions that they had to deal with, in my view, they did not have enough time to go into everything in depth.
My answer is that I agree with their recommendations. But they did not go deep enough. Before Mr. Brown arrived with his staff, I had already looked into those matters. There was not a single question in his report, apart from one or two, that were not already being worked on.
[English]
I accept and support Mr. Brown's report in terms of dealing with those isolation issues, but every one of those issues was being dealt with in a major way. Part of the challenge is the ability for the force to have the flexibility, so I come back to the Treasury Board.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Just so that people understand, we are talking about isolated postings. How many RCMP officers are in Iqaluit, for example? Is that considered isolated?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes, of course.
Senator Nolin: How many are there? Two? Four? Six?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I do not know. There are 110, 125 positions in the territories.
Senator Nolin: In all the territories?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes. Just Nunavut.
Senator Nolin: One of the problems is paying these people?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes.
Senator Nolin: So, do you believe in giving the RCMP more management flexibility, in setting up a separate administrative entity to manage its human resources?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes.
Senator Nolin: Let us talk about overtime.
[English]
Mr. Zaccardelli: For example, if I wanted to have a policy that said if you go above a certain parallel in certain isolated posts, I can give you a $10,000 bonus. It does not exist in the Treasury Board policy; therefore, I was not allowed to do it and that is what tied my hands.
We need more flexibility. Of course, you have to be accountable for that money; but with more flexibility, you are better able to deal with some of these challenges that are identified in the Brown report.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Is it normal practice in Canada for a cadet not to be paid during training?
Mr. Zaccardelli: The decision not to pay them was made because of budget cuts.
Senator Nolin: Mr. Zaccardelli, I am not accusing you. We all want the same thing: we want everything to work better, for the sake of all Canadians.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Of course.
Senator Nolin: Is it normal practice for police cadets not to be paid? I understand that it is not normal.
[English]
Mr. Zaccardelli: No. I went to Treasury Board and said that I want to pay the cadets. I was not allowed to pay them. This is part of the problem. We have to pay them because in the police community, some police forces had actually stopped paying cadets while in training. Now they are paying and, in a competitive market, you are really behind the eight ball if you are not able to pay, because they can walk out. The red serge will only take you so far. You look good in red serge but what is in your pocket will take you much further. They will come but you have to remunerate them reasonably well.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: There seems to be a problem with paying officers who are wounded and disabled in the line of duty. Commissioner Brown and his colleagues brought it up. What is your opinion on the matter? Again, would more flexibility give you a special status that would allow you to find a solution to this problem?
[English]
Mr. Zaccardelli: That is one recommendation where, in fairness, I did not do a detailed analysis of the report. I would love to see the working papers, if there are any, on the recommendations, but on that one, where they said that members that are injured or on duty and so on are not being looked after well, that is not the case. We look after our people very well. We can always do better, but again, pay and compensation is not the commissioner's prerogative. It is set down by Treasury Board, whether it is a funeral or whatever.
There were some very public issues out of Alberta about the cost of funerals. Even the military had some issues with that, but the commissioner's hands are tied by policy. I cannot ignore policy. People think the commissioner has or had unlimited powers. He or she does not. I have to abide by Treasury Board policy. In fairness, Treasury Board and the government was very fair when we found some anomalies or things that had to be improved. I would like to get more information from them, because I was not aware that there was any undue hardship in terms of members who were injured. We have bent over backwards in terms of accommodating members. Members who are no longer fit for duty because of injuries and so on we have done great work in terms of accommodating in the organization. It is a serious issue and I would like more information before I comment further on it.
Senator Segal: Commissioner, if you do not mind I will call you that — Tories like to live in the past; it is a better place to be on some occasions. Let me as a citizen express my appreciation for your making your own time available to be of assistance to the parliamentary process. History may show the parliamentary process was treated more fairly by you than it treated you. I am very appreciative of your presence and your ability to share your expertise and technical capacity with us.
Would you be good enough to reflect on your perspective relative to the contradiction between a national police force, which I think most Canadians view as there to deal with the fundamental existential threats to the country, a national police force that is there to ensure that our local police forces have the information they need and are linked appropriately in the event of a national emergency, a national police force that links up with Interpol for the purpose of sharing data about organized crime and the threats that may exist around the world that migrate to Canada, versus the provincial policing role that the RCMP has in eight of our ten provinces?
Do you see a contradiction between those two roles? Does it get in the way of what a national police force should be doing when you are sorting out the provincial policing requirements of Prince Edward Island or Nova Scotia, which are no less demanding than they would be in Ontario or Quebec, while at the same time sorting out your resources for the national task? You yourself have said we are under resource pressure. We do not have the money we need. We are not providing the level of policing we would like to.
In reflecting on that, could you give me your best judgment as to the notion of there being no distinction between crimes of violence, crimes that relate to a national threat, versus property crimes, for someone who is running an RCMP detachment in the downtown area of a municipality where they are acting in fact as the provincial police in some circumstances?
Senator Banks: They are acting as municipal police as well.
Senator Segal: Yes, thank you, Senator Banks. They have to sort out these choices. I am untroubled when I arrive at an airport and see the Peel Regional Police providing policing for that international airport. They are a great police force. My instinct is that most Canadians would expect to see the Royal Canadian Mounted Police providing that policing, but I understand why the resource pressures get in the way. Are we accepting the structure, which is an old structure going back to different times, and seeing it get in the way of what we should be doing?
If we could begin from the beginning and say, here is what a national police force should be doing, in comparison to what it does in France, for example, and Germany or in the United States, would we do it differently and should we begin to ask ourselves that tough question?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Senator, I cannot give a short answer to that.
The Chair: Yes or no will do.
Senator Tkachuk: You used up all your time with the question.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Knowing Senator Segal, I would love to spend a week discussing this with him, but he said to go back to the beginning. In the beginning there was Sir John A., who created the RCMP. This issue of a national police force versus a federal police force and the role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police comes up many times. The simple and naive commentary by many journalists, James Travers in particular, and others who are quite intelligent always amaze me. It is a perplexing problem, because in this country, if you go back to the beginning, there actually was not a strategic plan by any government. They laid out the division of the administration of justice, but policing was really left in a haphazard way and evolved in a haphazard way. The RCMP was on the chopping block several times.
I will start with the simple answer to the question. Given the nature of crime and the threats that we face today, I strongly believe that we fluked in to a good model to respond to that threat. I say that we fluked into it; that is why I believe the presence of the RCMP with responsibilities at the international level, at the national or federal level, and with a provincial and even municipal presence, gives us a distinct advantage. The reason for this, as I stated to Senator Banks, is that organized crime, terrorism, computer crimes, all these new types of crimes transcend us all. Historically, we could say to the RCMP at a federal level, you just do drug work, for example. Until the 1960s, the RCMP basically was responsible for all the drug work in this country. Then municipalities and provincial police forces had to come in because it overwhelmed us all, so we integrated and worked together.
If the crime transcends the various levels and jurisdictions in a country, if you have a national police force that has at least a presence in the various levels, you have an ability to not dominate or be more important, but you can coordinate and facilitate the exchange of information and the collaboration of efforts in terms of integrated operations. If you were to put the RCMP just at the federal level and had provincial police forces right across the country, the next day you would have to find a way to make sure that those police forces were integrated and worked very well with their municipal partners and their international partners. We are a country where you have one organization that can play that role — not dominate; we are not better or worse. At one time we said that if you have more police officers, you must be better.
The RCMP is no better than the smallest police force. If one police force has five police officers, we want to ensure that what they see, do, and know is connected and integrated with the broader community so that you have the 65,000 police officers acting as one team. They are in different jurisdictions, have different uniforms, are in different localities, but they are part of the same team; they are not competing or working against each other. Whether federal, provincial or municipal, they are on the same team. Then, once you get your Canadian team together, you have to hook up with the Americans, Europeans, Australians, et cetera, because they are all on the same team. Terrorism, for example, transcends us all. We must work in ``virtual reality'' in an integrated way with our world partners.
There must be a facilitator. Our challenge is getting people to understand this and then change their behaviours to back this up. That is the fundamental challenge. Everyone at every level — whether bureaucratic, federal, provincial or municipal level or police boards — are inundated with all that work. They have to understand that what is happening across the border, across the world, is affecting them.
I remember going to speak to a police board in Surrey, B.C. We police Surrey and the lower mainland. I was talking to their board and I said to the RCMP members, of which there are 300 or 400, ``I want to take two of your members and put them into an integrated team with Vancouver.'' Well, they were indignant. They said, ``You are not taking two members from Surrey; we want them in Surrey.'' I said, ``We have an organized crime problem and we are creating an integrated team. If we take your two, Vancouver's two and police from the other communities. . .'' ``We do not care about Vancouver.'' They said that in a nice way, they were not trying to be disrespectful. However, they could not see past that local community.
In today's world, the worst thing you can do is not see past your own responsibility. You have to act in your jurisdiction, but be connected and aware of what is going on elsewhere in the country and around the world. When you integrate that in a seamless way, you maximize the benefits to the society and minimize the threat.
An organization like the RCMP that has a presence in different levels, does not dominate and is not more important, but it can facilitate. That is the benefit that I believe we get from contract policing. Some people say, ``Well, if we were not in contract policing, we could spend more money on the federal.'' The fact is that policing would be much more costly in this country. Do you know what Treasury Board would do? Do you think they would transfer the money? A lot of it is not transferable because it is infrastructure money. Therefore, be very leery.
We can remodel policing in this country in as many ways as we want and many people dream up different models. The key for us is to find the best model that maximizes the uses of those limited resources we have at municipal, provincial, and federal level, as well as in partnerships with our other key partners to make sure that our police boards, our municipal councils, our provincial and federal ministers understand and work together. Then, we can really have something that is unique. We are actually doing it in many ways. The only problem is I am never satisfied we are going to have it where we need to be, at 100 per cent. It is reaching for that brass ring, senator.
I think we are very fortunate. It saddens me when I see otherwise very tell intelligent people say, ``Well, if we just did this or that with the RCMP, somehow the world's problems would be solved.'' It is not that simple. If it were that simple, the solution would have been found a long time ago.
Senator Segal: Would I be right in assuming that when any member the Canadian Forces is finishing their hitch and decide not no reconnect, or any person leaving CSIS decides that, for whatever reason, they are looking for something new to do, that the RCMP would be eager to recruit that individual? This assumes there is no personal reason not to. Would you have any program for the purpose of making that happen as we speak, or was it active in your day as commissioner?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Recruiting is probably one of the biggest challenges of all police forces today, not just in this country but around the world. The RCMP is facing it because of demographics and so on. We encourage men and women, no matter where they come from, if they meet the standard, to come and see us.
Going back to some of the inhibitors, one problem at the federal level is due to transfers. We went to the Department of Justice and Treasury Board. If a RCMP officer wants to join other police forces and other police force officers want to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, there is a problem. Municipal and provincial pensions are not transferable to the federal government. Why can we not do that? I think we are number 754 at the bottom of the list. However, a simple change like that would help. There is no cost; it does not cost the government anything. If a municipal police officer or some other police officer wants to transfer their pension or change careers, why should we not? We would benefit from new blood, yet we cannot do that.
Senator Segal: Would you ask a 35-year-old retiring Canadian major or captain in the CF to go back to depot and start at the beginning, or would they be able to enter directly and broaden their career?
Mr. Zaccardelli: There are different programs and for some people, we have a sort of indoctrination into the organization. Following that, they would move. However, I think Canadian policing has to do more and more of that. I do not think we do enough exchanges. The different ideas that come from different organizations are good. Again, sometimes unions will say you cannot bring someone at a certain level; they all have to start at the bottom.
We did that with the present chief in Calgary. We took him across as a chief superintendent into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Believe me; I still have the welts from some people. ``How dare you do that from another police force?'' He is a very competent person. I think he enjoyed the stay us with and I think he will be a better chief in Calgary because of his experience.
We have done some of that. I think we need to do more.
Senator Day: One complaint we have heard in the past is that the RCMP, as part of the border security model, is not getting there in time. Therefore, we must arm the Canadian border security people who previously were collecting taxes. There is some discussion about creating a border security force. I would like you to comment on that — whether that is needed and what is lacking from the point of view of the RCMP.
The second question is with respect to international training; the role that the RCMP is playing in international training in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti. Does that take away from your core work that should be done here? Do you get full recovery for that so you might otherwise have those funds to hire more people?
Finally, with respect to training: Six months does not seem to me to be very a very long time to train someone. I notice that you have described the Brown report as quite superficial. I heard your discussion with Senator Nolin in that regard. How long does the ``field coaching'' that the Brown report talks about go on and what are the problems that exist with respect to that model?
Mr. Zaccardelli: In terms of the field coaching, six months is an extensive training for basic training. Remember, training is a two-year process. The coaching program extends for a year and a half in the field. Therefore, it is not fair to say we only train them for six months. There is field coaching. There have been some issues because we have not, because of the pressures in some cases, been able to have all the coaches we needed; however, in principle, the program is solid and it is two years of training.
Senator Day: What do you do with those you do not have a coach for them? They are not properly trained?
Mr. Zaccardelli: You do not have a specific coach but you have other senior police officers that are with them. A coach is one who is specifically trained to coach someone. However, the fact that someone is not trained as a coach does not mean that they cannot pass on experience; if they have been on the job for five or six years, they can mentor and coach. Those are some of the pressures you have to deal with when there is such a demand on resources.
Senator Day: Would you rather keep them in the training depot for a year instead of six months?
Mr. Zaccardelli: No, I think six months is enough. The art of policing is something you practice on the street. You can only learn so much before you have to go on the street. Until you encounter a situation, you will never know what it is really like; simulations only go so far.
With regard to your point about Afghanistan, when I was there, we had 10 members in Afghanistan. Although it drained certain resources from Canada, it was critical. The payback is huge and the benefits are tremendous. If we do not help countries that need it, those problems will come here anyway.
If we can help by training them to be better police officers, it actually helps us. I am all in favour. However, I asked to have a specific number of people to do international training. We have to do more of that. We are not doing enough.
The Chair: In that regard Mr. Zaccardelli, you have a line item in your budget for 105 constables for overseas.
Mr. Zaccardelli: We could use a lot more. We are being helped by other police forces. For example, the OPP have been tremendous, Edmonton has contributed and Montreal was involved in Haiti. The police community in Canada has been tremendous in its response. When you talk to the men and women who have come back, they have been enriched by the experience and Canada benefits from their experiences.
With regard to the border situation, we touched upon that in my last meeting. However, especially since 9/11, in my view, we have not responded in the way we need to when you talk about the border weaknesses in this country. When I talk about the border weaknesses, I am talking about the land border, the marine ports, the Great Lakes and the airports. With all due respect, and I say this not as a criticism, we have had miniscule resources in the past. When you look at the potential threat we face, it is simply not enough and we have to get serious about that.
When I was commissioner, we had a proposal that required a major infusion of resources at those various locations. It is important that we just do not say we will have a border patrol to cover the land border. If you only cover the land border, you are vulnerable elsewhere. You have to cover them all because organized crime groups and terrorists will find the weaknesses.
We need substantial investments and I mean substantial investments. We are talking about thousands of police officers. I believe some of our provincial and municipal partners would be willing to work with the RCMP if the finances and the resources were there to help them. It is to their benefit to do so. Remember, if someone crosses the border, he or she does not enter into the federal level, but into a province and then into a municipality to carry out the crime. Working with the RCMP would benefit the provinces and municipalities.
We will spend $1.5 billion arming the border guards and I am on record saying that I do not believe that was the wisest investment. If you are investing in one area, you are saying that you are not investing anywhere else. I believe $1.5 billion could have been better spent for the security of this country. I am not saying the border guards should not be armed. They are armed; let us get on with it.
The real issue is that border guards will not stop the crime groups or the terrorists. They will be able to do their work and they are part of the security package. We need a presence at the land borders, at the marine borders, at the airports and on the Great Lakes, which we never had to think about before. The evolving nature of the threat from organized crime and terrorism makes it imperative for us to be there. We have to move on that front. Every day we do not move is one more day that we are more vulnerable.
Senator Tkachuk: Is the percentage of funds committed to policing going up or down compared to overall budgets for the municipal and provincial governments that have their own police forces?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I do not have the figures; however, I believe in the last number of years that most of the municipalities I know have increased their budgets for policing, et cetera. The provincial governments in Ontario and Quebec have also increased their budgets.
The issue is not necessarily the increase in budget. The question is whether the increase is keeping pace relative to the threat and the mandate. You can get an increase in budget of 3 per cent; however, if crime increases by more than 3 per cent, the gap has widened. This is the real challenge in many areas. That is why I mentioned that many times I have gone and asked for more resources. Police chiefs and commissioners go as well and they get 2 per cent. They do what they can, but make no mistake, if you get less than what you need, then the gap widens. Eventually, that gap will come back to bite you at some point.
Senator Tkachuk: Is that true of the federal budget as well? We may be committing more money to the police. However, as a percentage of the federal budget, is it more or less than it was 20 years ago?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I do not have the specific statistics. However, on organized crime and terrorism, for example, the RCMP is seriously deficient when it comes to terrorism. Two years ago when I came here, I said we can only deal with about 30 per cent of all the organized crime groups that we know. I am afraid it is probably getting worse. We are talking about huge gaps that have to be overcome. The gap will not be closed by small incremental increases. There has to be a serious recognition of the problem.
We talked about the different border points of entry in this country. This is a field we have never tackled before and never considered as a threat. Now, we know those are vulnerabilities that put us at high risk and we are not putting the resources there yet. They are being considered. However, they are not there.
Senator Tkachuk: I want to go back to that because we are here to talk about the security of our country and that aspect of the budget.
You mentioned not only crime, but also the amount of time eaten up in processing an arrest or a charge brought on by legislation and court decisions.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Like I said, every time there is a new piece of legislation and every court decision requires more and more time.
Senator Tkachuk: A DUI takes 250 per cent more time. Why is that?
Mr. Zaccardelli: That is because of what the police officer is required to do to comply with the various court decisions and policies in place to respect the Charter rights. We do not question that compliance; however, those decisions have a direct bearing upon us.
I believe you have Commissioner Fantino and Chief Boyd here. As young members of our respective police forces, when we did an affidavit for a wire tap authorization, for example, we could do it ourselves in half a day with 5 or 10 pages for the affidavit. The judge would do an authorization and say yes or no.
The average affidavit on an organized crime group today will literally run into the hundreds if not thousands of pages. This means that you need a team of police officers along with a team of lawyers who will spend weeks and weeks on it.
We have to do it because the court has required us to do that. However, while the group is working on the affidavit, they are not out there doing police work.
When a police officer picks up an impaired driver, you can kiss his shift away because it will take that whole shift to process that one impaired driver. That is the reality of the work. The way the processes have evolved has encumbered the police officers' ability to be out there on the street doing what he or she needs to do.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Mr. Zaccardelli, you are describing the challenge for organizations all around the world.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes.
Senator Nolin: Ask any employer to quantify for you the effort that employees have had to put into working with computers in the last ten years, they will all tell you that they have had to invest in training and retraining their workforce, that they have had to devote an increasingly significant part of their budgets to making sure that older employees who knew nothing of computers are now able to survive in a world where computers are everywhere.
So I understand that it is frustrating for police officers who were trained at a time when courts were less important in our everyday lives, but that is how it is these days. Society has accepted it; I think you have to as well.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I understand perfectly. We have accepted it.
Senator Nolin: Police officers are not alone.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I understand; I just wanted to put all the facts on the table. Something that took a week ten years ago takes months now. You have to realize that officers are up to their ears in paperwork.
[English]
Senator Tkachuk: There is a big industry there. It keeps on going, it seems.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: We agree that the key is the ability to move with the times. Are the policemen and women who are part of the almost 100,000 Canadians responsible for protecting the rest of us able to adapt to a new work environment? That is the key!
[English]
Mr. Zaccardelli: I agree with you, but make no mistake; men and women of all police forces are very capable and have adapted. The fact is that when the Supreme Court issued a certain decision like Stinchcombe on disclosure, disclosure takes a lot of time. You have to deal with that reality; however, I do not think any police force in this country got additional resources when the Stinchcombe decision was handed down. We have adapted; we make the disclosures to the lawyers and to the defence, even though it frustrates us at times. I am just trying to explain that those decisions have a direct impact on our ability to be on the street and do the investigations that the public is demanding of us; we have to understand those realities.
Senator Tkachuk: It is good for the public to know. They should know more of it actually, as to how these decisions affect normal police work.
You allude to what we need, and so that is my question — that it is not just 3 per cent. Let us talk about national security and terrorism. You can combine them with organized crime, if you wish, which is international today.
Technology has made their life easier, not more difficult. How much money would it take? When you are envisioning the solution — not the solution, but at least a giant step — what are you talking about as far as money and people are concerned?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I cannot give you exact numbers, senator; we are talking about such a fundamental shift. We were talking about many thousands of new resources on the ground — boots on the ground — at the municipal, provincial and federal levels; investigators capable of undertaking serious police work. We are talking about many thousands of police officers.
Senator Tkachuk: I think you said it costs $150,000 per officer.
The Chair: Your previous testimony was $180,000 for the RCMP.
Mr. Zaccardelli: It depends; that is for some of the more sophisticated levels. I think I said $150,000 for municipal.
Senator Tkachuk: The cost is $150,000. It does not have to be exact, but we want to get a feel for the commitment that is necessary.
Mr. Zaccardelli: If you were to look at the borders as we described them, the four areas, we are talking in the area of 5,000 to 6,000 police officers just to do that area. If I said we are only doing one-third of the organized crime that we know, you could easily see to get to 100 per cent, we are talking about several thousand more officers.
Also, it is not the just the RCMP that does organized crime. That is done in partnership at the provincial and municipal level. They make great contributions to that; often more than the RCMP in some jurisdictions. There would be a corresponding requirement on the part of provincial and municipal resources.
We would need a fundamental shift in this country to tackle this issue. As I said, on a per capita basis, we are the lowest of the 25 most developed countries in the world. We have actually less today per 100,000 people in Canada than we had in 1975 when we did not even know what a computer or a terrorist was; we almost did not know the meaning of a transnational crime.
The challenges and the threats have increased exponentially and we have done our best. I am proud of every man and woman in policing and law enforcement in this country because they have responded well. That does not mean as well as you can respond and with as much efficiency as you can squeeze out. There may be more efficiency you can squeeze out of it, but you still will be left with a serious gap, in my view, senator.
The Chair: Commissioner, just to put this in context, on the Great Lakes, we have 14 Mounties and 19 designated ports with 29 Mounties. Joining up across Canada, we have 145 Mounties taking care of our border between Canada and the United States and Canada and Alaska. We do not understand that.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I agree. I just said, senator, I believe we probably would look at in the neighbourhood of 5,000 to 6,000 police officers. We like to reminisce about the past, as Senator Segal said before. You know there is a famous story about Superintendent Walsh, or Major Walsh, as he was known at the time, when he went and met Sitting Bull after he defeated Custer. Sitting Bull had 5,000 warriors. Major Walsh rode up to him with 12 Mounties. He said, Sitting Bull, this is Canada and you better obey the law. The legend goes that Sitting Bull did not cause any problems for five years. I do not think we can rely on that type of thing today. We have to put our resources where our mouth is.
Senator Zimmer: Mr. Zaccardelli, I thank you for being here today. Listening to you is always an adventure for me. In the government's 2007 Speech from the Throne, a commitment was made to provide the resources to recruit an additional 2,500 police officers across the country. I would appreciate your comments on where you think the biggest challenge lies in recruiting these officers, and should it be a cost sharing between the three levels of government. How do you think that funding should be allocated between the RCMP and provincial and municipal forces?
For instance, in the term of the funding, five years is not enough; it barely gets them trained to know the job. It has to be in the area of 20-25 years. What are your thoughts in that area?
Mr. Zaccardelli: Thank you very much for that question. I was commissioner when I learned about the 2,500 officers. I think it is a great initiative. Any time we can add more police officers — especially a number like 2,500 — is a good thing for policing and citizens in this country. However, as I alluded to, I believe it was made as part of a political program. I do not think many of the issues had been worked out about what the 2,500 were going to do. There was not a lot of consultation. The first time I heard of it was after it was announced. No one came to me or the police chiefs in the country and asked, ``What do you really need? What are the challenges?'' However, given that, we were pleased with it.
Then the question became, is this funding permanent? If it is not permanent funding, that puts the police chiefs and the municipalities and police boards in a very difficult situation. You cannot hire someone for three years and then have no money to fund them.
The real issue is the distribution. Where do they go? You need to have a way of managing and being accountable for these resources. I had some preliminary discussions with the minister and the department at the time. I said we should do what we always do, which is to make an intelligent decision based on the threats and challenges we face.
This is one the problems we face in communities, and bureaucrats and politicians sometimes have problems with this. It is easy to say we will give someone an equal amount or divide it this way, but I believe you need to be disciplined and have a strategic system of identifying the threats in this country and then allocate the resources accordingly. If you do that, then you have the best chance of reducing the threat to the country.
I am not there but, if they asked for my advice, I would bring the leaders of policing together, because they know the challenges. They are on the street. They are the leaders. They are responsible for knowing. I would ask them about their collective threats and challenges, and the best way to deploy resources. I would implore the government to look again at the funding on a permanent basis, because it will be very difficult to negotiate through the provinces or municipalities. I do not know how they will do that, but they will have to deal with that. If they can do that and make this permanent, this will be a huge step toward enhancing what we call the philosophy of integration.
Where are the threats? There are always places that can take up all those resources. You have to look at regions and different threats, but you can look at this intelligently. What resources do we have, and what do we want to attack most that benefits Canada most? If we all just look at our own little area, we will never be more than the sum of our parts. We want to be greater than that and look at Canada as a whole. More and more, you have to look at the threat to Canada, and when we look at that holistically, we all benefit.
I think the police chiefs can come up with good recommendations to the appropriate political masters, and they can make that right decision. I have total confidence that that can be done, but I warn you that 2,500 new officers are not enough to meet all the demands. That is where the major issue will come, and the other issue will be permanent funding of these resources. You really put the leaders of policing in a difficult situation if you say you only have them for two or three years. I think the threat is too important not to do anything, but I would like to see this as the start of some whole new process of a serious funding initiative that I believe has to take place.
Senator Zimmer: You do your research first and then come up with a number.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Yes. The warlords out there want this money. Every province and every municipality can use it up. The question is will it be used to the greatest benefit for the greatest benefit of everyone. It is like organized crime. I had 15 divisions. I could give Ontario or Quebec all the organized crime money, but you have to deal with other parts of the country.
You have to do it intelligently. You have to do your work, and your strategic analysis identifies the issues. It is not someone just deciding, ``I just want to work on this project.'' The intelligence directs your allocation of resources, and it requires dedicated, hard leadership to make that happen; otherwise, it will evaporate on you.
Senator Zimmer: By doing the research, once you get the funding, are you able to place them exactly in the right position?
Mr. Zaccardelli: The government can then hold them accountable. Part of the problem is that there has to be accountability. The RCMP has to be part of that mix, with the municipal and provincial partners and so on. They are more than capable of presenting a strategic plan to the minister, and then the government can make a decision on how to allocate. That is the only way it should be done. If we use any other system, I am afraid it will cause problems.
Senator Zimmer: Then they all have ownership. With increased money and resources abroad, there are requirements for additional accountability and review and oversight by the RCMP. You could get additional revenue, but if it comes with additional responsibilities, you are handcuffed. You are actually moving back. You may get more resources, but with additional responsibilities, you cannot go forward. What are your comments?
Mr. Zaccardelli: In the last number of years is the RCMP received substantial increases of funds from both governments, this government and the past federal government, but then Treasury Board got into a habit of saying, ``We will give you this money, but you can only use it within this narrow silo.'' ``We will give you this pocket of money, and you can only use it within that narrow silo.'' It handcuffed the leaders of policing from using that money. The money has to be given with the flexibility to use it as the situation arises. If we see an opportunity for a partnership or integrated team somewhere, we have to be able to move that money. That is the danger.
Police chiefs are more accountable than any one else. No one is more accountable or held to a higher bar than police forces. We are very accountable. I will stand on that record. When people say we will give you the money but you have to be more accountable, I ask, how do you want me to be more accountable? We are accountable to the courts, to the oversight bodies and to the minister. I heard too many times about being more accountable; I never understood what that meant other than it often came from someone who had never left the beltway of Ottawa.
Senator Zimmer: On page 9 of the Brown report, it states that because of the complexity of the RCMP, given the organization's law enforcements responsibilities in Canada and abroad, it would not be unreasonable to argue that some or all of the solution to issues confronting the force rests in it breaking up. What are your thoughts?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I absolutely totally disagree with it. I cannot believe that statement was made in that report. First, it is grammatically wrong the way they have written it. The notion is that you break up the RCMP because it is too complex. That is a naive and dangerous notion of a group of people that did a report that was so superficial that I am embarrassed that they put their name to it.
Senator Segal: Tell us how you really feel.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Maybe over coffee some time. I do not agree with that recommendation at all.
Senator Zimmer: I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond to that notion.
Senator Moore: Thank you for being here, Mr. Zaccardelli. I have two questions.
In the course of your remarks, when you were talking about 9/11, you said that we fluked into a model that deals with the situation we now face in terms of addressing different types of crime. I did not understand that model. Did it pertain to the RCMP or policing in general across the country?
Mr. Zaccardelli: That is a good point.
Senator Moore: I want to know about that model. If others are coming here to look at it, what is it? I am suggesting it could not have all been a fluke.
Mr. Zaccardelli: What I was referring to was part of my answer to Senator Segal. When I say that is not strategic but more of a fluke, I am talking about the RCMP and the structure and the mandate of the RCMP. When Sir John A. Macdonald set us up, although he envisioned many great things, he did not envision this eventual structure. He set us up as a temporary force; we were supposed to be disbanded.
The fact that the RCMP has federal responsibilities, contractual responsibilities at certain provincial and territorial levels and also has a municipal mandate in certain parts, that is what I meant by a fluke. There was no design, no one sat down and laid out a plan for a federal police force. It simply evolved.
For example, we got into the contracts because of the Depression. The provinces did not have the money in 1928 through until 1932. In 1916, during the First World War when we had to deal with detainees, we had to give up our responsibilities with the contracts. In 1905, we got our first contracts in Alberta and Saskatchewan. They did not have the money. In 1932 the Depression was on. Saskatchewan came back in as did Alberta and New Brunswick. They came to the federal government and said, ``We cannot afford it. Will you start the policing?'' There was not a strategic plan.
Senator Tkachuk: Is there more effective policing in the eight provinces where you have contracts than there is with, say, Ontario and Quebec, which have their own police forces?
Mr. Zaccardelli: No. The RCMP simply happens to do it by contract. I do not believe we are better or worse. We all provide a general level of policing.
Senator Tkachuk: Would there be no difference if every province had its own police force?
Mr. Zaccardelli: No, there would not. However, you would not have one national police force with a presence throughout. You would have separate provincial police forces that would then, because of necessity of today's requirement, have to be working together.
The Chair: Commissioner, you have a better argument than that. Come on. If you had 10 different provincial police forces, you would have silos again, you would have duplication, and you would not have the search capacity where you could bring people back and forth. The contract police work that is done is the best training your people have, and they move from there on into national policing. I should not be giving this commercial, you should be.
Mr. Zaccardelli: I am not disagreeing with you. The fact that we have a national presence enables us to move and do all those things effectively. I am not going to say that we are a better force than another provincial or municipal force.
The Chair: Senator Tkachuk's last question was so, it would not make any difference if there were 10 provincial police forces and you agreed with him.
Mr. Zaccardelli: In terms of the country. . .
Senator Tkachuk: Who is giving the testimony here? I liked your answer, although I did not necessarily agree with it. You gave your answer, so let us continue.
Mr. Zaccardelli: As I said to Senator Segal and Senator Zimmer, I believe the model we have is the best model for this country. That answers the question, overall.
Senator Moore: We were talking about coordinating the resources between the national, provincial and municipal forces. You said that we would need to set up a facilitator to coordinate between all three levels. Have you thought that idea through? Would it be a federal person? What is the mandate? Where does the funding come from, or is that concept just something, you are sky-balling. Have you really gone through that concept?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I have given it a lot of thought over the last number of years. Like I said, in term of the operations we are incredibly integrated and efficient in this country. I said on the HR side there is a great need to do a lot more integration. All police forces are facing recruiting challenges, demographic changes, succession planning stuff and promotion systems. We are all facing those common issues. Why are we all doing them, more or less?
I think we can set something up, but you have to get the key players: The police chiefs have to be there, the police boards are critical and representative of the various levels. Then they have to make a decision.
I think there is a need for leadership. I believe the federal government and Public Safety Canada can provide that impetus to bring people together, not because they are more important or to direct it. I think we can come to a general understanding and agreement on how to do this. If we need to do major research in this country on policing, why do we do it differently from province to province and municipality to municipality?
I think the model from the Home Office in Great Britain is a very good model. It is not perfect, but it is a model where serious people who understand policing run the program. Most of them are civilians, along with secondments, and they actually do some good work. I do not mean to be critical.
Senator Moore: When you were in office, did you look at models like that from other countries to try to enhance your own situation?
Mr. Zaccardelli: I did, and I learned much from them in terms of their research. Unfortunately, in this country Public Safety Canada has not lived up to that type of level of resourcing. They have not, in my view, become the department that they need to become. There is very little added value, if any, by the department in terms of helping police forces and the police chiefs in this country.
The Brown report says we should have more research done in the RCMP. If I had a department like Public Safety Canada or some other department that was doing effective research for me, why would I waste my resources? I would love to keep my resources. I am sure Commissioner Fantino would love to keep his resources, if he knew he was getting something of quality from some national group that had secondment and was working for our benefit. We do not have that in this country. As a matter of fact, at times they work at cross purposes with us.
The Chair: Thank you, Commissioner Zaccardelli for a very passionate, incisive presentation and for the answers that you have given us. We appreciate it. If there is one thing that is very clear, it is your dedication to Canada. I would like to thank you very much for coming before us and assisting us with this study.
Mr. Zaccardelli: Mr. Chairman and senators, it has been a pleasure and I thank you for inviting me and giving me this opportunity. I think together we can make Canada a lot safer than it is.
The Chair: Senators, we will continue our study on first responders. This is a follow-up to our initial report, which was first tabled in 2003. We have before us our second panel: Mr. Julian Fantino, Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police; and Mr. Mike Boyd, Police Chief of the Edmonton Police Services. Both of these gentlemen are here today to speak to us about the resource requirements for key police programs and initiatives in their own jurisdictions. We hope to gain their perspectives on how a lack of resources may impact on a force's ability to deal with emergency management as well as their thoughts on major challenges facing key business lines, including recruiting, training, equipment, infrastructure and attrition.
Julian Fantino, Commissioner, Ontario Provincial Police: Honourable senators, it is a pleasure to be appearing before you on issues of mutual concern. I am pleased to be following Commissioner Zaccardelli and be with my colleague Chief Boyd of the Edmonton Police Services. All of us, as you may gather, have worked tirelessly in the trenches. There is a thread that will no doubt resonate with our submissions about common views on policing issues generally. That will not surprise you at all.
As you know, in previous submissions to you I have emphasized a crucial need for adequate resources. I am pleased to be able to share further views in that regard with you today.
I believe that police officers in this country have performed commendably, dealing with the many current and emerging issues that we have had to deal with, as you well know.
The OPP has a rich history. We are coming up to our one-hundredth anniversary in 2009. Over the years, we have looked after some very significant issues, working with our partners, more recently on the National Day of Action, as well as so many of the First Nations policing issues that we are facing in our province, dealing with land claims and with other situations that we are facing as we move forward.
I will not go through song and verse of my initial comments; you have a copy before you. I do want to spend a little time focusing on some of the more critical issues, namely, this issue about how policing has changed significantly over the years. Much of it has involved great progress in terms of our ability to embrace science and technology to become more efficient and effective, but at the same time I fear that much of our efforts and efficiencies have been taken away by other impacts that we have had to deal with. You have heard about the significant, very real threat of terrorism that we face and organized crime. We also have issues dealing with the high level of international work that we must now undertake in order to keep our business and fulfil our mandate efficiently and effectively.
The police beat of today is no longer local; it is international. The list of things that we need is found on page 3 of my document. However, police are unable to do these things due to the increasing degree of specialization required to combat crime; the greater complexity of cases; the time required to fulfil evidentiary requirements; and the increasingly reactive nature of police work. Commissioner Zaccardelli went into that, so I will not repeat issues arising out of the disclosure, and so on, that we have had to deal with over the years.
The list is quite long. We need police to remain focused on peace and security, although from time to time we are faced with what appear to be local issues, many of the things we are dealing with are really that which polarize our communities from events that take place elsewhere. This past weekend, at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto, there was a significant demonstration arising out of the politics in Kosovo. That is an every day, all-the-time occurrence that we face. We no longer have to police locally; we have to keep our eye on what is happening internationally, especially on things that flare up in our own communities as well.
The OPP has taken a leadership role in many major incidents by providing expertise, human resources, technical resources and planning capabilities where they are needed. The kinds of things we are dealing with are those that we can forecast, but very often we must deploy quickly in order to deal with some of these events.
In my previous job as Commissioner of Emergency Management, I had the opportunity to gain great insight about the perilous world in which we live in terms of manmade, nature-caused or health-borne disasters or emergencies that can happen in which first responders, with the police very much involved, will respond.
If you look at the pandemic scenario and the worst-case scenario, and at our experiences dealing with the SARS outbreak — which was not a pandemic but an epidemic — you will see that such a localized health issue created no end of difficulties for our police agency, the health experts, and so on. We were on the forefront of that epidemic. How do you keep your people coming to work in those situations?
We need the police to combat organized criminal syndicates. Commissioner Zaccardelli talked about that and I could not agree with him more about how challenged we are. There is a blurring now of what is organized crime or criminal activity with that which morphs into terrorism. How is terrorism funded, who is doing the funding, and so on? We are conscious of the fact that not all criminals are terrorists, but certainly, terrorists are criminals. Much of that evolves around the whole notion of organized crime and how organized crime is able to provide finances or is used to obtain finances to achieve that end goal for terrorists as well.
We need the police to fight street gangs. There is a proliferation of young people now going into street gang activity. One must wonder about what is happening with so many of our young people. Predominant numbers of our young people are law abiding, decent, hard-working and conscientious, but there is an element of hard core young people who are resorting to guns, gangs and drugs and that becomes their life. We are facing that scenario right across this land.
The availability of firearms is a serious issue. We see handguns in the hands of these young people, who have a total and absolute predisposition to using these firearms and are prepared to die in the process — something that is very strange to us and difficult to understand. Nevertheless, it is something that we must tackle. We can talk all we want about doing away with firearms, but we must start talking about what is happening to our young people, who are turning to this lifestyle.
Our fraud investigations consist of very complex, multijurisdictional and transnational fraudulent schemes that result in significant financial losses to individuals, corporations and the various levels of government and that very often target seniors and so forth.
We have to develop new ways of doing business. Jeffrey Robinson stated:
As long as we live in a world where a seventeenth century philosophy of sovereignty is reinforced by an eighteenth century judicial model, defended by a nineteenth century concept of law enforcement that is still trying to come to terms with twentieth century technology, the twenty-first century will belong to transnational criminals.
I could not agree more. I want to be clear that senior police leaders in Canada live that reality every day in making ends meet, trying to find a balance and trying to dedicate the resources where we can have the most impact.
We are doing a lot of work to elevate our effectiveness in terms of the work that we do in joint operations. Provincial organized crime enforcement teams and border enforcement security teams are relatively new innovations available to us when the funding was allocated. We are now developing some significant ties and links with our federal counterparts in the United States. Ontario happens to be contiguous to five border crossings, so we are working closely with some of the folks in the United States. If I were to give you an inventory of the amount of contraband that now travels back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, you would be as startled as I am by the commodities that we are able to seize. I fear that the ones we are not able to deal with is so much of what goes back and forth.
These are all significant issues. Marijuana grow enforcements teams is another area where we have dedicated people, as well as the provincial weapons enforcement unit; and I could go on. All of this is labour intensive. We are trying to be more strategic and intelligence-led in terms of targeting and dismantling these organizations, but there is no end to the work.
You would be surprised to know that in an ordinary traffic stop, police officers are coming across all kinds of contraband and hundreds of thousands of dollars that are directly linked to organized crime. The work that then goes into that is quite extensive and significant. When we are finished dealing with those enterprises of organized crime and have spent all kinds of resources as a police agency to investigate those, we do not get one red nickel of it once it is seized. Some inequalities need to be addressed. If we are doing the work, we should be compensated in some way.
Child sexual exploitation work on the Internet is a difficult and serious issue. You saw what we were able to do recently through a significant collaborative effort. We were able to do the work because, in our case, the provincial government dedicated $5 million to enable us to put our best investigators forward to deal with these dastardly crimes committed against children — the most vulnerable people in our society.
As well, we can look at U.S. based computer crime. Many frauds committed against our elderly citizens are based and driven by organized crime. We see that the use of the computer is increasingly becoming a greater and more difficult problem for us. Just to further illustrate the problem, consider that Equifax and TransUnion, two major credit bureaus, receive 1,400 to 1,800 Canadian identity theft complaints each month. That is the kind of work that we face.
Our capacity to support these investigations is a major concern because we need to dedicate people to this kind of work. This capacity is also predicated on how much work we have to do to prepare these cases for court. For example, large electronic media storage adds exponential volumes of time when conducting computer analyses. In one recent Canadian investigation, we had to examine a seizure of 4.3 terabytes of data. That represented 160 stacks of paper, each the height of the CN Tower. That is what we have to deal with. All of these resources are not on the street because they have been sucked up by this exponentially growing, labour intensive and highly technical work that our people need to do. It is not just the police officer on the beat but it is all the dramatic increases that we have to deal with.
In 2005, there were 207 requests for service that had to deal with some of our work with our international partners, and those requests are growing significantly. We receive many requests for follow-up investigations from police agencies elsewhere in the world.
The Chair: Chief Fantino, you have given an exhaustive presentation and you have spoken for a while so I would ask the committee for permission to add your written presentation to the record of the evening's discussion.
Hon. Senators: Agreed.
The Chair: We will take it as read.
Michael Boyd, Police Chief, Edmonton Police Service: I join Commissioner Fantino in thanking you for the opportunity to make this presentation, to answer any questions and to be of assistance to you. I will make a few additional remarks to add to the collective presentation you have heard today.
Policing has a four-part mandate: crime prevention, maintenance of social order, enforcement of our laws and enhancing and addressing matters of public safety. Changes arise out of the changes in the world today that affect all of society. I will cover those off for you because you might find them interesting. There have been changes in many sectors of society: the socio-cultural sector, the government sector; the economic condition sector; in technology; the market sector and the financial sector. You heard Mr. Zaccardelli refer to changes in the human resources sector. There have been changes to the industry sector, the international sector and even in the raw material sector in Canada; just think of the diamond industry in the North. Policing is on the cutting edge of change in our society, whether we want to be or not. We are there and we must deal with these changes.
Today, I will speak not only as the Chief of the Edmonton Police Service but also as the Co-chair of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Emergency Management Committee, which includes not only police leaders but also representatives from the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs and Chiefs of Emergency Medical Services. I am also a member of North America's Major Cities Police Chiefs Association. In my Canadian capacity, I have had discussions with American colleagues who believe in and wish to see more Canadian collaboration on the policing front.
Since September 11, 2001, it is a gross understatement to say that the profile of emergency preparedness in North America has dramatically increased. Due to both human-caused events and natural disasters associated mostly with the weather, we have done a great deal in the past few years to address that preparedness. However, so much more is yet needed to be done.
I want to point out that it is not all about money. Certainly, money is a factor but it is not all about money. It is about the need for leadership — leadership at the federal level between Canada and the United States and leadership nationally between the different orders of government and the different leaders of policing and the 9-1-1 emergency services. This is the position of the 9-1-1 first responders — EMS, fire and the police.
The challenges are around cross-border interoperability planning, governance, policy and perhaps legislation, strategic planning, interoperability and technology, training together and equipment. When I talk about training together, I am not always talking about table-top exercises; I am talking about training together in the field.
Given that Canada and the United States are neighbours sharing the same continent, U.S. law enforcement officials working together in seven major urban centres recently expressed interest in collaborating with Canadian police officials in their ``all-hazards'' approach to emergency preparedness. The United States has created fusion centres in large urban areas, such as New York and Los Angeles, et cetera. The U.S. is presently more coordinated in this way. Canada, although integrated, because of the changes in our structures is not quite integrated in that same way — although I think we are doing a pretty good job.
Addressing the needs of 9-1-1 first responders and their families is an important lesson learned from previous disasters in Canada and the United States. If communities expect first responders to address the disasters, some comfort and priority has to be put on the needs of first responders and their families. Currently, this has not been a priority, and I think we need to do start doing so.
Presently, there is no Canadian equipment and resource inventory similar to the one developed by the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. This means that for first responders, we do not know what Canada has across the country. Therefore, we do not know what we need to acquire to prepare for or deal with the all-hazards emergencies. In other words, Canada may have acquired some of this equipment. We just do not all know across the country what is available in the country should we need to use that.
Although research is being conducted by the Centre for Security Science and the Canadian Police Research Centre, we do not have a research inventory of available research worldwide, or a process to initiate research to aid practitioners in the field.
There are some situations, such as CBRNE, where 9-1-1 first responder specialists are needed. There are a limited number of people in the country with these credentials. In situations where sustaining a response beyond 72 hours is necessary, 9-1-1 first responders may need to come from other parts of Canada where agreements are not already in place addressing the question of their lawful authority or status to operate in another jurisdiction and/or addressing the issue of their legal indemnity. Although there have been ongoing discussions for several years about legislation enabling peace officers to move between jurisdictions while maintaining their status, there are few agreements in place presently permitting that movement.
Also presently, there is no skills inventory in Canada to identify 9-1-1 first responders with skills in certain fields. In emergency situations where resources are scarce, this is insufficient. Presently, there is a lack of training for senior people in emergency response agencies and no common language in emergency situations. This can be problematic.
Currently, there are few elected officials that have received training in emergency preparedness. It can be helpful to emergency leaders in the various jurisdictions when emergencies arise.
There is also the never-ending issue of interoperability of communications. We have not resolved the issue of being able to talk with one another when we need to work together, especially in an emergency.
Last, there is not the funding available at the local level to cover the costs associated with training and equipping 9- 1-1 first responders to do what they will be expected to do in some of these emergency situations.
I have some ideas. The following initiatives are doable, and the 9-1-1 first responder community is already at the table awaiting other necessary partners to join with us. We want to move forward.
We need to initiate increased collaboration with our American colleagues around all-hazards emergency situations, both human-caused and natural disasters. The door is open with the United States to engage in that work. Funding would be helpful as no single agency can do this on behalf of Canadian policing.
A Canadian equipment and resource inventory, complete with the appropriate security measures, is necessary, along with the lexicon to ensure a common language. This would be best led by the federal government and supported nationally by all the provinces, regions and municipalities. This inventory should also include the commercial and military equipment in Canada. If they build it, we will come.
Acknowledging and addressing the needs of first responders and their families is a priority to plan for and deliver on. This should be built into our planning and actions when the emergency is declared.
We need to resolve the issue of 9-1-1 first responders working in other jurisdictions where they maintain their authority and have the legal indemnification supporting that. This could be done legislatively by the federal government under declarations where policies and conditions justify that.
Canada needs to have a skills inventory, which could be led in the same way that the equipment and resource inventory could be created. This inventory, as with the equipment and resource inventory, must tie into protocols and governance which is not yet in place.
We need to have more capacity for providing training of senior levels of agencies that provide emergency response. A national strategic commanders' course with cross-agency training to facilitate incident management focusing on the level 400 IMS would address that void.
Last, training for elected officials is important to have an understanding and a level of confidence around the field of emergency preparedness and emergency management. Some jurisdictions already provide this training. Programs have already been designed and are presently being delivered. We will not need to reinvent the wheel; we just need to share it with jurisdictions that do not already have it.
The police community, the fire-fighting community and the emergency medical services community are already collaborating because we know that we must work together. We must plan together because we know that we will be in the field and in the trenches together when this happens. What we would like to urge the different orders of government to do is unite in the same way that the different levels of policing — the RCMP, the provincial, municipal and regional police services across the country — have come together to find that leadership to work together as we are doing.
What we really need now is to have the different orders of government come together the same way that the police, fire and EMS communities have done at the different levels so that we can move forward on the things that are not yet done and very seriously need to be looked at.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: First of all, I would like to thank our two witnesses, Commissioner Fantino and Police Chief Boyd for the quality of their presentations. I think that they will be very useful for the committee's work.
Before we go into detail, in general — and my question is for each of you — a few months ago in the Speech from the Throne, the government announced that it was going to provide extra funds to create 2,500 new police positions across Canada. Not just for the RCMP — I am sure that was not the government's intention — but for all police forces in the country. We know that creating 2,500 new positions will present a challenge. You heard Mr. Zaccardelli speak about the recruiting challenge just now. In your areas of responsibility, how do you see the federal government's offer to create 2,500 new police positions?
[English]
Mr. Fantino: That is a very valid question and one that we have been asking for quite some time. I am sure that the announcement was well-intentioned. The problem is how we do it or how will the government deliver on that one promise.
There are some obvious solutions. The position taken by ministers across the land is that the federal government fully and sustainably fund it. We cannot afford to take even a 5 per cent hit in providing more resources to make this happen. Therefore, the criterion is 100 per cent sustainable funding from the federal government. We have taken the position that the way to divide the funding would be to do it on a prorated basis to the population of each province and then let the provinces figure out how that will unfold. That is the Ontario position and I wholeheartedly support it.
I should also mention that Ontario went through a similar situation with a 1,000 police officer announcement. We went through the same kind of machinations for the longest time. One thousand police officers are now serving with sustainable funding from the province. It took a long time in planning to make it happen. I fear that if we do not get on with it, this will never happen.
One thousand police officers were put in place in Ontario police services. The OPP did not get any of those officers, although I was not squawking because I was Chief of the Toronto Police Service at the time.
[Translation]
Senator Nolin: Commissioner Fantino, I would like to talk a little more specifically about the whole area of emergency management. We heard Police Chief Boyd — his brief was relatively full of information on the matter — but I would like to hear about your force's responsibility, given that you are the largest police force in the country after the RCMP. What is the role of the Ontario Provincial Police in emergency management, and how ready are you to play that role? I know your experience in the area, and I am sure that members of the committee will benefit from it.
[English]
Mr. Fantino: The situation in Ontario is that we have an Emergency Management Unit that takes into account planning strategies, intervening with respect to making connections with resources and doing all of that networking. People in the field carry out the actual work. In Ontario, we have the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Unit, HUSAR, which is now mandated to travel across the country. I believe there is one in Vancouver as well. They help in other areas where there are structural failures that require rescue operations. We have the CBRN to the level 3, which is a high level of response to chemical, biological and nuclear substance threats.
The actual work is done by fire, EMS and, invariably, the police services. Therefore, we train together and work very closely, but we do not have a FEMA system in this country. The work as we know it in the United States allocated to FEMA is done by first responder's — police fire and EMS.
Senator Nolin: We heard Chief Boyd talk about the necessity for statutory protection for people performing under such an umbrella. In Ontario, do you have a statutory protection system or must it come from Ottawa?
Mr. Fantino: We have the requirement to ensure health and worker safety is in place. We train and deploy as required, but there is no statutory requirement to do anything in that sense.
Senator Nolin: Chief Boyd, maybe you can explain your recommendation.
Mr. Boyd: We are talking about 9-1-1 emergency responders, in particular, the police who have the authority within one jurisdiction. If we were going to respond and assist in an actual disaster in some other part of the country where additional police resources and perhaps specific expertise are needed, our police officers could not automatically jump to the different provinces and be lawfully authorized to carry out their duties. It would require some form of agreement and there are very few agreements set up in Canada to do that now. Therefore, we need to deal with that issue where years ago it was not required. In today's world, we do need to be able to do that.
Mr. Fantino: Ontario and Quebec have a mutual aid agreement dealing with emergency management response. However, that is between us. We worked this out, but there is no federally mandated authority.
For instance, if one of my police officers goes to work in Edmonton, in order for that officer to function in that jurisdiction, he has to receive authority. I do the same with other police officers from other jurisdictions coming to Ontario, but it is on a one-off basis.
Senator Nolin: Could either of you address the question of accessing new recruits? What challenges do you face?
Mr. Boyd: I think every police service in the country faces this challenge at one time or another. When I was in Toronto, they moved on the bubble a few years earlier than what I am seeing now in Edmonton, Alberta. For the last three years, with one a half more years to go, a significant number of police members have retired because they have completed 25 or more years of service. They are leaving now and we have the increased challenge of hiring new recruits at a time when fewer people, as Mr. Zaccardelli said, are interested in coming into policing.
Many of us are recruiting at the same time, we are all recruiting from the same pool of people across the country, and that is making it very difficult. We are achieving our numbers and we feel that we are lucky in doing so. However, I know there are other police services that are struggling. Therefore, we need to be thinking about the future of policing as the world changes.
Mr. Fantino: In Toronto — and Chief Boyd was there during this period — in 2003-04, the Toronto Police Service lost in the area of 700 police officers through attrition and other issues. That was in two years. It was a big challenge and, as was pointed out, we experienced that ahead of some of the other organizations who are currently dealing with similar circumstances.
The Chair: Could you clarify the problems that come up if you do not have an agreement and are sending people to another jurisdiction? If you needed to send people to British Columbia or Saskatchewan, what sorts of risks are involved? Describe the problems that you need the legislation to address.
Mr. Boyd: In Alberta, we have an agreement with Saskatchewan, but not with Manitoba. If they went ahead and made arrests under the same authority that they do in the Alberta, they would be doing something that would not be authorized by law. They would have no more than the powers of a citizen.
The Chair: Are there also liability questions?
Mr. Boyd: Absolutely. That is why I raised the importance of indemnification.
Mr. Fantino: When we have major national events, we all have to chip in and help. In those circumstances, if the RCMP is the lead agency, our members are sworn in as special constables for the purpose of that one assignment. I am forever signing delegation of authority to the police officers coming into Ontario from elsewhere in the country to do police work. We have faced the same issues when we had some of our officers deployed in Gatineau, for instance, for President Bush's visit. These are huge issues for us.
As Commissioner Zaccardelli said, the British seem to have realized that there is this one overarching need for us to have some national policy with respect to how we can do policing in a blended way across the country.
The Chair: Does the vehicle of ``special constable'' provide all the protections you need?
Mr. Fantino: Senator, there is no protection from being sued these days. Some of the legally-trained people know what that is all about. However, it does protect the member, enabling her or him to carry out lawful police duties in that province where normally they would not be able to do so.
The Chair: Do you both pay your cadets-in-training?
Mr. Fantino: We are doing that now, but there is some talk about moving away from that. However, there are different variations of that; different departments are facilitating training in different ways. Generally speaking, I believe that most are supporting the cadets as they go through their training.
Mr. Boyd: We are currently paying our cadets-in-training and we need to do that in order to stay competitive.
Senator Nolin: I want to go back to provincial authority versus the federal authority to cover police work outside your province. Perhaps you can put something in writing to give us more details of what you really need.
I am trying to find out which federal statute would cover that. I can understand the provincial statute doing it, but how does the federal statute do that? There is a question of jurisdiction.
Why do not you file something in writing? Perhaps you can go back to the office and get the proper reasoning behind your recommendation and we would explore that properly.
Senator Tkachuk: I do not think we can do it with carpenters let alone police officers.
The Chair: One step at a time.
If we could have that assistance it would be great.
Senator Nolin: Commissioner Fantino, when you sent the police force to Montebello, I am sure there was some kind of agreement with your counterpart in Quebec.
Mr. Fantino: In the past, when we engaged in a significant way with large numbers of resources, we usually got a guarantee up front that we would be compensated. It is hard for any of us to take hundreds of police officers outside of their own jurisdiction because you have to backfill that void.
I should also mention that we are in the same boat. We are in the same predicament dealing with situations that we have experienced in Caledonia, for instance. I am sure that is not a news item to you. We have had to seek out other police agencies to help us.
The OPP is not inclined to sends bills but I am thinking about it now.
The Chair: Could you assist us on this matter?
Mr. Fantino: I can. I do not know how deeply you want me to get into this, but the First Nations policing issues are a huge challenge for us.
The Chair: It was not Caledonia but the issue of transfer to which I was referring.
Mr. Boyd: I want to suggest that whether, in the final analysis, it was an opportunity for the federal government to do or whether this is one of those tasks that between the different orders of government there is a resolution for, it needs to be done.
Senator Nolin: We are trying to ensure we recommend something that is legal.
Senator Moore: I want to go back to the situation with regard to the first responders and their families.
Let us talk about the SARS situation. When that epidemic broke, did some medical officer come to Chief Fantino and say, ``This is what we have. Your people cannot be exposed to this. You have to take these precautions.'' How does that happen? How do you know how far you can go near a situation without endangering your people? Does someone tell you what you facing and what you have to wear? Does that coordination happen? Did it happen in the SARS situation?
Mr. Fantino: It happened piecemeal. First of all, we did not know what we were facing. Chief Boyd was intimately involved as well, but when that first happened, I did not think for one moment that we, the police, were going to be impacted in any significant way at all. It was a health issue and that was how we saw it at the outset.
Very quickly, it became a police issue because there were then quarantine orders that people were not obeying. Who enforces the quarantine orders? There was also the issue of kinds of equipment needed, keeping your people informed so as they will come to work and will continue doing their work. Then there were restrictions placed on hospital visits. People, of course, who had their loved ones in palliative care and in the last days of their lives were not about to be told they could not go and visit their loved ones in the hospital. Therefore, we had to put police officers at the hospitals, as well.
Very quickly it became a huge problem for us. Then the thing that struck us significantly was when the source was identified at one local hospital and the 10-day quarantine was called. We had to identify every police officer that had contact with that hospital during whatever periods of time, and they had to be quarantined at home. Therefore, suddenly we were short 100 and some odd people basically on the turn of a dime.
Senator Moore: In that situation, commissioner, can you say, ``Well, I know my friend, Chief Boyd. I will give him a call and see if he can spare 50 and ask another friend in Quebec, as well.'' Can you do that or does this go back to the jurisdiction situation whereby they cannot come in because they cannot enforce the law because they are not legislated to do so?
Mr. Fantino: That is exactly right. They can come in and help out — no doubt we would help one another out. We have in the past. However, when you are talking about authority that is where that jurisdictional caveat comes in. We have to give the people the authority to do their work, carry their firearms and enforce the laws, if that is the case. We do not have that across this land. Chief Boyd is quite right that we need to have this overarching business attended to. It is not just about the funding about but the authority.
Senator Moore: You made excellent recommendations in both your presentations. There were some good ideas and some things that I thought were in place.
You were both here during Commissioner Zaccardelli's presentation. He mentioned that we would have to put in place a facilitator. I do not know if he fully thought that through. However, he is probably expressing the same frustration or recognizing the need for some kind of umbrella person or structure to oversee what you know has to be done, to meet a situation like the SARS epidemic. Have you thought that through? Can it be done with the structures that we have now?
I we had the legislation to permit officers to go from Alberta to Ontario, who would give the okay? Is it the law; is it some person or some place you contact to say, ``Look, we need so and so.'' Can you get them? How would that work?
Mr. Boyd: We might find a situation in Ontario where a certain skill set is needed at an emergency. In Alberta, it would be fair to say that our officers have received CBRNE training to deal with petrochemical matters. That is one of the issues in Ontario and perhaps they do not have enough of their own officers to get them through the first 72 hours. They might need backup and a phone call to Edmonton would be enough for me to recognize the urgency and to offer assistance if we did not already have that kind of problem in Edmonton. There would then be the technicalities around when those officers may go to that area of Ontario.
Senator Moore: There is still the compensation thing, too. That is important from everyone's budgetary viewpoint. If you have to send in half a dozen men and women, someone will have to pay. If you are taking them out of service here, who will cover that off?
Mr. Boyd: When we are dealing with a smaller number of issues, one-off situations, both the police leaders and the people who we serve in our communities recognize that you have to share and help one another. I do not think that is normally an issue on a small scale. On a larger scale, of course, it would be a practical reality because we have commitments to our people.
We are trying to point out that as leaders between the 9-1-1 emergency services and the different orders or levels of policing, we work quite well together to figure out many of these things, but we need a hand. We need a hand with the non-policing issues. Often when we expect that leadership to be there, it is not there in the same way to help and support us to accomplish what the Canadian public knows we need to look after.
Senator Moore: With regard to recruiting, Chief Boyd, you mentioned that we are all drawing from the same pool. Was it your department or was it Calgary that was recruiting in Nova Scotia in the last year?
Mr. Fantino: Do not answer that.
Mr. Boyd: We are recruiting all over the country and beyond the borders of Canada. We hired eight police officers from Manchester, England.
Senator Moore: I did not know if it was you or if it was Chief MacLeod in Calgary, who was from Cape Breton. I thought it might have been him.
Senator Banks: I will cover old ground briefly because I do not understand. When a police officer is made a constable and given the authority to stop, question and arrest someone, for example, or to do other things that police constables in this country need to be able to do, from where does that authority emanate? Is it the province in or is it the municipality in which that officer is being empowered?
Can one of your officers, Commissioner Fantino, go into North Bay and arrest someone in the event there is a municipal thing that needs to be done there now, today, without additional authority? Chief Boyd, can a Calgary police officer come to Edmonton and make an arrest without gaining additional authority? In other words, you have been talking about interprovincial problems. Are there intra-provincial problems?
Mr. Fantino: The simple answer for the Ontario Provincial Police is we have provincial authority. In actual fact, so do municipal police officers. In the case of Ontario, we are all governed under what is known as the Police Services Act, which is a provincial statute. Our authority to use force and all those kinds of things come from the Criminal Code of this land. Jurisdictionally, we are police officers for a certain jurisdiction. However, as a police officer in Toronto, for example, we have the authority bestowed upon us by the province. We could exercise that authority beyond that but it is normally not done; we are very respectful of other jurisdictions.
In the case of the provincial police, the reality is that we are all over the province and we do operate in all jurisdictions, including when called upon to do investigations or to help other agencies within the province. That is something we do on an ongoing basis.
Senator Banks: What about city to city?
Mr. Boyd: As far as I am aware, it is the same right across the country. Officers are sworn in for the province or the territory in which they are serving.
Senator Banks: Using Britain is not a good example because it is a unitary state; it does not have the jurisdictional problems that we have as far as provinces are concerned.
Mr. Boyd: The example might seem to be minor in nature, but, for example, if a police officer from Alberta, where we do not have the Special Investigations Unit, went to Ontario to assist, where they do have the Special Investigations Unit, would that officer be subject to inclusion in an investigation by the Special Investigations Unit? That is just one example. When you think through all of the possible scenarios, it is a little more complicated and it is something that needs to be resolved.
Senator Nolin: The Province of Ontario would include those persons in their operation. That is how it works. The nature of Canada is that the administration of justice is provincial. I understand that the powers are under the Criminal Code, but what you are explaining is really the administration of justice. We should not spend too much time on that. Send us material in writing and we will dissect that and try to make it work.
Mr. Fantino: There are also some anomalies in First Nations policing communities as well.
The Chair: The think the message that Senator Nolin is giving is that the committee is sympathetic to the concerns you have raised. If we could have some more background, we would be grateful.
Senator Moore: You said something with regard to reserves. Do you have the authority to go on to a reserve and enforce the law, whether in an emergency situation or not?
Mr. Fantino: In an emergency situation, we most definitely will respond, but it gets into a grey area beyond that because it is sovereign territory. There are all kinds of historical agreements. In Ontario, we have 134 First Nations communities and 19 of those communities are directly policed by the OPP. These are done on agreements with the council, and so on. Ontario has nine agreements with self-directed police agencies that operate on reserve territory. There are all kinds of issues there because they are not subject to the same standards of accountability. The Special Investigations Unit does not apply to them and there are other issues as well, but we supplement them.
The other thing to remember is that the funding formula, which is 52 per cent federal and 48 per cent provincial, is absolutely inadequate because it looks after only a minimal police presence in those communities.
The funding for policing on reserves puts a few people in police cars and those people are doing their best. However, if there is a need for any other elevated investigative or tactical response or other investigative requirements, we end up responding to the need.
Senator Moore: In an emergency that has a huge impact on your.
Mr. Fantino: It has a huge impact on us.
Senator Moore: As well, there are matters of authority and jurisdiction.
Mr. Fantino: There is also the remoteness of these communities to consider, many of which are fly-in communities. This whole issue has to be addressed in the context of public safety, policing, and the kinds of work we need to do in those communities in terms of prevention and the many programs not available to them.
Senator Banks: Successive reports by this committee have recommended that there have to be ways to address funding shortfalls. I will ask you about one in particular. During the previous government and this government, we heard a great deal about joint emergency preparedness program, JEPP funding, of CBRNE responses, et cetera.
It is all very well to give someone a great big machine or equipment but who will pay for its maintenance and for training the people to run it properly? When it comes to matters of national security, however that is defined, much of this comes down to the federal government. Could you comment on that?
Why is it that when anyone says we need more police officers, it is thrown at the federal government because it is either a provincial or a municipal responsibility in the first case. Corollary to that, how much of the JEPP money, that kind of post 9/11 federal money, has filtered down to you for equipment, training, human resources and other necessities?
Mr. Fantino: In my previous job as Commissioner of Emergency Management, I administered the fund. It is minimal and is used for odds and ends such as equipment, as you pointed out. It amounts to only a percentage of the total cost and has made a $25,000 contribution from the JEPP grant. There is not a lot of substance to those grants. It is minimal and is not a motivator for people to either buy or not buy a certain piece of emergency equipment that might be necessary to do the job.
You may recall, senator, that when I appeared before the committee on another occasion I spoke to the need to do an inventory of where we spent all the money — what we bought and what we did not buy. Billions of dollars have been thrown at this. The Americans purchased all kinds of equipment, not because it was necessary to do so, but because the funds were available. I am not saying that happened here but I sure would like to know where all the money has gone.
Senator Banks: It is quite a bit of money. We have heard complaints across the country, literally from sea to sea to sea. When it comes to sending people to actual exercises for practical application, rather than table top application, some provinces, municipalities, and some heads of agencies have been loath to do that because it means that the person will be gone for a couple of weeks and will have to be backfilled. Are you getting help from any federal programs?
Mr. Boyd: No, I am not aware of any federal assistance. Recently, we had occasion to deal with one of the high officials from Canada Command who was in British Columbia working on the floods. We had a good discussion about doing some meaningful field exercises whereby officers could take the knowledge they learned and apply it to the real world. It is costly to go through those exercises and often you are taking people away from the limited resources for policing in order to do it. Certainly, the cost of that and the funding support is not in the municipalities.
Mr. Fantino: I should cite a positive example of how things should work. Forest fires are serious life-threatening situations that often require a whole set of responses, strategies and resources. There is an agreement in place between the provinces and many U.S. states for a blended response such that the training is done jointly and all the equipment is compatible. The management of any major event is seamless. I recall attending a huge forest fire up in Armstrong, Ontario, during my time as Commissioner of Emergency Management. The on-the-ground situational commander in charge was a fire boss from Alberta. The water bombers were from Quebec. The working firefighters on the ground were from Ontario and Saskatchewan. The whole effort was seamless. We need to have such a seamless deployment system in place to deal with policing issues.
Post Hurricane Katrina, when there was such a convergence of help deployed to New Orleans and area, they found that there was not a mechanism to strategically control, regulate and deploy these resources. Now, they are working toward an agreement similar to the one I mentioned where we identify the resources and develop management structure in place to deploy those resources in emergency stricken areas. We want to do the same kind of initiative here.
Senator Banks: That is consistent with Mr. Zaccardelli's remarks.
You said that we are getting very good at creating joint forces to target specific kinds of crime and that we are improving efficiencies. Then, in the next paragraph you said that unfortunately these joint forces operations have a negative consequence. Are you talking about the personnel?
Mr. Fantino: That is a good question. I was talking about the ability to sustain joint forces. We have to have sustainable funding. We are taking people from the front line and we have funding that will enable to us do a project. As I mentioned earlier, with $5 million we were able to bring together 18 different Ontario police departments to deal with child pornography on the Internet. We met with great results but we need sustainable funding because those people were doing other jobs that someone else has to do, or we do not do them any more.
Senator Banks: The negative consequence was a personnel and money issue.
Mr. Fantino: Yes.
The Chair: We have talked about an inventory of assets and a repository of best practices. We have not talked about national communications and about funding for exercises. Are you looking to Public Safety Canada or any another department or agency for that to happen?
Mr. Boyd: I see that as something the federal government could look at seriously. If the federal government felt it was not a national responsibility to have that kind of communications equipment available, to fly into some of these places within 24 hours or sooner, it would, at the very least, be something that the federal and provincial governments should look at. I think the federal government should look at that, although that is my own opinion.
The Chair: Commissioner, would that be better than having the JEPP or a continuation of that program?
Mr. Fantino: Anything at all would, senator. The joint emergency preparedness program has very limited funding and a limited scope of access to it as well. We need to do this inventory, as I spoke of in prior appearances before your committee. We need to find out where everything is and have this overarching corporate view of managing these serious emergency events and being able to deploy in a seamless way.
As I stated earlier, one of the difficulties we have is even though you have resources you want to dedicate, you still have to do your work back home. That production line never stops; but we do not have the buffer, the depth of resources, to enable us to be flexible.
The Chair: Are you looking to Public Safety Canada for this funding or do you think it should come from some other agency?
Mr. Fantino: We do not want to create more bureaucracies. We just need to look at what we have and how to utilize the resources to deploy people where they are needed.
For instance, for preparation, on June 29 of last year, on the National Day of Action we looked at every contingency. We had a plan in Ontario where the OPP would deal with issues at the outset and local police jurisdictions would deal with issues at the local level. If things escalated, then we had an inventory of resources that we could call upon, prearranged, to help us. If things really escalated, we could go to the RCMP; if they escalated further than that, we could go to the military. We did these things on our own.
Obviously, terrorism is a primary responsibility of the federal government. We know that, but we have to keep in mind that terrorism is a local event and the people to respond to that will be local people.
The Chair: What difference have you seen since Canada Command has been stood up?
Mr. Fantino: There has been a great deal of improvement, a tremendous amount of goodwill and the willingness to work with civil authorities. Because of Canada Command — and Ontario command, in our case — we are assured that we will get a substantive response. We plan together, we talk and work the issues through; it is a huge improvement for us.
The Chair: Chief Boyd, have you had the same positive experience?
Mr. Boyd: Yes, Edmonton is a military town and the land forces are there. We work well together anyway, but we are grateful for that relationship because they are there on a phone call if we need their involvement.
Senator Segal: I want to talk about remote areas, not just in the context of grow ops and those kinds of difficulties, but in the context of border security, of not having people in many areas to report back on what is going on in terms of a civilian population. We are seeing a depopulation of our rural areas across the country.
Commissioner Fantino, is the OPP deploying new technology to be contextually aware of what is going on in these remote areas where the population has dropped? Close to 96 per cent of our population in Ontario is in the cities. There are huge expanses of territory without any people in them at all, which constitutes a security risk by definition. Are you happy with what the OPP is able to do in that context?
Mr. Fantino: No, I am never happy because we are always looking for better ways to utilize our resources or effect our mandate. One of the problems we have is the remoteness of so much of the territory that we have to police, so we do that with boats, all-terrain vehicles, Ski-Doos, cars and airplanes.
As an example, we have police officers patrolling in very remote areas and their backup is an hour away. We have communications issues, where the communications are difficult at the best of times. We have had cases where it has taken our tactical people the better part of 12 hours to respond to a northern community involving an armed and barricaded individual. We had difficultly in finding a plane to get specialists up there; our ability to do all of that is very much constrained.
Senator Segal: In terms of the day-to-day burden that includes normal criminal activity such as property crimes, gangs and the rest, are the majority of the subjects of your inquiries and actions poor people, middle-income people, et cetera?
Mr. Fantino: Speaking for the OPP, we arrest over 10,000 people a year across the province for impaired driving. This is just in OPP-policed areas. That is just as a ``for instance,'' and that touches all classes.
Senator Segal: Is that the largest group of people that you detain?
Mr. Fantino: Of any one particular crime, that would be the highest, yes. The diversity of that is something I could not even begin to tell you about, but just think about that — 10,000 people in the Province of Ontario arrested by the OPP alone for impaired driving.
Clearly, social and economic conditions have great deal to do with young people and especially their opportunities. I can tell you, for instance, in First Nations communities, with the whole business of suicides by young people, those kinds of issues are very disconcerting to us. I think the socio-economic conditions and the lack of opportunities do very much impact their lives.
Then there is the whole business of drugs infiltrating communities. The organized crime element is quite astute at finding marketplaces of very vulnerable communities. Organized crime finds its way into many of the social housing areas where they target, and victimize those people. I would say that social and economic conditions have great deal to do with it, especially with regard to some of the gangs, guns and drugs subculture.
Mr. Boyd: I think that one thing that is hurting both our Canadian cities and rural communities is drug dependence, and the drug dependent repeat offenders.
I want to be very clear here; I am not talking about the illegal possession of drugs. I am talking about the drug- dependent individuals who are not gainfully employed. They need to commit crimes to get the money to buy the drugs to feed their habit. If there is anything that I could say that is tying police down, it is working on the same drug dependent people every day. This is a problem and our system is not really dealing with it very well. It ties up our officers.
Senator Segal: I want to come back to the challenge of choices that you both face in the discharge of your obligations to the Crown in your own jurisdictions. I remember Solicitor General Claude Wagner of Quebec who was seen as a crime-fighting solicitor general. As a young researcher on his staff, I once asked him, how he put together his campaign to fight organized crime. He replied that it was simple: you get the guys from homicide, vice, and anti- racketeering and you put them all together in a task force and you go at a particular group of suspects as best you can for a period of time. You invest heavily and arrest some kingpins. You break up some networks and push the forces of darkness back. Then you have to put those people back where they were in homicide, in vice and in anti-racketeering because no one can afford to give you those people all the time. They have another job to do, which is just as important.
Commissioner Fantino says there were 10,000 arrests for impaired driving. I know how important impaired driving is, why it has to be stopped, what a danger it is and that the law is the law with regard to the Highway Traffic Act and the Criminal Code. I am not suggesting there is anything ``unserious'' about impaired driving; it is very serious. However, do you not have to make choices about deploying resources? If you had the freedom to deploy more people on the drug side or on grow-ops or the anti-gang squad, would you. Are you constrained by limited resources? Are there ever enough resources in that context?
Mr. Fantino: There are never enough resources. I think you know we are strapped doing what we need to do today. However, impaired driving is the leading cause of criminal death in Canada. It is something we have to take into account. The death from a traffic fatality results in a $2 million hit on the community and the family through the loss of productivity, health costs, et cetera. We have to stay focused on this very serious crime.
In that context, we have made every OPP officer responsible for traffic safety in the province whether it is a detective, a commissioner or whoever. It is a matter of harnessing the resources you have to focus on this particular issue. Clearly, drugs are a problem. Gangs and guns are a serious issue.
I want to raise one other issue if I may on this item. This cannot be left to the police. There is a huge expectation on the police that we deal with this whole crime issue, law and order and public safety. In actual fact, we need to move to a more strategic place and find the mechanism in our society to do more prevention and education. We need to ensure that we have the infrastructure and resources in place to keep young people from turning to these non-productive and often criminal ways of life. That is the big challenge for us. If there is one entity that is working very hard, it is the men and women in the trenches doing the heavy lifting.
As commissioner, Mr. Zaccardelli raised that we need more partnerships with the rest of the society to throw into the mix. We are social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, medics and on it goes. There is too much of an expectation for a young police officer do be all those things and not ask the question where is everyone else?
Mr. Boyd: At the outset of my remarks, I talked about the 10 environmental factors that have an influence on policing. You hear some people talk in black and white terms about how crime is down in the country and why do we need the number of police officers that we have. There are huge changes every single day, which affect policing in our four-part mandate: maintaining order, preventing crime, enforcing the laws and tackling matters of public safety like terrorism and emergencies.
There is no police service in the country that really wants to say that it does not have some part of their organization involved with Internet child exploitation. All police forces want to say it has a few officers on identity theft. We have become a mile wide and an inch deep. That is the reality of policing today and the reason why we are stretched so thin.
Then, when September 11, 2001 comes along and the issue of terrorism is a real concern here on our continent, the police have to get into that business. Even our municipal policing becomes involved with their RCMP counterparts and their provincial police agencies. This is the reason we are in this situation.
Compounding that, as Commissioner Fantino said, are all the social issues that we have an opportunity as a country to address up stream. Policing is dealing with most of this stuff downstream. We have to think about what we can do upstream and get our health systems working with mental health and addictions.
I understood that the committee's interest was in trying to understand more about the situation for Canadian policing to allow you to tie that back to national security and emergency preparedness. That is part of the big picture.
Senator Tkachuk: You talk about community problems and efforts to renew their economic status as a way to prevent criminal activity.
I was talking to a police officer from Saskatoon when representatives were up here at a police convention. They were visiting and lobbying different senators and I was invited to go on a drive along. I will probably try and do it this fall. However, they said that if you come out at night the chances are that 100 per cent of the calls will be someone who is out on bail, on parole, just out of jail or a repeat offender. In other words, there are no new criminals just old criminals recycling themselves. The police spend their day recycling criminals. It was partly in jest, but he was really serious. Would that happen in Toronto?
Mr. Fantino: You would not see that all night, but you would see an element of it. I also believe there is a whole new set of criminals coming on board who are more violent, more predisposed to gun use and looking for quick ways to make a buck. Organized crime is very much aware of that and that is where they are working to recruit and bring people on board.
Senator Tkachuk: I sit on the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, actual many of the senators here do. Every business organization is talking about the need to recruit talent. There are tons of opportunities available. We just finished talking about the opportunity in the police services with the former witness saying there will be a serious problem in recruitment. It is not that people do not have jobs. There seems to be more jobs than people in several provinces. This has not stopped crime. What would be the attraction for people to get into a gang rather than getting a nice job being a police officer?
Mr. Fantino: It is the choice that people make. It is much more lucrative for some people to drive a nice car, have nice clothes and party all night rather than punch a time card. If you walk down Yonge Street in Toronto, you will see many signs on the window for help wanted.
However, what about the homeless issue? That is what I say about the socio-economic factors; many people make these decisions. A lot of folks cannot help it because they are suffering from mental illness. There are also many young people making bad choices and turning to things like guns and gangs.
Senator Zimmer: There are intangible and tangible crimes. The two I want to talk about briefly are the intangible crimes of fear and of damage to moral. Regarding the fear element, you have spoken about SARS. It was an epidemic. Hopefully, it is under control, but what comes from that is fear — fear among the public. How do you manage that fear? You have the issue of dealing with SARS issue but then you have to manage the fear.
The second part is the morale of your force. You just said there are 10,000 DUIs in a year. A lot of them and other crimes get off on a lenient sentence. You put in all the work and then they get off and you go back and you do it again. How do you manage the morale of your force; how do you manage the fear with the public and the morale of your force when you see them do all the work and people walk away?
Mr. Fantino: That is a very good question. Chief Boyd and I had to deal with that very issue with the SARS situation: How do you keep your people comfortable and feeling safe enough to come to work? The concern becomes, as it happened in New Orleans, what happens to my family? Who will look after my family if I go and look after everyone else? We felt that it was best to communicate the threat realistically, provide assurances about the ability to do the job and be safe and appeal to the sense of duty of having signed up to do the best we can. That is the first issue.
The other issue is the notion of how so many things are misreported, miscommunicated and sensationalized. I will give you another example from my previous job. In a nursing home in Toronto, we had an outbreak that attracted the attention of CNN. This was post-SARS. Right away, the message was that Toronto is at it again. It was the epicentre of communicable diseases and so on.
It took us a long time, as it did with SARS, to figure out what was killing these elderly citizens, many of them frail and ill anyway. Regardless, I believe 37 people died. We were hard pressed to stay on message.
In the end, through the work of the scientists and doctors, it was determined to be Legionnaires' disease. We were able to counter that. However, one of the things that happened is that the moment that the cause was identified and it was reported that Legionnaires' disease had its origin in the United States CNN disappeared.
Factual, timely information is critically important and we have all learned to realize that in managing any major event. There are all kinds of examples about how things go sideways if you do not manage the information: You address the issues, the facts; and you proactively address the public because of the fear factor. The incident at Three Mile Island is a good example. If you do not communicate with the public in a timely, effective way, you will have all kinds of issues. That is my simple approach.
Mr. Boyd: There is another kind of fear that is very relevant to your questions tonight. There is the crime that that needs to be attended to, but then there is this other issue called social disorder. You recall that one aspect of our four- part mandate is the maintenance of social order. When police agencies are stretched to do so many different things, they try to deal with what appears to be the most important thing: The crime that is occurring.
What we have learned is that it is very important to deal with the social disorder concerns in communities because those social disorders, although they may not be crimes in and of themselves, have an eroding effect on countries and on cities. We have seen this across our country. It is the graffiti; it is the aggressive pan-handling and the behaviours. It may be the prostitution. Forget for a moment the issue of prostitution and the selling of one's body as an adult. It is the issue of prostitution when it occurs along with drug dealing. This makes the community a magnet for undesirable conduct. The relationship between crime and social disorder creates the fear.
We have learned that lesson in this country. When we are stretched so thin, it is very difficult to tackle that as well as the crime. It is all about trying to maintain or build a good quality of life for people in our cities and communities.
Senator Zimmer: You raised 9/11 and noted that it had considerable impact on police and security intelligence, what has been the impact in respect of organizations? Has there been sufficient increase in funding? To what extent are your personnel properly trained to respond, and do you need additional resources?
Mr. Fantino: Yes, yes, yes. Clearly, we have learned many lessons. By the way, it is not just 9/11. Terrorism has been felt all over the world and we are now very much plugged in worldwide. Our problem is we do not know what we have prevented; we know some but not all.
Clearly, we need dedicated resources for these issues. We need dedicated resources for organized crime. Those resources that allow us to sustain the effort as we must because of the challenges we are facing are not there. Senators, 9/11 was a powerful lesson for us. Today, under the auspices of Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, we have an aviation security committee that has been struck. We have all the partners who have anything to do at all with the safety of the industry whether it is threats from organized crime, terrorism or whatever. We are finally able to look at these things more holistically. However, it is the police that brought everyone together to the table. We also discussed this with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police where there is a consortium of people who have been brought together to deal with mission-critical issues that are not to be left only to the police. There are all these other people who have a very important role and responsibility to deal with the problem to find solutions and to energize ourselves to be more effective.
The 9/11 commission has taught us that there is no charity allowed if we do not get our collective acts together. That is why I give you assures that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has taken these lessons from 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and others. We are driving the agenda to unify this country to provide the best possible public safety, whether it is terrorism, emergency response initiatives or organized crime.
I have a document that I would like to leave with your committee, entitled ``Consolidated Principles of the National Framework for Progressive Policing.'' This is hot off the press. Chief Boyd, myself and all of our colleagues across the country in police leadership have been working on these principles. There are six of them and I think it will give you an eye opener, as it has given us, in terms of focusing on who we are, what we are here to do, who we are here to serve, and trying to do it better from a leadership point of view.
Senator Zimmer: There is a role that we all can play in this as far as supporting the force.
Senator Banks: Chief Boyd, your city, which is my city, has a lower number of police constables per population than most other cities. It is certainly lower than the national average. Why is that so? Do you pay them a whole lot more and, therefore, the budget does not go quite as far? I know that the Edmonton Police Services has conducted consultations with the public there over the last two months. What did you hear during those consultations?
Mr. Boyd: I cannot answer your first question. I have been in Edmonton for just over two years and I do not know the history insofar as the lower ratio of police per population. Certainly, we do need more police officers.
In those community consultations, I heard people's concerns about quality of life and safety in their communities. They want an opportunity to hear what the police know about the crime problems in their community. They also want to have an opportunity to get to the microphone to voice their concerns about the social disorder I discussed earlier. We heard the concern that we are not taking care of things as we used to and that goes back to my statement on our being stretched too thin.
We have harmonized the list of what I call obvious policing priorities and the community's priorities, the social disorders. Now, we can focus together between the police and the community to deal with these issues to reduce fear and increase the quality of life of the residents.
Senator Banks: There was an attempt a while ago to re-establish not exactly beat cops but community cops who would become known to the people in the neighbourhood and thereby result in more interaction between the public and the police. Has that happened and if so, does it work?
Mr. Boyd: We have made changes in the way we deploy our officers by giving them geographical ownership so that they work in smaller areas and they get to know the people and the people causing the problems. As well, we have seen a reduction in crime and a reduction in social disorder. It is all about focusing, focusing, focusing.
Senator Day: I want to tell you how helpful your testimony has been here this evening, both of you. It is very helpful to talk to someone who is living the situation and you both are obviously doing that.
Chief Boyd, in your remarks you referred to the Centre for Security Science and the Canadian Police Research Centre. Who stood these up? Where are they based and from whom do they get their financing?
Mr. Boyd: The security centre is in the Atlantic provinces. I think it is in New Brunswick, but I stand to be corrected on that. The Canadian Police Research Centre has been looking for a home and I think it is in Saskatchewan.
Senator Tkachuk: There is lots of room there.
Mr. Boyd: They are now working with the other emergency services providers, but they come under the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. We look after a lot of the business of being the board in assisting that organization.
Senator Day: We could visit, then? Is there some physical place or establishment that we could visit to talk to them? You are talking about research and aid practitioners in the field. Presumably, they will provide the lead for that?
Mr. Boyd: They are certainly providing some support for that right now. I cannot tell you whether they have finally set up in Regina; they were looking for a home for quite a while. Commissioner Fantino, do you know?
Mr. Fantino: No.
Senator Day: We will track them down.
If we need some coordination of research and the dissemination of information or the ability to access that information, then there will be a need to have something set up and to digitize the research and the lessons learned from various situations so that other people can get in and get that information.
Mr. Boyd: They have been working very closely with our Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Informatics Committee, which gets to that issue of communications and interoperability.
On that point, I have a chart that I would like to leave with you which talks about the interoperability continuum. It goes through the list of everything from governance down to usage, which may be helpful to the committee.
Senator Day: Thank you for that. Does the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police have an office here in Ottawa?
Mr. Boyd: We do. It is on Somerset Street.
Senator Day: You are a member of the Emergency Management Committee of that association?
Mr. Boyd: I am, along with the counter-terrorism and national security committee.
Senator Day: I thought it was important to get that on the record.
One of your previous positions, commissioner, was Commissioner of Emergency Management. You then talked about communication and how important communication is in helping to imagine the situation so that the public will not panic in these situations. Is that kind of communications handled by the commissioner of the OPP or by the commissioner of emergency management?
Mr. Fantino: If it has to do with an emergency situation, whether caused by nature, or health borne, or whatever, it would probably come out of EMO, Emergency Management Ontario. However, if it affects my people or public safety issues or our constituency, I would probably jump in. In these situations, we would be intimately involved. There would be a joint effort, as we did with SARS, for example, with the communications that went out, the timing of them, and so on. The big problem with SARS was that we did not know what we were dealing with for a long time. That created a whole new set of issues that we had to deal with.
There are two audiences and the internal audience is equally important as the external. If you do not have your people well informed and well equipped and feeling safe, as I said earlier, they will not come to work.
Senator Day: I am trying to get a feeling for how you both work as Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police and Commissioner of Emergency Management. Is that a good relationship? Do you operate from the same area? Do you each have your own communications? Explain to us how you work.
Mr. Fantino: We both have our own communications, but what we put in place during my time at Emergency Management Ontario was an integrated approach. For instance, we had a new piece of legislation, which defined roles, responsibilities and authorities, especially if the emergency was such that there had to be a declaration of an emergency by the premier of the province. We put in place a team of ministers that would manage that emergency. With that, of course, there is a communications branch and a whole network.
As the commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, I am one of the decision makers at that table and in that capacity, I advise the premier and the cabinet. My role can be found within the framework.
I am very proud of my time away from policing because I discovered a whole new world of public safety and challenges. One thing we quickly asked ourselves was how we protect our infrastructure so that the public can count on government services during the most difficult times. We took a rigorous approach to every ministry having its own emergency plan in place to deal not only with the emergency but to keep their ministry working. It was a huge effort and I am proud of that. Again, these were all initiatives that we undertook because looking at the big picture, you plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Senator Day: I want to expand on the training new recruits. You heard Commissioner Zaccardelli tell us that at the training depot in Regina, they are in for six months and then they go out to the field and then there is a sort of apprenticeship or mentoring for a period of about a year and a half before they are fully up to speed. He is having problems finding enough trained mentors to handle the recruits.
Do you each train your own recruits? Is there a trend towards the first aspect of training being at a community college, like the Holland College in Prince Edward Island, and then you do the on-the-job training afterwards, or are you doing everything from the time you bring them in?
You say you pay them, and that is different from the RCMP for that first period, but for how long do you pay them? How do you see the training going, especially keeping in mind the need for all these specialists that you indicated and the specialist training that will be needed?
Mr. Boyd: In Edmonton, we have a training program that is about one year in duration. Part of that is in the classroom in the police college, the training section, learning the laws and learning how to deal with situations and what kinds of reports and how to do statements and all these policing matters.
I agree with Commissioner Zaccardelli about the need to then try to have officers, recruits, out in the field working with a coach officer of sorts and trying to put into practice what they have learned in training. I believe that through that process you really get to apply and transfer that learning from the classroom setting into the real world of policing.
The training is about a year, but after that, police officers continually go through mandatory training, often yearly. There are certain types of annual mandatory training, and then they carry on and learn more specialized areas within policing.
Senator Day: I will ask Commissioner Fantino as well.
Mr. Fantino: In Ontario, we have the Ontario Police College, which is mandated to provide recruit training to all of the Ontario police services, including OPP. That training is three months, in the college. Prior to the recruits going to the college, we spend time with them to orient them in OPP world. Then they go off to the college and then they come back to us and we have them for another six weeks in a classroom setting, doing scenarios with regard to OPP practices, policies and procedures.
Then, as was indicated by my colleague, they go out to a detachment and there they work with a coach officer. It is a mentoring program and evaluations are done. All kinds of formal steps are in place to develop the expertise sufficient such that we can then rely on them to go off and do their own work.
What should be pointed out is that no police officer should ever be left to his own devices, because we have to have supervisors who are there to mentor, to coach, and also to discipline, if need be; that quality control must be in place.
As well, in our situation at the Ontario Provincial Police, every police officer, including myself, has to go through an annual qualification. If you are carrying use-of-force equipment, you have to meet this standard.
We do a week-long block training where we bring in people from the field to headquarters to do this training, which consists of a refresher on the Criminal Code, the latest decisions rendered by the courts, policy changes, and of course use-of-force training. It is quite rigorous. There is never a time when we feel that there is enough or adequate training.
Then there is a whole host of specialized training if they are working in the areas of e-crime, fraud, forensic accounting, surveillance and technical work. It just goes on and on. That training package takes people away from their jobs in the field, and it is the only way we can do it.
Senator Day: I want you to think toward the future, with all the specialized policing that you say you will need. Do you see hiring people with special training to join the force? I refer to people with special training in chemical, biological or, God forbid, lawyers? Do you see bringing them in, and if so would they have to go through all of the training that you give to the generalists?
Mr. Boyd: I believe that is part of the present and part of the future. I think that police agencies will need to be able to bring people in as specialists and I think we will see more lateral transfers into policing.
Senator Day: Do they do all that other training you have just described?
Mr. Boyd: Currently they do, but we are looking at having jobs that have traditionally been done by police officers performed by non-sworn members, as we call them, or special constables, if they are working in certain areas. I do not know that it will be the trend throughout Canada, but I can already see that in the West, particularly in Alberta.
Mr. Fantino: In fairness, we should also address the civilian component of every police organization and the amount of expertise and specialization that component brings into an organization. Very often a segue for us will be to identify a civilian employee who does not have to meet those use-of-force standards and other issues, to deal with some high- end issues like technology, communications, accounting and law. That has been a big bonus for us.
As things stand now, if you are a sworn police officer, we normally put you through the police academy, the same as a brand new recruit, even if you have a university degree. We do try to quickly identify some of those skill sets and try to place the people in positions where their talents are put to good use.
The question was asked earlier about people coming out of the military. That is a great asset for us. We welcome and embrace them. They bring so much experience and talent. There are certain recruits that we pursue actively. The diversity issue has to be addressed as well.
Those issues are driving the recruiting now. We are becoming more and more selective, and that also cuts down some of the availability of people, because we are not taking just anyone.
Just because we are not getting the thousands of recruits that we used to years ago, we are not lowering the standard one bit in terms of expectations, capacity and backgrounds and so on.
The Chair: Chief Boyd and Commissioner Fantino, this has been a very valuable evening for us. I speak for the entire committee. Your comments have been very constructive. We expected it. We have seen you before and we knew you would bring value. You brought double value with Chief Boyd. We are very grateful to you for taking the time. Let the record show that it is 8:20 at night. We appreciate very much that you would come and assist us with this study. We think it is important that we try to address some of these problems and try to get them right, and your testimony this evening has gone a long way towards assisting us. On behalf of the committee, thank you very much.
The committee adjourned.