The Ottawa Citizen - April 15, 2009
The Guardian (Charlottetown) - April 16, 2009
The Daily News (Truro) - April 18, 2009
Vancouver Sun - April 21, 2009
The Edmonton Journal - April 27, 2009
By Colin Kenny
Drug addictions breed thievery. Gangs breed thievery. Recessions breed thievery. And right now Canada – like most industrialized countries – is having significant problems with all three of these: drug addiction, gangs and one whopper of a crime-breeding recession.
Statistics will tell you that crime rates have been down in recent years. But yesterday’s statistics won’t tell you what is happening today. Nor do statistics reflect crimes that go unreported because victims know that the police are stretched too thin to deal with them.
So Canadians should get ready for more break-ins and robbery of all kinds. They should also expect more of the kind of violence that often goes with this stuff. Convenience stores in all kinds of Canadian communities are already getting whacked – one store in Ottawa has been robbed four times in the last few months.
What can governments do about it? Well, I believe in social workers as much as the next Liberal, but more police also have to be part of the solution, especially when the police are doing a lot of the social work in Canadian communities right now. The bad cops who fire Tasers at the wrong time and drop drunks off at the outskirts of town grab the headlines, but a lot of good cops have been saving the lives of a lot of street people in recent years.
We need more police on the streets, but we also need more police at our airports and seaports, at our border crossings and on the Great Lakes. These are all vulnerable areas that American as well as Canadian security officials are worried about.
I said we need more cops. I didn’t say we need more prisons. The current federal government likes to bellow macho manifestos about getting tougher on sentencing, but prisons create more crime than they prevent. If the American experience tells us anything, it is that prisons are a cop-out when it comes to preventing crime.
Let’s focus instead on better policing. And let’s start with the RCMP. The modest investments the federal government has talked about making in better policing have all but ignored the RCMP, but the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence estimates that our county needs somewhere between an additional 5,300 to 6,500 Mounties to supplement the 17,000-plus officers now in uniform.
These officers would make the lives of Canadians more secure in small towns and big cities alike. They would help strengthen our economic relationship with the United States to help pull us out of the recession because they would make our borders more secure, and help jump-start the process of unclogging the border crossings between the two countries.
If you think we’ve got more than enough Mounties to go around, consider a few facts that may make your head swim:
· While the U.S. Coast Guard patrols the Great Lakes with 2,200 officers, the best Canada has been able to offer up are 14 Mounties. The Americans keep asking us to team up with them to fight crime on the border, but the RCMP just doesn’t have the funding to provide personnel join them.
· Canada’s ports are riddled with crime, but the Mounties don’t have the officers to do much about it. Huge gaps in security leave Canada’s ports vulnerable to both criminals and terrorists. We need 900 more Mounties to police our ports properly.
· The committee heard testimony that the Mounties can only keep tables on one-third of the criminal organizations in Canada that it knows exist, let alone all the others it hasn’t found yet.
· A 2002 study showed that Canada ranked 19th out of 23 OECD countries in police officers per capita – our number of police per capita was 186 per 100,000 people. Australia, a comparable society, came in at 305 officers per 100,000 people.
· Statistics Canada data for 2008 showed that Canada has climbed all the way up to 196 officers per 100,000 people. Wow! Unfortunately, we have a much large increase in problems with drugs, gangs, terrorism and the recession.
· Police work has become increasingly time-consuming for a variety of reasons. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms is essential to modern Canadian society, but the time it takes for police to comply with its strictures means it takes three officers to do the work that two used to do. A break-and-enter case that took an hour to investigate in 1970 is now likely to take between 5-10 hours.
Luckily, Canadians need more police at a time when Canadians are in desperate need of good jobs. Being a police officer is a very good job, even if the government is squeezing the RCMP on salaries, just like it is squeezing the rest of the public service. Squeezing police salaries is not a smart idea when we need the very best kind of people to get into the RCMP and help revive the organization’s proud traditions.
Canada needs more good cops. The federal government should be doing everything in its power to fund them, both for the sake of our economy and our society. I say stop pontificating about tougher prison sentences. Give us more quality humans to fight the good fight for a humane society.
[Colin Kenny is Chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence. kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca]