Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 12 - Evidence - March 14, 2012
OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 4:14 p.m. to study social inclusion and cohesion in Canada.
Senator Kelvin Kenneth Ogilvie (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, we have quorum and I hereby call the meeting to order.
[Translation]
Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.
[English]
My name is Kelvin Ogilvie and I am a senator from Nova Scotia, chair of the committee. I will ask my colleagues to introduce themselves starting on my left with the deputy chair.
Senator Eggleton: Art Eggleton, senator from Toronto, deputy chair of the committee.
Senator Merchant: Pana Merchant, senator from Saskatchewan.
[Translation]
Senator Demers: Jacques Demers from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Seth: Asha Seth from Toronto, Ontario.
Senator Seidman: Judith Seidman from Montreal, Quebec.
The Chair: Thank you very much, colleagues. Before I go to our witnesses, I want to indicate to my colleagues on the committee that because the Senate is sitting we will not have the benefit of pages here during the meeting. If you need anything, simply proceed outside to deal with it yourselves.
With that, we are continuing our study on social inclusion and cohesion in Canada. This our eleventh meeting on the subject, and today's meeting will focus on the prevention of crime in Canadian cities.
We have four witnesses with us today. I will introduce them as I call upon them to present. By early agreement, I will start on my right with Karen Leibovici, First Vice-President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
Ms. Leibovici, I would invite you to make your presentation.
Karen Leibovici, First Vice-President, Federation of Canadian Municipalities: Thank you, and it is a pleasure to be here on behalf of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to talk about the issue of urban safety, crime prevention, community development and providing the municipal perspective.
[Translation]
Hello everyone, I am pleased to be here.
[English]
I am an elected councillor at the City of Edmonton and have served two terms on the Edmonton Police Commission, so I have that background as well as now being the First Vice-President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
For those who may not be familiar with FCM, we are the national voice of municipalities across this country. We represent almost 2,000 member communities that make up over 90 per cent of Canada's population, and our members include large, small, rural, urban, northern and remote communities from coast to coast to coast.
The Senate committee has heard from FCM in the past on the work municipalities are undertaking to ensure social cohesion and inclusion are undertaken through strategies like affordable housing and immigrant settlement. We all, I think, know and can agree that safe and healthy communities are essential for building a strong economy and national prosperity. Community-based holistic approaches to preventing and combatting crime and victimization are most successful when developed through intergovernmental and community-based partnerships which can be accomplished through social development, notably by investing in all aspects of community infrastructure, like shelter, libraries, recreation centres, while also addressing the complex root causes of crime.
Policing, which is a necessary part of this approach, is a core responsibility of all governments and plays a significant role in crime prevention, community perception of safety, and law enforcement. However, there are cracks in our system, and we need a new approach.
Municipalities are facing a fiscal squeeze, caught between inadequate financial resources and a growing range of responsibilities, including many that have, in the past, been offloaded by other orders of government. Policing and public safety are the fastest growing areas in our municipal operating budgets, currently at about 20 per cent. As more money is spent on policing, there are fewer resources available to address other services that contribute to safe and healthy communities.
Just for some quick facts, the total expenditures by all police services in Canada have almost doubled in the last decade, from $6.4 billion in 1999 to $12.3 billion in 2009, and municipalities have paid for 60 per cent of that increase.
Municipalities hold 1,200 contracts with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and pay the salaries currently of two out of three police officers across the country, but we collect just eight cents out of that one Canadian tax dollar that we know comes from that one Canadian taxpayer.
We understand the current economic realities are constraining all orders of government, but we also know that when federal and provincial governments do not meet their policing and public safety responsibilities municipalities are left to fill the gaps, putting a strain on our limited fiscal capacity. This is not sustainable for municipalities or for property taxpayers.
The current government has put public safety as its top priority, and so far the conversation has occurred mainly on Parliament Hill and is focused on a narrow band of legal issues. However, while federal parties are debating new laws there is little discussion of how to enforce them or build communities that are more resilient to crime in the first place. This must change, and the work being done in Ottawa has to connect to what is happening on the ground in our communities.
Earlier this month in committee you heard about innovative systems and changes happening on the ground — smarter policing, as Chief Dale McFee calls it — which is breaking down bureaucratic silos to make an impact in our communities. All three orders of government must start having a similar conversation about smarter government and working together to make sure that our RCMP, provincial and municipal police forces have the resources and tools they need to keep our streets safe.
In February, FCM launched a policing tour, which started in B.C. and Alberta and is working its way across the country. We are talking with stakeholders like the Police Sector Council, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, police boards, et cetera. The conversation we are having is about the public safety challenges facing communities and examining the federal, municipal and provincial policing relationships: what is working and what is not. What we are hearing is an extension and even worsening of what the FCM findings were in our 2008 report towards equity and efficiency in policing. We can provide you with a copy of that report.
Through the RCMP, the federal government is responsible for policing our borders and ports, rooting out criminal organizations that span municipal and provincial boundaries and keeping guns and drugs from entering the country. Over the years, growing national and international RCMP duties have not been matched with adequate resources, leaving the RCMP straining to carry out its federal policing responsibilities.
Municipal property taxpayers are subsidizing the federal government's policing costs to the tune of more than $500 million a year, as local contributions to federal policing grow. Increasingly, crimes traditionally falling under federal jurisdiction, such as cybercrime, gun smuggling, commercial crime and the drug trade require municipal involvement.
Local governments are resourceful, however, and I would like to give an example. The City of Edmonton introduced the Violence Reduction Action Plan in August 2011 to address and prevent the frequency and severity of violence in our city. One aspect of our crime prevention strategy is our successful REACH Edmonton campaign, which is a community-led body that grew out of recommendations from a city council task force. REACH Edmonton plays a leading coordinating role in public safety and is a centre of excellence in innovation, yet no matter how resourceful we are as municipalities, with expanding municipal policing roles and the growing cost of responding to crime, governments have fewer dollars to invest in successful programs like REACH that help prevent crimes from happening in the first place.
The reality for local governments is that although all orders of government are responsible for crime, when crimes occur, whether it is drug related, guns, fraud or car theft, Canadians turn to our local police forces for accountability and action.
Thriving neighbourhoods are key to the economic, social and cultural sustainability of Canadian communities. Citizens rely on all orders of government to keep municipalities safe, but we cannot fight crime alone on a national or international scale or address the social and economic factors that affect crime rates.
What Canadians want is for all orders of government to work better together, work smarter together and to rethink and reinvest in policies and programs that keep our communities safe and stop crime from happening in the first place.
Thank you very much, and I will be more than pleased to answer your questions.
The Chair: Thank you.
Now I will turn to Professor Ross Hastings from the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.
Ross Hastings, Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, as an individual: Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.
When criminologists look at social inclusion and cohesion, they tend to make a division between two kinds of factors. When they look at social inclusion, they are looking at objective kinds of indicators like rates of poverty, rates of upward mobility and income levels. When they look at social cohesion they tend to think more in terms of — for lack of a better expression — feeling part of a team and, more importantly, having a sense of reciprocal and mutual responsibility: You do not want to hurt someone and you do not want someone hurting you. That contract notion that is the basis of order. Those things are obviously interconnected.
I believe you have all received the speaking notes, so I will address those. Essentially, what criminologists look for when they think of cohesion and inclusion is what could go wrong. On that first slide I give you four indicators of those kinds of problems. One obviously is crime rates, but the reality is crime is not randomly distributed. A small number of people commit a significant portion of crime: upwards of two thirds. Those are the people we need to target.
Second are victimization rates. What people do not realize is a small percentage of victims constitute a majority of victimizations. That is also not random.
Third, there is the notion of fear and insecurity. Again, this is not randomly distributed. Some people are what we would call irrationally afraid of crime. Your chances of being a victim are not that great, but there are huge sectors in our society for whom the fear of crime is a very rational dimension of their everyday life, and that undermines their sense of well-being, their sense of use of their community.
Finally, there is a more general notion that we call community efficacy. What criminologists are thinking of is essentially the capacity of a community to take care of itself and to self-police: parents watching children, people watching each other, people stepping into help each other.
What we really want to ask ourselves then is when and where that goes wrong. It appears that more and more it goes wrong in very specific and systematic ways. That is the diagram you have on slide 3. I am an academic, so I could go on for four or five hours about this, but I will spare you.
The simple idea in this document is if you look at the up and down arrow, that is the in and out arrow. At the very top are the rich, the wealthy, the well off, what we would call the secure: life is good and it is going to take care of me. At the very bottom of this are the poor, the dispossessed, the excluded: those for whom life is very precarious. It is a struggle and they are not sure they are part of it.
If you look at the left-to-right line, that is a more perceptive sense of "where do I fit in this?" "Do I have a chance?"
What we are beginning to see more and more, and I believe my colleague will speak to this, is that there are real systematic pockets of people who no longer feel that they are part of the big game and that they are going to move forward. That is this bottom left-hand corner.
When you look at where crime and victimization are significant problems in Canadian cities, it is those sectors, those quadrants. That is where gangs and organized crime come from.
As an aside, the best definition I have ever seen of organized crime is that it is a new form of government when legitimate forms of government cannot or will not do their job. I will return to that theme in a second.
I will leave you with three basic assumptions on this. First, it is best to start with the idea that crime is a problem- solving behaviour; it is not a condition or a disease. There are systematic attributes of people who engage in this kind of crime, but for the most part they are solving problems. If IBM were hiring people in the ghettos, they would hire the gang leaders because they are young, ambitious and smart. They can organize things. They know how to manage conflict and people. They have real strengths. If we pull these people out, oftentimes we are doing nothing more than creating opportunities for the people below them to compete. It is like competing for places on a hockey team or at the administrative table. We should be thinking about what policing can do to backfire on us.
The basic idea here is that we cannot punish our way into a solution if the real problem is people solving problems in the context of what they perceive as their problem and what they perceive as the resources actually available to them, the tools they have at their disposal.
What do we do next? Ultimately I think there are two ways you can think about this. If it is problem-solving behaviour, we can focus on eliminating those criminal solutions that are so costly to the rest of us. That can mean some investment in better policing, better courts and better correctional systems, but again the emphasis has to be on integration rather than segregation and on pulling people in rather than labelling and excluding them.
Second, there is a great deal more that could be done with situational crime prevention, which is essentially an attempt to make crime a little more difficult, a little less attractive, or more costly. Those are things that assume that we are not that good at changing people's motives but we can change their options.
Finally, we seem to be hell-bent on focusing on offenders. If we did this in health, we would spend all our time focusing on people who contaminate other people and none of our time focusing on sick people, which is kind of a weird way of thinking. We have two systems that are so radically different. We could apply that logic to victims and do a lot more about reducing their vulnerability. Then it would not matter if there were offenders out there because the victims could take care of themselves.
Finally, if we do not want to focus on the options or the solutions, we can perhaps try to eliminate some of problems. Essentially that comes down to fostering a sense of inclusion and a sense of engagement and attachment. If you scratch the surface of almost any young gang member, any young drug abuser, any young person who is a victim of crime, fundamentally you find a young person who does not have a sense of hope and who does not feel life will get better. We need to ask ourselves what kind of world we have created where we systematically tear the hope out of their hearts and then do not provide them with alternatives. We have no right to be surprised that they go wrong.
David Hulchanski, Professor and Associate Director, Cities Centre, University of Toronto, as an individual: Thank you for inviting me here to share research carried out by me and my team. Professor Hastings and I just met, but it would be very helpful if you opened his presentation to page 2 where the green arrow is. For seven years in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, and soon in other cities, we have been looking at the geography of where this takes place. In the upper right of his diagram you see where work is stable, where there is cohesion and collective regulation, and you see the opposite in the lower left.
We all live someplace, if we are fortunate enough not to be homeless and, unless it is a rural area, it is a cluster of housing and we call it a neighbourhood. People live in neighbourhoods. For 15 to 20 years, urban planners, sociologists and others have been saying that something is happening to cities. Cities have always been divided. There have always been high- and low-income areas and ethnic enclaves. Those are facts. However, now the divisions are more pronounced. The areas of low income are more numerous and low income and poverty is greater than in the past, and the wealth in the well-off areas is even higher.
I would like to call your attention to a recent report, which is not mine, but I served on the committee. The full report is on the Metcalfe Foundation's website and is entitled The "Working Poor" in the Toronto Region. We talk about how to define the working poor, and there are different definitions. A very good social policy analyst, John Stapleton, and two Statistics Canada employees did a careful study of how to define the working poor and then they measured it. If you turn to page 15, which is the centrefold, there is a simple table that points out that in Canada about 6.3 per cent of working people are working poor. Leave aside the unemployed and those on social assistance, all of whom have their problems. These are people working hard, working almost full time, who do not have enough money to live on. This is something new in last 20 or 30 years. You can see that the percentage has gone up. That data is from 2005. A significant number of people, in addition to those we talk about, are working but are sadly still in poverty.
We found three things. This was predicted in the literature and we are finding it in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. We will have the Vancouver and Montreal reports very soon. There is a sorting process going on of more rigid divisions among people in Canada on the basis of socio-economic status. It was always there, rich and poor, but now it is more rigid and dramatic. Second, the same holds on the basis of housing tenure, renting and owning. In the 1960s, renters had about 80 per cent of the income of homeowners. Today, and for 20 to 30 years now, it has been a 100 per cent gap. Home owners have double the income of renters right across the country.
Third is ethno-cultural origin and skin colour segregation. In Toronto, 8.3 per cent of people identified themselves as Black in the last census. They are highly concentrated in about 9 per cent of the city. Only 2 per cent of the Black people live in the wealthiest part of the city.
We will have a report like this for Montreal and Vancouver very soon. In this report we painted an analytic map of the city of Toronto of rich and poor and trends. We found that 40 per cent of neighbourhoods in the city of Toronto, and a similar number in Montreal and Vancouver, have been continually going down in socio-economic status; that is, they are falling into the lower left of Professor Hastings' diagram of exclusion and cohesion. They are falling into deeper and deeper poverty. That is 1 million people in the city of Toronto, which is almost the population of Calgary. There are similar trends in the other cities.
We all hear about the decline of the middle class. "Middle class" is a wishy-washy term; I like to use "middle income." We have a fairly simple definition of middle income. At figure 1 on page 8 you see a bar graph that depicts the middle group. The city of Toronto census tracts in population shifted from two thirds middle income in the 1970s to less than one third middle income. On the left-hand side we see the very high income group doubling in that period and that most of the population has gone to the lowest income groups.
This is income polarization, which is separate from the growing income gap, so this is very bad. We always had an income gap, and the income gap is now way bigger, but this is polarization. Looking again at Professor Hastings' diagram we see that more and more people in Canada are in the lower left. Even if they work, some of them do not earn enough money to get by. Also, there are very few people in the middle. There are people at the two poles in his diagram and the two poles in my diagram here.
This is quite startling. When we released this, we were surprised. We test in various ways and we are carrying on that work.
What is the solution? We first had some solutions for the City of Toronto, but realized that what a city can do is very limited because they do not have a great resource base for causes and solutions. The biggest one is the labour market. People work, but many people have precarious, low-paying jobs. The second is housing. The biggest budget item for anyone is affordable housing, going back to what I said about owners and renters.
Third is the need for more effective anti-discrimination strategies. We do not talk about this much in Canada, as our population has changed in Canada.
Lastly, income support strategies: Social assistance benefits and the social safety net needs to be better, yes. However, remember a minority of people are on that and need it compared to people in the labour market. The majority are Canadians. More and more of those Canadians working do not have good enough jobs to have the qualities that my criminology colleagues talk about as leading to better inclusion and social cohesion.
That is a very quick summary of many things, and I am happy to answer any questions.
The Chair: Thank you. I note the professors from the University of Ottawa, in terms of dealing with their normal propensity as was indicated by Professor Hastings, decided to have two of them so they can have a longer amount of time.
Irvin Waller, Full Professor, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, as an individual: I am also President of the International Organization for Victim Assistance, and I did some of the original geographic mapping of crime in Toronto in the late 1960s and 1970s. I am showing my age. I was a director general during the Liberal government days in the 1970s, and I left government because I felt it was not focused enough on victim issues and on a return of investment.
I have had the privilege of spending the last 30 years working on those issues, including getting the UN General Assembly to adopt the resolution for human rights for crime victims, and becoming the founding director of the UN- affiliated International Centre for Crime Prevention based in Montreal.
Basically my message is that there are things we can do about crime in these concentrated areas of social disadvantage, and they are certainly not building more prisons. They may or may not be adding police, but they are certainly using police way more smartly.
My proposal, and my bottom line, is that I would like to see this committee include in its considerations for recommendations the establishment of a leadership centre, federally, on crime reduction. This would be a partner to the leadership centre that exists in Alberta, which is a model for the world, has been recommended for Saskatchewan, and recently talked about in the province of Ontario.
It would not only provide leadership for federal action, but it would be a partner with the provinces. It would help municipalities develop the sorts of strategies that have been referred to by the First Vice-President of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and it would help significantly reduce harm to crime victims.
I agree with the Minister of Justice who has continually told us there are 440,000 recorded crimes of violence in this country, and 1.3 million property crimes recorded. I agree with him. I also agree that $83 billion is the measure of harm to crime victims, and this justifies action. I do not necessarily agree with where he has gone in terms of that action. I also agree that when only 31 per cent of victims report crime to the police in this country, that we should be concerned.
I was disappointed and have to be critical of Statistics Canada in once again perpetuating the myth that victimization in this country is going down. They did not tell you the results of the victimization surveys, which show crime to be relatively steady over the last 15 to 20 years. What has actually been happening is reporting has been going down. If you look at the areas where reporting is going down, they are the areas that have been referred to by the two other professors on this panel.
I was also disappointed that it took the National Crime Prevention Centre to tell you about the relationships that Statistics Canada has found between these indicators of social disadvantage and crime rates. When I was doing these analyses in the late 1960s and 1970s, if you got a 0.3 correlation it was amazing. The correlations you would see for Winnipeg or Thunder Bay or Halifax are much higher today. We are seeing that areas have high crime rates where you have people living in situations of social disadvantage, family breakup, young single males and transiency. People from Aboriginal populations are of course disproportionately in those groups, as are the mentally ill. You have problems and you have to address them.
The reason I am so confident that there was lots of hope is that we have Canadian examples. Despite these indicators, Winnipeg reduced auto theft by more than 83 per cent per cent with an investment of $50 million. That is the secret. If you want to reduce crime you have to invest and do it smartly. It was a combination of both situational — that Professor Hastings referred to — and social and smart policing. It was not more policing and it was not more prisons. If we can do that in Winnipeg we can do it anywhere in the country because in terms of large cities, that is where the social problems are undoubtedly at the most extreme level.
I also have hope because we tend to talk about crime as if it was only violent crime as known to the police. However, as serious as the crime known to the police is the crime not known to the police; that is, crime against women. If you actually look at the Minister of Justice's $83 billion — and you cannot look at this for Canada but I have looked at it for the United States — you will see that violence against women accounts for more harm to victims than the traditional street crime. This is not to say we need to let everyone in gangs run around. It means we have to match what we are doing about street crime with stuff on violence against women.
The province of Ontario has the famous Fourth R program, the only one identified by the WHO as effective in reducing violence against women. This is the sort of thing you should be recommending from coast to coast. I am very proud this city, because it has a crime prevention strategy like REACH Edmonton, already has Fourth R in a number of schools. It is translating it into French so it can be done in the French schools here.
To build on REACH Edmonton and the City of Ottawa, there are now 14 cities that have formed the National Municipal Network on what can be done to prevent crime. They are unable to get money, even $1 million over three years, out the federal government. This is crazy. These are the folk who actually have potential solutions to the 60 per cent of the $12 billion that is being spent on policing; solutions in terms of controlling that. By the way, if you use the 2010 figures on policing, those costs have more than doubled in a decade. I just want to reinforce this point.
Mr. Hastings and I helped bring together these 14 cities, and we did a little series of action briefs. Unfortunately, this was so popular that there are no longer copies on paper. You can get it electronically in English and French. It sets out a guide that was used by REACH, by the mayor's task force in Edmonton, and in Thunder Bay. It is being used by a number of cities, including places like the Region of Waterloo, the City of Ottawa, Regina, Halifax, and so on.
I also think it is important to understand that while the federal government has been extraordinarily slow — and I am not just talking about the Conservative federal government, I am also talking about the Liberal federal government — in investing in prevention, Alberta got on with this and brought a task force together with the best evidence from across the world. They also talked to people about what was actually going on, and they came up with a set of recommendations that recommended about half a billion over three years.
Yes, Alberta has oil money. Who was in charge of that? No less than the current Premier of Alberta when she was Minister of Justice. Alberta has become a model. I work around the world. Mexico has just passed legislation, in part inspired by Alberta. We need to be doing this everywhere. Saskatchewan is copying it and Ontario is beginning to talk about it.
You have heard from Dale McFee; there are models in other countries. I am sure he mentioned Glasgow. It is an incredibly good model. With the Prairie cities, with homicide rates above the average in Canada, there is no doubt that every Prairie city could learn from that. Frankly, all of us could learn from it because it is no change in prisons. It is about no change in numbers of police. It is about smart policing, smart prevention, and situational crime prevention.
In the 1990s, we had two parliamentary committees. I hope that it is possible for you to relook at their recommendations. One was chaired by a Conservative, a believer in the death penalty, Bob Horner. One of his quotes is that if locking people up contributed to less violence, the United States would the safest country in the world. Of course it is not; it incarcerates one in four of all prisonners in the world. They have gone the wrong route.
Regardless, his committee recommended that the federal government should be spending 5 per cent — the equivalent of 5 per cent — of what it spends on policing and corrections. He recommended this because it will reduce crime. I would recommend that because it will help control rising policing costs and rising prison costs.
You have heard from the National Crime Prevention Centre that they do not have anything like 5 per cent and their programs are good but very limited. They try to help people replicate what is known to work. Today we live in a wonderful world where, with the flick of a mouse, you can get four major data sites, including one in Public Safety Canada that seems to be universally ignored; one in the public health agency, which is probably where it should be; one in the U.S. Department of Justice called Crime Solutions, to use Ross's word; and of course one in the World Health Organization, which is where I would turn for these things.
I think the challenge is how to move from these examples, this knowledge and this momentum to move in the right direction to the innovation that we need here.
Mr. McFee has a wonderful quote that "you cannot arrest your way out of violence." By the way, that is used by William Bratton, the famous cop from New York who supposedly reduced the crime rate there. That is what the chief of detectives in Glasgow uses. However, he also says we will not stop arresting, and I agree, but we have to use police far more smartly. I like the phrase that FCM used; it is a very important phrase. We have to innovate and to shift our way of thinking on these issues.
If we can get the sort of strategy that a country like Canada, that believes so much in law and order and in safety, and if we can get what the people who pay taxes deserve, we will see not only crime brought down, particularly in the disadvantaged areas, but we will also see the potential for controlling policing costs. It would make for a much better and safer place for those people who live in our cities.
The Chair: Thank you all very much. I will turn to my colleagues for the question period.
Senator Eggleton: Thank you very much. Those were four excellent presentations, being very instructive in this area of social cohesion and inclusion, particularly today dealing a little more with the crime and safety aspect while still dealing with all aspects of cohesion and inclusion in our major cities. I have questions for you all, but I will probably run out of time.
Professor Hulchanski, I have been talking about your three-city study for some period of time in Toronto, and you have noted today that you are also about to do reports on Vancouver and Montreal. Are you finding similar patterns in the Vancouver and Montreal studies?
Mr. Hulchanski: Yes. However, please be careful with the word "pattern." Every city has geography: rivers, lakes, mountains, an order, and so on. Toronto happened to break out into what we call three cities — three clusters — because of the history of Toronto. However, the trends are the same, with slight differences in a variety of locations, depending on the history of that city.
Senator Eggleton: Do you think it would be similar in other cities in Canada?
Mr. Hulchanski: Yes. It is more noticeable in rapidly growing and changing cities. It is a little less noticeable in cities that are not rapidly growing, but it is still there because the economic trends, the labour market and all that is affecting the whole country.
Senator Eggleton: On page 6 in the three cities booklet you have given us, these are a couple of figures I frequently quote, and they are really quite staggering. In 1970, when I started on the Toronto City Council, 66 per cent were middle class. In 2005, it is 29 per cent. The number of low-income neighbourhoods has gone from 19 per cent to 53 per cent in that same period of time. Those are staggering numbers.
Where has the middle class gone? One could think that maybe some of them went up into the rich and some went down to the poor, but I probably suspect most went out to the 905 — into the suburbs of the city.
Mr. Hulchanski: Yes, if you look at the back cover of the booklet. Concerning one point Senator Eggleton raised, yellow designates middle-income areas. I, too, came to Toronto in 1972 to study urban planning and I knew the city that you see there in 1970. Red is low and very low income areas. That is the dramatic change in the city. It takes your breath way.
When we first did this, we showed the previous Mayor of Toronto, David Miller, 1970 and then on purpose just flashed 2005. All he could think to say — and I think it is a good thing to say — was: "It is better to know this than not to know it."
There has been a decline of the middle income group. One of my main takeaways from what I have learned from all this is that we still call ourselves a middle-class society, and Canada is a middle-class country. Yet no, we are not. The term came about after World War II, when we built a middle-income society — more and more people were in the middle income. One income could buy a house and a car. Almost any job had certain benefits and all that.
That has all changed. We have a vast majority of people in lower-middle segments, we doubled the upper level, and the middle has disappeared. For 20 years, you have all heard about the so-called disappearing middle class. It has gone down, as the table I referred to — figure 1 on page 8 — shows.
When we saw this as researchers the first time, we said to ourselves what Senator Eggleton has just raised. He said that maybe that middle class or middle income group is out in the suburbs — you call it 905 in Toronto. It is the area around the City of Toronto. Look now at figure 2 on page 9, which shows the trend in 905. It is the same trend: They start off with more middle income people in 1970 in neighbourhoods and they are falling. Therefore, they have not fallen as much as city but they are falling. Now the outer suburbs had no low-income census tracks 30 years ago and now one in five — 20 per cent of the census tracks in 905 — are low income, and they are losing their middle income group also to the lower income side.
There is still a larger middle income group in 905 than in the city, but it is diminishing.
Senator Eggleton: I will bring in two other reports. The United Way has done two reports, one of which is poverty by postal code, which identified 13 low-income neighbourhoods — this has expanded even beyond that now — when they did their study about a decade ago in Toronto. Recently, the United Way also came out with a report about high- rise buildings being a place of considerably low-income people.
In the 1970s and 1980s, I when I was Mayor of Toronto, we talked about enclaves in the city, but are the enclaves about to become ghettos?
Mr. Hulchanski: The word "ghetto" is problematic in all kinds of ways. We like to talk about two kinds of enclaves. There is nothing wrong with ethnic enclaves, enclaves of choice. The Portuguese in Toronto, for example, want to be near the Portuguese church and Portuguese school, so they cluster in that area. However, it does not include other people from that area. It is a positive kind of enclave. We have those all over our cities across the country.
A negative enclave — to avoid the word "ghetto" really — is where people end up living someplace they would rather not live and end up clustering with people like themselves in various ways. That is happening. That is why I mentioned skin colour. We are a country of so many nationalities and ethnicities, and there are ethnic enclaves that celebrate all that. However, there is something in Western culture, of course, about black skin. Black people come from so many countries and so many cultures, but we find them in Toronto clustered. I did not bring my map of where Black people in Toronto live, but they do not live in the 20 per cent of the city that is blue on the map here. Two per cent of Black people live in that area. They are clustered in the poorest areas, and they are highly clustered together in the poorest and more rundown high-rise buildings.
If I may, one final point. Across the country, from the 1950s to the 1980s, we built these rectangular slab high-rise rental buildings. Toronto has the most. Larger cities have more and smaller cities have just a few. They are now 40 or 50 years old. In Toronto's case, we have 1,200 of them, at 40 or 50 years old. It turns out that half the renters in the city of Toronto live in those buildings. Some of those buildings are okay and they have been kept up, but many are not. That is where you find the poorest of the poor, and people who are discriminated against end up in those clusters of high-rises right across the country.
[Translation]
Senator Verner: Thank you very much for being here this afternoon. My question is for Mr. Waller, and it is related to crime and victim protection. In the city where I live, the greater Quebec City area, two cases, among others, were in the news recently. Two victims are currently having to face their attackers. In one case, the victim is a female police officer. A guy tried to kill her because he is obsessed with women in uniform. Another young man was savagely attacked and beaten throughout his childhood by his father. In both cases, the criminals have served their sentence and will go to a halfway house that is a just a few minutes away, on foot, from where the victims live.
I asked the question to a woman who appeared before the committee last week representing the Institut canadien pour les victimes. After having invested a lot of energy in helping victims, do we not have the impression we are back at square one when they have to face their attacker?
[English]
Mr. Waller: I do not think we have paid very much attention to victims. You are right that the province of Quebec has done better than any other province. I always advise my students: If you are going to be victims of violence, please cross the bridge, because you will get much more in compensation, you are much more likely to get a female police officer, and you are also much more likely to get a professional victim person working with you.
For instance, I know that you have followed Canada's role internationally. If you look at the International Criminal Court, which was approved by Canada, victims have much greater protections, much greater rights, and so on. There is no doubt that we need those here. The right that is most important to victims is the right for governments to invest in effective victimization prevention, crime reduction, crime prevention, whatever phrase you want to use. I prefer "victimization prevention."
When Mr. Horner recommended 5 per cent, we could mention a little bit of situational crime prevention and maybe the Perry Preschool. Today we have an accumulation of knowledge about what works. Yes, there will be exceptions. The two cases that you cited do not make me feel very happy, but what I hope this committee will do is say, "Look, we have the evidence to reduce violence and property crime in the areas of high crime." Five per cent of families produce about 50 per cent of offenders, and about four per cent of addresses produce about 40 per cent of victimization. What you see from Glasgow or from the U.S. Department of Justice — and it is on the website of Public Safety Canada, if you have the time; it is a bit harder to find, but it is there — we know that we can reduce violence and property crime by upwards of 50 per cent within a three- to five-year period. Winnipeg reduced car theft by over 85 per cent within a three-year period. Actually, it was longer, because they tried doing it through policing on its own, and not smart policing, and it did not work.
For me, as a long-term victim advocate, it is long overdue that we invested in these things. In terms of return investment, you can look at, for instance, the Government of the State of Washington. They have a return-on- investment indicator for various things that work. They show you how to reduce the prison population. They have not focused as much on policing as I would like, but RAND has.
We have the information in this country to significantly reduce violence, and we are not doing it. That, to say the least, upsets me. Maybe not every case you talked about, but if we cut the cases such as you talked about in half, that would be worth doing.
[Translation]
Senator Verner: I brought up these two cases because they are still being talked about in the Quebec City region's media. However, there are a number of others. Do we not have the impression that criminals are free to choose the location of their halfway house while victims have no choice?
[English]
Mr. Waller: I brought this book for a reason. It is called Rights for Victims of Crime: Rebalancing Justice. It looks at the international standards that Canada has agreed and it looks at every area from policing through to the role in the court. I think there is no doubt at all that we need to seriously review what is being done in Canada in relation to victims, and this goes everywhere from what police can do through to the immediate issues of the high-profile cases in court or in the parole hearing.
In the International Criminal Court, victims are represented by lawyers. By the way, the majority of these lawyers come from the Quebec Bar, for some strange reason. We do not have that here. I think we have to be careful about how we do it, but that is what we need to be looking at. We have to take the concerns of victims seriously and not use a small group of very violated victims to argue only for more prisons.
What should be done in the case you are talking about? I do not know, but I am certainly sympathetic to your view that these folks should not be allowed to go and be in the place next door or close to them. Much of this has to do with saying that preventing victimization is a priority, using science — what you call smart thinking — and changing from a reactive way of dealing with it. In 1973 I was on the committee that recommended that victims and police chiefs should be on the parole board. I clearly agree with that direction, but we need way more today. If we can reduce those violence numbers by 50 per cent, we should be doing it. Do not forget that, in many of these areas of concentration of disadvantage, victims and offenders are, in a different way from what you describe, living together. We need to make those places safer for women, for young men, and, indeed, for old men, not that we are actually that much at risk.
Senator Demers: As Senator Eggleton mentioned, that was a great presentation.
Professor Hastings, you mentioned "part of the big game" — hope. When you say, "part of the big game," is that time to give up? They just do not have that hope? Hope was mentioned a few times. Professor Waller mentioned 84 billion and what happened in Winnipeg. Is it all about money for better education, more social workers, and more police officers? I would appreciate your response.
Mr. Hastings: At the risk of some oversimplification, it is part of hope. If you look at Professor Hulchanski's data, he suggests that that sense of hopelessness is probably a pretty rational, accurate assessment of where they actually stand in the pecking order. If you look at the statistics on social mobility among the kinds of people who are in the bottom quadrant, none of those people move up, unless they are lucky enough to be an athletic star or a music star. They are what they are and what they will be, in that sense.
I am a little bit more reluctant to take on the social work and policing aspect because I think that that asks these people to live in a crappy situation and learn how to put up with it when what we need to be doing is thinking about whether or not we could change the distribution within that situation. We now know more and more — and Professor Waller was talking about this — about the kinds of situation, kinds of families, and kinds of school experiences that lead kids to become isolated and excluded. I do not understand why we wait until these kids are 20 years old and then invest in policing to address that because we can see this coming. We have no right to be surprised; we are making a world that will produce a smaller number of more serious offenders, and that is the world that we are going to have to live in.
Yes, we need social workers, but it is not simply remedial of individuals. That is blaming the victim.
Mr. Waller: If you look at the Alberta strategy, you see what is called braiding. They brought five ministries together — the policing ministry, the justice ministry, which is where Allison Redford was, the education ministry, the health ministry, and social services — and they have now added municipalities, Aboriginals, community spirit, and a fourth one that I am missing. Oh, housing, my main point.
You see an attempt to improve the general welfare, as Mr. Hastings mentioned. Housing is clearly very important to the Alberta strategy, and I think it should be important to any strategy in Canada. However, you also see them going after the at-risk situations. Winnipeg was putting $50 million that came from provincial public insurance into that problem. They had Rick Linden, the Chair of the Police Commission, a very well known academic — someone Mr. Hastings and I know very well — the police, public insurance, and social work. They had them all there; they looked at the problem and came up with a combined solution, and it worked. That is what it means to be smart. You do have to put in money, and you do have to be smart.
If, like me, you wanted to see a 50 per cent reduction in street, family and school violence — family violence basically means violence against women and children — then you do have to put in money. I think the 5 per cent recommended by the Horner and Shaughnessy Cohen committees was good. I concluded it should be 10 per cent, but I will bear with was you. If you can get 5 per cent, that is a very good start, but you also have to look at how you will use it. Alberta will get every municipality working in a partnership similar to the Edmonton REACH process and to the Waterloo region process. We need to do that. We need to put money into training. There are people out there who have these skills. They are not the same as the skills you need to arrest someone or defend someone. We have to think about how we make people smarter, but much of this is political leadership. You saying that this is the way to go is important. The Mayor of Edmonton deciding that he wanted this to be the way to go is important. The Chair of Peel Region saying this is the way to go is important. All of those things are important. I probably mentioned the most important. I think it helps to have police on side, and the super cops of today are on side.
Ms. Leibovici: I would like to provide some examples. Mr. Waller has mentioned Edmonton and the province of Alberta a number of times. To give you a few examples of the kinds of work that we are doing, we have what is called the Neighbourhood Empowerment Teams, which are teams that work in partnership. We have the Edmonton Police Service, the Family Centre and the United Way that provide some of the social services that you are asking about, senator. They go into neighbourhoods that have issues with regard to capacity and that are high crime areas, and they work with those neighbourhoods to do capacity building for a two to three-year period. They build the resources within those neighbourhoods, and then they move on to other neighbourhoods. They are getting individuals within those neighbourhoods to understand what their strengths are, to work on their weaknesses, and to build towards the future.
We have the Community Action Team and Crackdown deployments. That is part of the smart policing because we work together as the police and social service partners. They engage neighbourhoods that are experiencing enduring levels of violence. As some of you may be aware, last year we had the title of being one of the cities with the largest number of murders across the country. That is not a title that we like to have, and it is one that we are working actively to get rid of. Part of that is the target of five-by-five-by-five activities. We have got strategies across a broad range of disciplines — not just the police — looking at a targeted reduction in violence of 5 per cent.
Then we have our 24/7 initiatives. I spoke earlier, in my opening remarks, about the fact that police are engaging in activities that are probably not the most appropriate activities. Police officers spend a lot of time with individuals with mental illnesses to the detriment of other policing activities. We are looking at a 24/7 initiative so there are the right kinds of services available 24/7 to help those vulnerable individuals find a home and find the services they need to help them get off the streets and allow time for police officers to deal with crime as opposed to helping those individuals that have other types of issues that they might not have the skills to deal with.
There are many areas we are working cooperatively with other services towards how to provide that community safety within the city of Edmonton.
Senator Dyck: Thank you very much for your presentations tonight. They were inspiring and interesting.
I am from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and I had heard about the crime prevention programs in Edmonton. Being that I am from Saskatchewan, we have a very high percentage of Aboriginal people, also a lot of young people; Saskatchewan has a very young population. We know Aboriginal women are targets of violence. Within the programs in Alberta that you were speaking of, are there strategies that are directed specifically to Aboriginal groups? Could you provide examples of what they are and how they have worked?
Ms. Leibovici: I would be pleased to. We have a something called the Flying Eagle Program, which is a program that serves Aboriginal children and youth. It has now expanded year-round and across the city. It focuses on leadership, recreation and communities services.
We have another program, and I am probably not going to pronounce it correctly, but it is called Nîkânihew, which is an Aboriginal youth leadership program. It is an aquatics-based leadership training program that incorporates Aboriginal heritage and teaching.
We also provide passes to our recreational centers for low-income families. Although they are not strictly for Aboriginal youth, it is for a wide range of youth who do not otherwise have the ability to enter into recreational facilities.
We also have a strategy where the Edmonton Police Service is engaging with youth. They are working with them to address youth risk factors and develop a trust relationship with them.
Again, our 24/7 service is one that we are seeing will be very valuable in dealing with some of the issues we have. We also have refugee and immigrant communities we are working very closely with. That does not quite address the Aboriginal question you asked.
There is a program called the Injera Initiative, which again is working on enhancing relationships between police and youth.
If you would like a more detailed outline of some of the programs that we have in the city of Edmonton, I would be pleased to get our administration to provide that to you.
The Chair: Thank you.
Mr. Waller: As a brief footnote, we just had a Metis PhD student complete a study on how to reduce crime affecting urban Aboriginal people. The review of the literature is particularly interesting. She did a testing, a grounding, if you like, of this in Winnipeg. This comes back to the senator's question.
What you will see is that the people delivering services to young Aboriginal people agree with what all these fancy research things say should be done. What is lacking is leadership in helping them coordinate and obtain permanent funding. There were some other things, but if it is of interest to you, I would be happy to share the website.
Senator Dyck: Thank you.
Senator Merchant: I, too, want to thank you very much for the work you do and for taking the time to come here and present to us today.
You have touched on some of my questions, so I will perhaps go to a suggestion of mutual responsibility that one of you mentioned. Could you provide us more information about that? I am thinking there is too much reliance on the police in trying to make us feel safer and deal with crime. You have mentioned some programs. Is there a further way that we can work within the multi-ethnic fabric? I am an immigrant from a long time ago, but I know that certain communities sometimes have a distrust of working with police and others. Is there a way we can involve Canadian citizens of every sort? You said there is less and less reporting of crime.
I heard a story yesterday on the radio where they solved a murder from 20 years ago. The man who had committed the crime against a woman had confessed it to several people but no one reported it. He even had a death bed confession, and the nurse did not report it because people are afraid to get involved.
We cannot just rely on the police; we have to somehow engage other people. I understand there are educators and social workers, but I am talking about just ordinary people. Can we involve them? Or is there some danger in getting people who are not really qualified to get involved in policing crime and reporting it?
Mr. Hastings: I will answer the two separate parts of that question. First is the question of reporting rates of crime and the sense that those rates may be going down.
I think people need to understand that reporting a crime is also a problem-solving behaviour. The bottom line for most of us is we will report a crime not because we feel morally offended but usually because our insurance policies or other kinds of requirements make it useful to do so. In that context, a significant proportion of people simply do not believe the police will solve their problems. When you add young Aboriginal males, young Black males or young Asian males in certain sectors of the city, they have little or no reason to believe that is where they go for solutions; they take care of themselves. That is one thing.
With respect to the question of mutual responsibility, one of the things we know from criminology is that the single thing that most predicts people stopping crime is age. The older you get, either because you are rickety and rackety or more likely because as you get older, you get more invested in society and you simply have more to lose, whether it is reputation, a job or dollars and cents. People will not like you if you commit crimes; people may walk away from you.
If that is true, there is the hook around which you can build a crime prevention strategy. The question becomes, how do we get people to mature in terms of engagement in jobs and attachment to pro-social people more quickly? That goes back to Senator Demers' question. That is where some combination of social work and education that builds skills, along with the other partners that no one ever talks about, which is government and the private sector, to create actual jobs where those skills are marketable come in. We too often suck people, especially young people, into training programs, give them hope and very quickly teach them that we sucked you in because there are no jobs for you so never mind. Then we are surprised that these people are cynical. That is the result we produced. We may not have set out with that as our objective, but those activities will predictably produce that kind of stupidity, and we need to rethink that.
Mr. Waller: I am ultimately an empirical scientist masquerading as a social scientist. I originally did maths and physics and economics, so I am always looking for data. It is important to see that were you to go to the U.S. Department of Justice's website or Public Safety Canada's website, you would see examples of what Professor Hastings talked about.
Often in a random control trial, one group of kids have been given something that gave them a reason to have hope, and another group of kids just went the normal way. You see in these reductions in crime of the order of 50 to 60 per cent. If you look at this in terms of savings police costs, like the Washington State Institute, they are huge. If you look at them in terms of saving harm to victims, they are mega huge.
The Boston strategy talked about in the 1990s basically created job training and jobs for people drifting into gangs, and it eliminated all homocides of people under 18 and reduced the adult homicide rate by 70 per cent. The Glasgow strategy, which is more impressive because it is permanent, and they actually have a permanent leadership centre, which is another issue, is doing some of the same sorts of things.
There is data there, and we need to use data. We need to use this evidence, because this is what will meet the most fundamental right of crime victims, which is for governments to have balanced and effective strategies to prevent victimization.
Senator Callbeck: Thank you all for coming today and for your presentations. They were very helpful.
We have been talking about victims reporting crime. Mr. Waller, I think you said that only 31 per cent of victims report crime, so that means that 69 per cent of victims do not. How do we get that figure? I have heard this figure before, and I have often wondered how we come up with it.
Mr. Waller: I assume that, in addition to my brief, you got an appendix to the brief.
Senator Callbeck: No, I did not.
Mr. Waller: It is available in, I believe, English and French. If you turn to the first table, you will see the Statistics Canada general social survey data for the sweeps in 1999, 2004 and 2009. You see that the rate of reporting went down from 37 per cent to 34 per cent to 31 per cent every five years. Just to give you some indication, the reporting rate in the United States or in the United Kingdom is above 40, which is what it used to be here. Something is going on here.
It is also important to notice what Mr. Hastings described as problem solving behaviour, and he referred to people claiming insurance. That is exactly what the research shows. That is why people report property crime. People report violent crime because they expect the state to do something about it.
You have to look at sexual assault. More than 90 per cent of the women who are sexually assaulted in this country do not report to the police. Sexual assault is fairly broad. If you were to limit that to what the Americans call forcible rape, you would be looking at something well over 80 per cent not reporting. It is very clear to me what needs to be done. To go back to my Quebec analogy, the Montreal police have 30 per cent female police officers. We know that gendering policing makes a difference to whether women report or not. If you have a lot of women police officers, you have a better chance of reporting.
We also know a lot about how you can encourage reporting. Most of that does not come from the Statistics Canada survey because it is underfunded. The StatsCan person did not even refer to it in their material for you. In other countries, like the United States or United Kingdom, this is one the main ways of measuring crime. It is a main way of looking at data.
In addition to wanting to see innovation in terms of working on the knowledge we have, we need to also invest in getting more knowledge ourselves, and Alberta is doing that. The federal government here is not. From what I can see, there is no other province than Alberta that is doing that. There may be one that is, but nothing like at the levels that we need.
Senator Callbeck: You mentioned that in Winnipeg they reduced the auto crime there by 80 some per cent in three years. Has that program been tried anywhere else?
Mr. Waller: It was taken from a Regina program that was not quite as spectacular. There are two answers to the question. They had the highest auto theft rates in North America, so they were bringing it down to the average levels. I am not sure that I would argue for $50 million in the city of Ottawa to reduce car theft here.
The second answer to your question is that what they did in Winnipeg to succeed is the same as Dale McFee talks about in Prince Albert. It is the same as the Alberta strategy. It is the same as the whole series of examples that you have heard about from REACH Edmonton and the City of Edmonton. It involves leadership, so someone saying we are going to reduce crime and not just react to crime. It involves bringing police and social agencies and schools and housing people together to look at what should be done. It involves using data. It involves investing. This sounds like a long list, but Winnipeg can do it. Alberta is doing it. Waterloo region is doing it, and Thunder Bay is doing it. Regina is doing it with difficulty because, in the past, they have been strapped for money. Maybe they will have more in the future. There is a movement here. This movement is local, which is great. Peel Region is about to do this. We need to see this coast to coast. I want to come back and re-emphasize that this needs to go along with things like Housing First and other general programs that will somehow reduce the gaps in advantage and disadvantage.
Senator Callbeck: You said that program you talked about, Violence Against Women, was recognized by the WHO. Where is that being implemented in Canada?
Mr. Waller: The Fourth R was something that came out of the team working in the city of London, Ontario. That is the centre of thinking and action around how you reduce violence against women. They woke up one morning and said, "We are not succeeding by only reacting, even though we are one of the best in the world, so we are going to invest in prevention." They tested it in 22 schools in the Thames Valley area, 11 where it was done and 11 where it was not. That is how they know it worked. That is how it got WHO recognition, because it was a spectacular controlled trial. In the city of Ottawa, a group like REACH Edmonton has pioneered Fourth R into the curriculums in this area, and I mentioned translated it into French. I know that the Government of Alberta is looking at spreading it across the province. I am not up to date on exactly where it is being used. I do a lot of work in other countries. Mexico, for instance, is interested in developing a Spanish version appropriate to what they are doing.
The WHO did a major review of everything that works in violence in 2009. It is easily available, and easily readable, by the way. You do not have to be a PhD to read it. It is easily accessible for you. In 2010, they did a more in-depth one on violence against women, and the Fourth R, the one you are referring to — reading, writing and arithmetic, and the Fourth R is relationship — was one of two that they identified for which there was evidence that it works. It is not expensive to put in, but it works.
Senator Seidman: I think you are moving to answering my question, but I will double check. I am really struck by the fact that you are all sitting there telling us, and agreeing, that there is evidence here for what works in crime prevention. I have really learned something. You say specifically it is empirical evidence. I would like to double check that with you and see how well formed this body of evidence is, specifically scientific evidence, if it is empirical.
How well formed is it? I suppose you have already begun to tell us where it exists, but I would like to go back and double-check this with you and find out how well formed it is.
Mr. Hastings: I will let Professor Waller jump in, but basically the source of evidence is of two kinds. One is essentially objective-based evaluations. You try something and did it work, and then building up a body of comparative work.
The classic example is experiments done in Kansas City years ago on police patrols. Everyone believed that if you doubled and tripled police patrols you would arrest more people and have more safety. They went in and divided the city into grids. Some people got regular patrols, some people got double, some got none. They went back a year later and found no difference. It finally dawned on people. I think the mythical statistic is the average police officer comes across one or two crimes in progress during their career as most offenders are smart enough to wait until the cop goes by. It is not rocket science; they are problem solvers.
The other evidence that is even more compelling, Professor Waller mentioned the Perry Preschool project where you have random control trials. You divide people into two groups or more and some people get the intervention and other people do not and in all other ways they are alike. This is the way medicine tests drugs, with placebo effects and everything else. This is the way most other sectors work experimentally. There is a huge and growing body of knowledge within crime prevention about things that do work and things that do not. Professor Waller has mentioned some of the sources. There are many others, and I hate to use a corny pun, but it is almost criminal that we are so little apt to use that evidence in this sector when in almost any other sector we would not stand for that kind of sloppiness.
Mr. Waller: In the appendix to my brief, you would find on the last two pages a listing of those sources. It is organized around proven victimization prevention; around what factors are linked to offending, which are very important; about violence against women; about the combined balanced approaches that involve smart policing, rehabilitation and prevention. It is about the Alberta strategy, in simple terms, or the Glasgow-Scottish strategy. It is about how governments have actually shifted, and it is also about how we understand costs.
You go back 20 years, in 1992 — Mr. Hastings was later in the 1990s as the head of the National Crime Prevention Council — if you look at that time period, we were actually grasping at a few individual examples, Perry Preschool being one of the most famous. Today there is a huge body of literature. The World Health Organization just 10 years ago created a phone book size document, scientifically based like any other WHO report. In 2009 they produced this report on evidence which makes it a lot easier to see what is going on. I think if you look at the U.S. Department of Justice crime solutions, you look at the criteria for getting something in there, there is very definitely hard science criteria. If you look at the Public Health Agency of Canada, those are hard science criteria. If you look at Public Safety, they have done a bit more cherry-picking. I am not against the cherry-picking, but it is not so comprehensive, but there is a very strong body.
For short periods of time, Mr. Hastings was producing a journal on this stuff that brought it together, and I think that is important, but where I think the most important for you is that major government agencies — the U.S. Department of Justice as an example — says this is what works. They do not put up stuff unless it is proven scientifically. It is run by their research institute with full support all the way up to their Attorney General. The Public Health Agency of Canada is the same, the World Health Organization, I do not think you can get better.
The other thing that is important is people are talking about social impact bonds. So do we really need to pay for these things by innovating? I do not think so. I do not think we need the re-testing that the National Crime Prevention Centre is doing. I think we know. Okay, you can go on doing it because I like evidence, but we have more than enough evidence, and if you look at the traditional responses, Mr. Hastings referred to police patrols, we know that these do not work. We know that adding police, most of the research says that it does not help. We know certainly that adding prison capacity only has a very limited impact on crime, and I could go on.
Senator Seidman: Thank you.
Senator Seth: I thank you very much for your great presentations and sharing your knowledge.
Since I live in Toronto, Dr. Hulchanski, you mentioned that in Toronto one key point is increasing polarization of wealthy neighbourhoods and lower socioeconomic areas, and yet we have discussed in previous meetings about the shrinking of the middle class group. What might the impact be in terms of public safety in Toronto? Would greater socioeconomics and diversity in Toronto neighbourhoods contribute to a safer city? If so, how would such diversity be achieved?
Mr. Hulchanski: In two minutes, right?
The Chair: I will give you three.
Mr. Hulchanski: Again, I will refer to Professor Hastings' diagram. In summary, too many neighbourhoods are moving to the lower left in the diagram. We should be moving neighbourhoods and people to the upper right and we are not right now. This is the macro-socioeconomic conditions doing this. It is public policy as well as the labour market and public- private sector.
It is almost that simple. We can talk about this at various levels. Target areas where there is lots of crime, yes, you have to do that, but you also have to target ways of not having so many areas that might have crime. That is a preventive measure around socio measures.
I hope you know, and something I use as a crutch because I am not a criminologist, the Ontario government five years ago commissioned and then mainly shelved, unfortunately, a very good review called the Review of the Roots of Youth Violence. Has that been mentioned here? It is five volumes. You can Google that, and colleagues of these criminologists contributed to this. It is an excellent report.
They make the point that poverty does not directly cause violence. Yes, we have poor areas and more poor areas, and poor people are not criminals any more than others necessarily. However, if not ameliorated, poverty and low- income areas and all that can nonetheless play a central role in generating alienation, a lack of hope or opportunity, low self-esteem, a sense of having no future and other immediate risk factors. We have to address all those, and that is where we have been failing. Addressing things on that list is a solution in addition to tackling crime where it is popping up in all that of course.
Senator Seth: Thank you.
Senator Cordy: I echo the comments of my colleagues who have said this has been an amazing panel. I thank you all very much for the insights you have brought to us today. I have two questions.
First, I used to be an elementary school teacher and certainly know that one can identify at-risk young people at a very young age. I know a number of you made those kinds of comments.
I am interested in the 24/7 program, how it works and who makes the phone call for help, because when this committee studied mental health and mental illness, we learned that police officers were the front line people in many cases who dealt with these situations. We heard from police officers saying that they would often be sitting in an emergency room for five or eight or ten hours, which was not good use of time for the police officer. It certainly increased the stigma for the person with mental illness to be sitting in a waiting room with a police officer sitting behind them for an extended period of time. Could you tell me how that works?
Second, you all made reference to Glasgow, Winnipeg and Edmonton, the decrease in crime and the challenges in breaking down the silos within the various levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal. We are talking about the policing system, the justice system, the health system, social services, recreation and all those kinds of things. How did they all come together? Also, is there a greater trust in the policing system in Edmonton and Winnipeg — and I know you referred to Glasgow — and the work done there with the new holistic approach to fighting crime and helping victims? Are people more likely to come forward and report crime in the cities that are implementing these new procedures?
The Chair: I will start with Ms. Leibovici with regard to the first issue. On the second one, I wonder if Professor Hastings could identify an example. There was so much in Senator Cordy's question, perhaps you could take an example and take it through. On the third question, I would like one of you to identify one example and use that to illustrate the aspects that she brought out. I will go, perhaps, to Professor Waller on that.
Ms. Leibovici: Many years ago, I was a school social worker in Montreal. In my function as a school social worker, I worked closely with teachers who could identify early on whether a child was going to have problems. They were able to identify those children who had moved within the school year three or four times and could see the behaviours that resulted as a consequence of that. I fully understand, and it is a difficult job for the teacher to do that.
With regard to the 24/7 initiative, it is one that is starting; it is not fully implemented. We are waiting for funding from other orders of government in order to implement it. It is a new strategy that is looking at bringing together the different resources required when there is a call at two o'clock in the morning. Traditionally, that call at two o'clock in the morning has been to the officer or sometimes to the ambulance worker. In our case as a first responder, we have firefighters as well that are first responders. You might have an individual who is in distress or is engaged in some kind of activity. The police and/or the firefighter and/or the ambulance and the emergency worker come, which means there is a lot of money being spent and it is not for the right type of service.
Going back to the issue of empirical evidence, we are looking at establishing a real-time information system. If there is an individual who is on the street and who may or may not be committing a crime, if they are committing a crime it would be something different that would happen to them. If they are not committing a crime but potentially could be committing a crime, we are looking at the ability for a phone call to go in. Let us say it is the police first that makes the phone call. If it is a social worker, then it would be a social worker that would come. In the meantime, there would be the ability, through the real-time information system, to find out where we can put the individual. There are only so many spaces that we have for individuals who are inebriated; where do they go? What happens after that to ensure that that person does not get lost in the system and the cycle starts over again the next night? Again, that is costly to everyone. When looking at this notion of smarter policing, this is one way that we can use our police resources and our other services more effectively.
This is an initiative that is starting. As we get the funding, because I am hopeful that we will, we are hoping that it can be something that other municipalities across the country can look at and implement.
Much of the work that REACH engages in is based on empirical evidence. Goals are set and we try to reach them as well. Thank you for that question.
The Chair: That took seven minutes with the questions and the answer — not your answer alone, but for both the questions and the answer. Professor Hastings, I am going to ask you to give a summary of the question.
Perhaps I will take a moment now to indicate that I am going to request you subsequently to follow up with us on additional information after you leave here. I will not interfere any more at this point; I will wrap it up later.
I would ask you to focus on an example of either Winnipeg or Glasgow with regard to the second question, try to do it clearly focused and then follow up later. Professor Waller, I am going to have to ask you to be very focused with the beginning and then also follow up later with regard to Senator Cordy's third question.
Mr. Hastings: As I understood it, the question was how to get people to work together. I think there are three basic options, one of which does not work. The first option is just ask people to work together and we will all be one big, happy team. The reality is that when you bring individual agencies together, they protect their turf, their client base and sit there to exercise their veto. You need to have some kind of incentive. One example is the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act, which set out to deliberately reduce the number of young people who are incarcerated. The Department of Justice at the time made a specific decision not to fund generally but to target their funding to the new activities they wanted to see performed. That was the carrot. If you do that, it works.
The reverse example of that is more of a stick and accountability mechanism, which is something along the lines of the Auditor General. You said you were going to do this. Did you do it? You said you were going to do it with, for, or to these people. Is that who you did it to? You said this is what would happen. Did it work? If you sunset your money to that kind of discipline, then you can have huge impact.
Mr. Waller: I will answer the Glasgow question. Basically, they got both the health minister and justice minister to decide that this was important action. They established a high lever unit as their leadership centre that looked at what was known about the causes and about things that have worked and it got people to commit to reducing violence in a range of different ways — all the way from issues relating to alcohol, to early childhood, to primary schools, and so on.
In terms of your follow up, the Alberta website has a complete conference with videos with people — not from Glasgow but from all across this country — who are leaders in helping get this multisectoral approach implemented.
The Chair: Thank you. That was very helpful and we will follow up in that regard.
Now, I have three senators on the second round. If I sense that we are not going to get them answered, I will get the questions on the table and then ask you to follow up later.
Senator Eggleton: Professor Waller, you submitted a brief calling for a crime reduction board for Canada. You have also made reference to 5 per cent, although I am not quite clear — 5 per cent of what? It also raises the question of how that relates to the National Crime Prevention Centre. We had them in the other day and they were telling us about what they do. I sensed you said that all they were funding was replicating work, or what we might call promising practices, going into other communities. I sense you are thinking that it needs to be more than that with what you have suggested here in terms of the board.
Why would the federal government not just keep the present structure and maybe improve upon it a bit, versus the kind of structure that you are suggesting?
Mr. Waller: On the 5 per cent, we have basically unlimited empirical evidence to suggest that if we invested the equivalent of 5 per cent of what is currently going into mainly reactive systems — the police courts and Correctional Services — at the federal level, and I would go for every level, that we could achieve large reductions. I have written a book about this that talks about 10 per cent. It is the same argument.
How does the crime reduction board differ from the NCPC? The NCPC is basically retesting things that have been proven empirically to work in Canada or elsewhere. It started in 1998. To give one comparative example, the Youth Justice Board set up under the Blair government in 1998 took one of the things that the NCPC is testing here and put it into 72 priority communities within three years of evaluating that. When they found it worked, they put it into another 72. All these areas are the areas you are concerned about, high priority. This makes it very clear that we need a lot more than just a research and testing thing. We also need something at a much higher level. The committees recommended a senior bureaucrat. The guy in charge of this is a DG; that is what I was 35 years ago. You need an ADM or deputy minister level, and this person has to be able to lead, to bring the different federal ministries there. They have to be able to interface with people like the Alberta Smartcom level, like what is being talked about in Ontario.
It is only if you do that that you will actually begin to get the sorts of investments provincially and it is the only way that you will be able to control and break a little bit the incredible policing costs. Mainly, two thirds of those policing costs are reacting to 9-1-1 calls. That is not prevention.
Senator Eggleton: I will go to Councillor Leibovici. You talked about Edmonton and about Alberta generally. Could you put on your FCM hat and talk about how these and other measures are being spread across the country? There was reference to a 14-city network. I do not know much about that. If you do, you can tell us about it and what it is producing.
When we ultimately report, we will address it to the federal government. What can we say the federal government can be doing to help what you are attempting to do across the country?
Ms. Leibovici: What we are looking at is a fairer distribution of policing funds and ensuring that federal policing undertakes its role. At this point in time, municipal police forces are taking some of the responsibilities that most rightly should be within the federal policing jurisdiction. That is taking our limited resources — 20 per cent of our operating budget is going to cover policing, and not being utilized towards the preventive type of policing that we are talking about today, because we have to do policing that really is not within our jurisdiction. If we can get a fairer and more equitable distribution of policing and policing responsibilities, that would be extremely helpful.
Also, we need recognition of the fact that there are other areas that municipalities can provide services in to be proactive on the crime prevention side. That is part of what our ask is to the federal government.
Senator Eggleton: What do you mean by policing for the federal government and things that are not in your jurisdiction? Criminal Code stuff, you police on, and those are federal laws. I do not know what you mean.
Ms. Leibovici: For instance, every border community in Ontario spends close to $1.5 million annually from its policing budget to provide law enforcement and support at international border crossings. That is not within municipal jurisdiction. I talked about the cracks in the system and we end up filling in those cracks when really that is not our responsibility. Someone has to do it.
The Chair: On that point, Ms. Leibovici, do the municipalities not have the right to appeal to the federal government for compensation for a number of the aspects that you have referred to?
Ms. Leibovici: I guess we always have the right to appeal, but we have never received the funding for those activities.
The Chair: Senator Eggleton has more questions and I have two senators with follow-up questions. I would like them to put their questions in a focused manner. I do not want you to respond at this time. I want to get all the questions on the table and have you follow up later.
Senator Callbeck: I am trying to get at how successful we are in our efforts to reintegrate offenders back into society. Mr. Waller, you said that programs and centres are very limited. Are they more limited than they used to be? For example, my understanding is that at one time if you were in a correctional institute you could learn a trade, whether to be a carpenter or barber or what not. Has there been a study or analysis to show there is more programming or there is less programming? That is the area I would like to know about.
The Chair: Do you have further questions, Senator Callbeck?
Senator Callbeck: No, that is fine.
Senator Merchant: We have been dealing with a sort of crime that we all understand, but no one ever talks about the other kind of crime, and these would not be people who would fit down here. What about white collar crime? I am thinking that very often the people who are victimized are elderly people. They must feel very insecure. It is not a physical crime so often but certainly is mental. Also, with the different ways of communicating, people can commit all kinds of crimes now, Internet-related. How are we thinking and what studies are you doing to make us understand what produces that kind of a mind, and is that reported? I am thinking about people who do not fit in that little category that we so often occupy ourselves with.
The Chair: I want to follow up on Senator Merchant's question and ask you to look at areas we have not talked about as groups today — the elderly, and family violence within the elderly community. There may well be in some of the documentation you provided to us today some of the statistics in that area, but these may well also fall significantly into the underreported crime area because of the very nature of it, the elderly with less opportunity and less confidence, and often very dependent, particularly within a family situation.
I want to take a moment here to echo what my colleagues have already implied, that the presentation today has been extremely valuable to us across all four of our witnesses. I was somewhat encouraged to hear Professor Waller's questioning of the statistics. I did some of that at the meeting with Statistics Canada, at our last meeting, because it did not seem to ring true to the perception, at least on the ground and, indeed, to some of the numbers reported on an annual basis on one of the cities I am most familiar with. It was nice to hear someone else say things along that line.
I would like to repeat what I implied a few moments ago, and that is to ask you to look into the issues that you have brought to us and that the questions have focused on and try to identify specific best practice examples. You have given us some here today so I am not implying we did not hear the examples you gave, but if there are additional specific best practice examples that you can identify, give us a one-pager at most, not five volumes. We can do the follow-up looking into those specific examples.
The thing that helps us most in doing what you have pleaded with us to do a number of times in terms of making recommendations is to use real examples. You have given us some; you have implied there are others. If you can think about it and say what is the very best practice example of this particular major issue we have talked about, put that to us and get that to us.
The clerk will be following up with you. You will have transcripts of this meeting very quickly following this meeting. We would really value and appreciate that additional information.
Having said that, it is obvious that the committee has very much appreciated what you have presented to us today in person and through the documents you have provided. You have not only provided us issues but you have put them contextually within the different environments that you were referring to. That has all been very helpful.
Finally, I thank you all on behalf of my colleagues. I thank my colleagues once again for their thoughtful questions to you.
(The committee adjourned.)