[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Tuesday, April 8, 1997
.0907 
[English]
The Chairman (Mr. Roger Simmons (Burin - St. George's, Lib.)): Good morning, everybody.
Good morning, Pierre.
[Translation]
Mr. Pierre de Savoye (Portneuf, B.Q.): Hello, Mr. Chairman.
[English]
The Chairman: For the benefit of any newcomers in the room, we're continuing our review of policies on the misuse and abuse of substances. This morning we're delighted to welcome, from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, Chief Barry King and his associates.
Chief King, please be so kind as to introduce your colleagues at the table. If you have an opening statement, that's well and good. Leave us some time to ask questions.
Before you do that, let me point out that we have only three members at the table, but we like to think we have the quality. More seriously, our rules require that for taking evidence, which is what we're doing this morning, as opposed to making decisions, we require three people - and that's what we have. Other members will show up during the morning. They have other commitments on the Hill. But of course everything you say will be recorded for posterity and, more to the point, will be taken into account when we review the transcripts for the purpose of preparing our report.
Welcome, Chief King. Go ahead.
Chief Barry King (Chair, Drug Abuse Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and good morning to you and to members of the committee.
This is really a collaborative effort and a partnership among the Canadian Chiefs of Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and in fact all the members of our committee, who include the Solicitor General, Health Canada, the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, and others. What we're going to do is split our presentation to try to cover all bases for you.
I'm Chief Barry King. I'm chair of the Drug Abuse Committee and have been for the last nine years. With me are Michel Perron, from the office of the Solicitor General - he's also a member of our committee; Assistant Commissioner Ryan, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; and Staff Sergeant Michel Pelletier, who is in charge of drug education programming for Canada. If I may, I will ask Assistant Commissioner Ryan to start with his presentation. Then I'll give the other half, and then we'll go into questions.
Mr. Terry Ryan (Vice-Chair, Drug Abuse Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and the committee, for hearing us and giving us the opportunity to meet with you and do our presentation.
The harm associated with drug abuse has forced the Canadian community to acknowledge the existence of the problem and the need to confront it, and to feel a sense of responsibility toward controlling and reducing if not eliminating the problem. For a long time the association between substance abuse and other social problems was not widely recognized and thus the solutions were not linked. The answer to reducing drug abuse was believed to be one of controlling the supply. However, the ability of law-enforcement personnel to control the supply effectively has been surpassed by the demand for illicit substances and new solutions are required.
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Law enforcement personnel have the ringside seats to view the harm caused to the community by substance abuse. The abuse is often a direct cause or a magnifying factor of the harm; hence police are willing to devote considerable effort to solutions.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police recognize that a balanced approach is necessary, which includes prevention, education, counselling, treatment and rehabilitation, and enforcement. Some of the participants in the drug abuse problem will require access to all of the solutions, while others will respond only to a particular approach. For example, youth require education regarding the dangers and difficulties of drug abuse. They need to be trained to recognize the problems that lead to substance abuse and understand that it is clearly acceptable and necessary to encourage a friend to get help. They should adopt role models as guides for social behaviour. Parents and teachers are often the first of these role models and thus need education and awareness.
Employers have a responsibility to provide a healthy and safe workplace that supports a healthy lifestyle through training, provision of substance abuse treatment, and rehabilitation. At the same time, they must ensure that all operations are safe and free from any negative impacts of drug use.
Health caregivers must ensure adequate counselling, treatment, and rehabilitation services are available.
The media need to eminently portray individuals who provide substance-free solutions to problems.
Colleagues from the various agencies that are confronted with substance abuse problems need to unite to carry the message in their day-to-day work.
These agencies also require constant dialogue to ensure that efforts and messages coincide and solutions are shared.
Canadian law enforcement agencies do not believe incarceration is an adequate response to cannabis consumers. On the contrary, they strongly believe in the solutions offered by the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and the alternatives to judicial disposition offered by Bill C-41.
Statistics Canada data reveal the present rate of one offence for possession of cannabis for every two police officers in Canada for the years 1994 and 1995.
Enforcement agencies maintain solutions will be developed by sitting at the same table with health representatives, community workers, and other participants while utilizing the guidance of community-based policing offered by the CAPRA model. Such a balanced response will allow law enforcement to concentrate maximum efforts towards investigations of serious criminal elements involved in the trafficking and importation of large quantities of drugs. Education or treatment and rehabilitation is not an adequate response to these individuals.
The law enforcement community strongly condemns efforts that include legalization of presently illicit substances, including cannabis. Once the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act is proclaimed, convictions for possession of small quantities of cannabis for personal use will no longer result in persons being fingerprinted or photographed. They will no longer be recorded by the Canadian criminal records system or be burdened with the negative consequences of such records. Furthermore, drug users and traffickers who sell to support their own habits can be diverted from the criminal justice system through the provisions of Bill C-41.
The Government of Canada must give a loud and clear message to the effect that it intends to refocus the response to the drug abuse problem in a balanced approach, with the justice system having the capability to refer abusers to health agencies. Society must be educated to the fact that drug abuse is not a police and justice problem but rather a societal problem, and society must accept responsibility for a place in the solution.
Furthermore, a failure by the Government of Canada to take a strong stand on the issues will result in an ambiguous message being sent to young Canadians that drug abuse is normal behaviour. Thank you very much.
Chief King: If I can just speak to my statement now, Mr. Chairman, the problems of drug abuse do pose a serious threat to the health and integrity of individuals in the normal development of our society. Drug abuse imposes abnormal social, economic, and political costs on countries, and illicit substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and inhalants, when abused, have proven dangerous to our health.
Controlling illicit drugs must be part of a comprehensive, focused, and national drug policy that balances - and I repeat it because it is important - education, prevention, enforcement, treatment, and rehabilitation and is effectively resourced and supported by legislation and policies at the national level. This must also be done in concert with the provinces and the territories, particularly with education, because that is one of the areas in which I believe we have a bit of a void across the country, where we don't have a consistent ability to provide education in all schools with the same programs.
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We must become partners for safer communities. There is a shared responsibility to ensure our strategy for Canada is comprehensive. In recognition of harm reduction initiatives, we wish to reiterate that the CACP emphatically does not support or endorse legalization of marijuana or any other illicit substances beyond the current boundaries, but we are reviewing decriminalization and looking at some opportunities so that we can move forward, be realistic, and work in partnership as we have over the last two years with the new HEP coalition - that is, Health and Enforcement in Partnership - to see each other's responsibilities, to see each other's point of view, and, I believe, to have some effective solutions.
We have to remember, however, that the drug trade is an enterprising crime, with the opportunity for individuals to make large profits, and we must strive to ensure that those opportunities also have a responsibility and that there is a risk for those people.
With respect to Health and Enforcement in Partnership, it's probably the most exciting thing I've been involved in, in 36 years of policing, and particularly during the last 10 years with the drug abuse committee. We formed a loose coalition with Health, Solicitor General, and the CACP. Now we have a number of groups - in fact approximately 10 groups are involved - and we've been working together looking at issues such as harm reduction, demand versus supply reduction, diversion, and risk reduction. Why? Because it's a community policing ``fit'' for the future of what we're doing in policing: partnerships, being involved with one another, supporting one another, and understanding each other's role and responsibilities. Secondly, because of the fiscal restraint, it just makes plain common sense. Thirdly, health and social factors are now blending with the criminal justice factors; we all have the same issues to deal with.
As to limitations of enforcement, while we don't like to say it, we can have all the enforcement in the world and we're never going to stop the problem, so we also have to find a blend of attacking it using three or four different methods.
As to overcrowded courts and jails, we know we can't just keep arresting people and putting them into jails. No one could possibly afford to build them to that extent, except maybe some of our neighbours to the south.
As to legislative reform, we have new legislation coming in that's going to change some of the ways in which we operate. In particular, it is probably going to cause us to renew virtually all of our programming because of the new legislation that will come in. That is not only an enormous jump-gap in cost but in terms of getting that message out to our people and their partners and then getting that out to the general public at large...
It's not just done through PSAs. As you probably realize, there are 17,000 schools in this country, and it's an enormous task to try to get to our young people.
How will we do it? We'll do it through federal-provincial initiatives, and we think those partnerships have to be strengthened. As I say, in education it's not as if we have a federal education ministry where we can come up with a program and get concurrence right across the country. There are different requirements in different provinces, and we are fighting those battles on a regular basis. We'll do it through good policies, cooperation, communication, coordination, and accountability.
With respect to the CACP drug committee, recently we have come up with a new mission statement for the years 1997-2000 that we feel very happy with, to promote safer and healthier communities through proactive leadership, by addressing and influencing prevention, enforcement, and treatment of substance abuse. The values we put into that are integrity, collaboration, innovation, inclusion, and excellence. Our new motto is ``Partners For Safer Communities''.
Internally, with 18 committees in the CACP, our drug abuse committee liaises with six of them: human resources; traffic; law amendments; crime prevention; policing with aboriginals; and the victims of crime committee. There's an interrelation of all of those, and we don't want to see things fall through the gap.
Externally, we're involved with 19 other organizations on an annual basis.
As to our history since 1989, we've developed programs. We've been into the 17,000 schools in Canada, in both official languages, with probably at least eight to ten various programs. We've jointly sponsored the Canada-wide major city mayors' symposium on drug abuse. We have videos that have been focused from junior kindergarten all the way up to secondary school students, the Junior Jays Club, a rural native-oriented video On The Road To Recovery, and we've been involved with a number of other things; for example, the Spiderman comics, where we distributed three million of those comic books focused on drug education.
Drug education and drug enforcement symposiums have been held over the last three years for the purpose of identifying common issues, and we've brought people from across the country so that we have a consistent application of not only enforcement but also of education programs.
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You asked how federal, provincial, and municipal authorities get along together. Probably in the last ten years there has been a drastic improvement, and in the last three to five years I would say outstandingly. Some of it is out of necessity, but some of it has also brought us together and then allowed us to nurture ourselves within that environment.
As the co-chair of HEP, which is Health and Enforcement in Partnership, we have been involved with NAC AIDS for needle exchange programs, and we've put a resolution to support that. We are involved with the CCENDU project, which is the epidemiology study that is currently going on in six pilot studies.
The CACP and the RCMP, with Health and SolGen, have now come forward with a literacy project, which has just been completed, a Canada-wide survey to find out for at-risk youth what are the types of approaches we can use to communicate effectively with them. We have just recently received the report - I'm sorry, we only have the one copy, and it's the large red binder. We did that in concert with Secretary of State and Literacy Canada. Our next phase in that project is to go ahead and try to find out what is the most effective tool to go forward to reach these people.
We are also involved in an illicit drug and alcohol study with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, to add to the economic cost of crime study in which, while it was accurate, we believe there wasn't sufficient information on law enforcement statistics. That's no one's fault; it's just that they had not been available. Now we're trying to find a way of capturing them so that we can honestly say whether 30%, 40%, 70%, or 80% of crime is related to substance abuse in one manner or another. We have two of the best researchers in the world who are committed to that project, and it has just been kicked off.
The one thing I would say is that with our drug strategy or our funding, the difficulty we're finding more and more is that as we're starting to get the impetus and the spark to move ahead, the funds are drying up. We're always robbing Peter to pay Paul.
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has never put in money funding for those kinds of projects before. We've always relied on Health or SolGen. But we even put $5,000 a year into that, and that money is coming right out of our own association dues. We think it's that important. I don't know how long we'll be able to continue doing that, but as I say, it's not just a cry for money; it's a cry for prioritizing some of the things that are going to help us make a difference in the future.
In regard to our strategic plan for HEP, we have a national round table coming into the city here at the end of the month. We're bringing 47 senior-level people from health and enforcement right across Canada. This will be our second in a year. Our strategic plan here is to confirm what the mission is in drug education, what the message is, and who should be the messengers, so we can eliminate the duplication and work closer, in concert right across the country, not just in isolated pockets.
There are a number of other issues. Because of the time I won't go through all of them, except to say that in regard to existing programs, we have probably upwards of 30 to 40 programs when you count drinking and driving, drug abuse, no sale to minors, things of that nature, right across this country. The problem with most of them is that they're...I wouldn't say dated, but they were created five, six, seven, eight years ago. What we're running into now is because of the funding in the United States, programs like DARE... You've all heard of DARE, but I could list you 15 Canadian programs you probably have never heard of because we don't have the marketing capability and the funding for those types of things. So we now have some police departments reverting to some of those programs, which is a concern to us as Canadians. We don't think the message we want to impart to our young people is the message we take from a three-ring binder that we buy from the United States and put out.
Those are the kinds of issues... As I say, it's from the heart of trying to say here are the issues. We have the opportunity right now with HEP, as you can see us sitting here together - SolGen and the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse behind us - and if there was one plea I could give you, it's that we need that independence of the CCSA, which has been an umbrella organization, a spark plug for us. It has the ability to do the research and the monitoring and the evaluation. We can throw money into programs, but we all realize now that if we're not certain how well they are done, why move on to the next step, just in isolation?
Those are the comments, and we would be pleased to answer any questions you might have.
The Chairman: Are we all through at that end for the time being?
Chief King: Yes.
The Chairman: Now we'll go to questions, with Pierre first.
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[Translation]
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: Gentlemen, I greatly appreciated your presentation. This is not your first appearance before our committee and I have always appreciated in your presentations the nice balance between law enforcement and prevention and assistance to drug abusers. You bring a practical experience which is very useful and which gives us insight into how things are going out in the field, so to speak.
That being said, I noted in your presentations that you state, on the one hand, that once the controlled drugs and substances act will be proclaimed, convictions for possession of small quantities will be dealt with in a different manner since Bill C-41 allows for alternative measures. This is certainly one of the good things our committee has been able to get done and your cooperation in this regard has been a major help.
On the other hand, I noted, and I would like you to clarify this, that you state in your first brief:
[English]
The law enforcement community strongly condemns efforts that include legalization of presently illicit substances including cannabis.
[Translation]
Furthermore, in your other brief, and I refer to the document that was handed out and not to the oral presentation, it says in the last paragraph of the first page:
[English]
- Decriminalization can be considered if appropriate strategies are employed and impact
analyzed.
Could you clarify for the committee the distinction you establish between decriminalisation and legalisation?
[English]
Chief King: From our perspective, first and foremost we have international covenants around the world where legalization, in our opinion, is not permitted. Legalization means to open it up much the same as licit drugs can be purchased, with licensed establishments and what have you.
Decriminalization, to us - and of course there are many definitions - really has the intent of lessening the penalties. It's a range of options such that the police officer who becomes involved now has the option of arrest, of summons, of diversion, of ticketing, possibly, which is basically an out-of-court type of method of avoiding court and paying a fine. But the important issue when we're saying that the effective strategies have to be in place is that we have to ensure that the officer in Elbow, Saskatchewan, 300 miles from the closest community, has an effective, or cost-effective, diversion method to use.
That is one of the difficulties we foresee. If we just blanket and say, now diversion, and we emphasize in that area, many of them don't have the ability to do it. There are probably other ways, such as volunteer groups, court-appointed counselling or things of that nature. We're willing to look at these areas, because we see the advantage as well.
When you take a look at the number of drug arrests made there's always the concern that the police are out there doing nothing but laying minor possession charges. Well, in some cases the possession charges are the only appropriate charge they can lay to solve another problem.
Take some of the homeless in Vancouver as an example. Some of these people, if they didn't have the ability to use some of that...because we don't have other legislation that empowers us, as we used to have. A lot of those cases...and they are reducing. The RCMP can speak for themselves, but their profile is into targeting upwards, and the municipalities are more under the street crime units.
As I say, I think possession for the purpose of trafficking is increasing and possession is decreasing.
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: I appreciate your clarifying this essential difference between legalization and decriminalization. I think it is very important that those two concepts be very well understood, because in there lies part of the solution.
I also notice that you are offering what you call the CAPRA model. I'm not acquainted with it. Can you tell me a little bit more about it?
Chief King: Assistant Commissioner Ryan will handle that one.
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Mr. Ryan: The movement we've been making in the last few years in relation to policing is that there's been a whole change of philosophy in relation to how we do policing. We're approaching policing from what we call a ``community-based'' policing approach, or a ``problem-solving'' approach, which we call the CAPRA model.
Basically, it's working with your clients and your partners within the community, not just to go out as we did in the years past and pick up somebody and take them before the court and let the courts deal with them. It's to try to sit down and work with the individual - we won't call him the ``accused'', but it's at least the ``suspect'' or what have you - to work with his parents if it's a youth, to work with the school, to work with health or social workers. We try to first of all identify what exactly is the problem, and to get to the root of the problem, and then try to work out a solution to the problem for both the community and the individual.
That's where we find the community-based policing model to be of great value. As well, the changes in the legislation and having the ability to use diversion as opposed to just taking someone to court is the vital aspect of that approach.
What we say sometimes gets misinterpreted. In relation to decriminalization, we're very much against a straight ticketing approach. We don't want to be forced to just do ticketing. We would like to see ticketing as one option, though, because there are some people you can't do anything with, and the ticket would be the approach.
But as Chief King mentioned, we'd like a range of options so that when the police officer looks at the problem and sits down and discusses it with the community, with the social workers, with the courts, if need be, then we can pick the most appropriate option to deal with that situation.
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: Thank you.
You also indicate that such a balanced response, the CAPRA model, will allow law enforcement to concentrate maximum efforts on investigation of serious criminal elements involved in trafficking and importation of large quantities of drugs.
In your other presentation you talk a bit about bike gangs and gang wars. I know our Minister of Health has taken enormous measures to make sure that market shares won't flow from this company to the other company through advertising, but at the same time, bike gangs use explosives and other methods to get at their market share. Obviously, you don't have the capacity to get the real kings, the drug lords, behind the bars.
In Saint-Nicolas, Quebec, for instance, people known by police forces to be the real drug lords push their drugs at kids. We're not talking here about cigarettes. We're talking about hard drugs. Obviously, it's very difficult to get them behind bars and keep them there.
Some approaches are being suggested right now. How do you react to that from your professional perspective?
Mr. Ryan: I can touch upon it from a number of angles, especially from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police approach. To tie it in with what we're trying to do at the street level, within the RCMP, first of all, we have approximately 1,000 federal RCMP officers dedicated to drug enforcement. Those 1,000 police officers are dedicated to the upward echelon in drug enforcement - in other words, not street-level enforcement.
Through our community-based policing approach we're trying to encourage and push the responsibility for street-level enforcement to the municipal level and to the street-level police officers, the rural police officers.
At the upward level we're trying to utilize those 1,000 police officers for that strict purpose in a great many areas, especially in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and in the larger centres, through task force approaches by utilizing Montreal urban city police, the Sûreté du Québec, the RCMP and other agencies as partners, which is a very successful approach.
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It is a difficult task with a drug enforcement approach. There has been really no change in drug enforcement resources on the enforcement side since about 1987, or since about 1987 on the drug awareness education side. We recognize the realities of the day, with the financial situation and economies and what have you. As a result of that we have tried to take a different approach and specifically focus those thousand officers on the upper echelon.
Tied in with that, on April 1, 1997, the government approved the integrated proceeds of crime units across Canada. That is an integrated approach where we have the RCMP, the municipal police, Revenue Canada Customs, Justice, forensic accountants, all working out of the same office and using those resources to target the profits of the upper echelon of organized crime groups, major traffickers in drugs or smuggling of alcohol, tobacco, or other things. Before April 1 we had those units in three locations in Canada - Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver - and we've expanded them to ten additional locations across Canada. That has greatly enhanced our arsenal on -
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: But building the proof is always difficult, linking the higher echelons to the lower criminals. Would you welcome an amendment to the law that would help you link the higher echelons to the criminal on the street; one that would outlaw, let's say, the Hell's Angels or the Rock Machine, for instance?
Mr. Ryan: There's no doubt we would welcome some changes in legislation that would make it easier to take certain proactive approaches towards organized crime. We very much recognize the difficulties with the charter and how we have to have a balance between respect for the rights of individuals and society, but also the need to take extremely strong proactive approaches towards organized crime and in particular such violent types of criminal activity as motorcycle gangs. So yes, we see a very strong need for some special types of legislation to assist in that area.
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: With the new provisions to seize property that has been used or is involved in the commission of trafficking or drug crime, what has your experience been in applying this legislation?
Mr. Ryan: Actually, in the three areas where we have the integrated task forces, it has been very successful. Most of them have been before the court now, but I'll refer to Montreal. We've had some very, very successful joint operations that have allowed us to move up the chain in criminal organizations. We're very near the top of some of them.
As you've already remarked, it is extremely difficult to get to the top layers and to locate the assets. They are very difficult and very long investigations, usually involving a lot of international work, with international implications. We are having some successes and we're hoping the expansion of that program will enhance it. Since 1989, when the legislation was put in place - I don't have the statistics with me - we've had a fairly consistent growth in what we've been able to seize.
[Translation]
Mr. Pierre de Savoye: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[English]
The Chairman: If you have more we'll get back to you, I'm sure, but I think Grant is anxious to talk to a cop who hasn't given him a speeding ticket.
Mr. Grant Hill (Macleod, Ref.): Chief King, in your presentation you referred to new legislation. Specifically what are you speaking of?
Chief King: Bill C-8, once it is enacted, the ability with our sentencing, particularly, or the requirement for judges to address and enhance sentencing or give reasons why they should not; the ability now for regulations to be enacted, as opposed to just trying to go every so many years to have the entire act changed, or the legislation changed: those are the types of things.
I don't know if that answers the question you were asking.
Mr. Grant Hill: It does. But since Bill C-8 has not been proclaimed, I presume it's just planning towards the date when it is proclaimed.
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Chief King: Yes, we're certainly of the belief that it probably will be in the very near future, and of course we have to start planning.
Mr. Grant Hill: Having the bill through the process, do you have a logical explanation as to why it wouldn't be proclaimed?
Chief King: Priorities and different things have to be addressed. I'm not really in the government's position to be able to respond to that.
Mr. Grant Hill: But you're planning and presuming?
Chief King: Yes, we are.
Mr. Ryan: The development of regulations, I understand, has been one of the last points in proclaiming the bill. My understanding is that there's a definite requirement to have the regulations in place at the same time the bill is actually proclaimed. My understanding is that process is very nearly complete.
Mr. Grant Hill: Whenever we have some experts in one specific area... You obviously must look at international experience. This is kind of a broad, open question: is there a country you would look to that has a better drug policy than that of Canada? I'm thinking of specifics: less trafficking or a lower percentage of drug users. Is there some country that you could put up as a good example for us to imitate?
Mr. Ryan: I would say that Canada is probably as good as any. Off the top of my head, to think of a country that is not faced with the problem, or some aspect of the problem, be it a supplier or user or a country that's used as a conduit for moving drugs from one area to another, I actually can't come up with a country that's totally not involved in one aspect or another of the trade.
It's interesting to look at the last number of years in the international community and the changes that have taken place within that community. A number of years ago, countries like Colombia and India and some others were not users as much as producers of drugs. But as these countries become more of a place for users of drugs, then they become more willing partners to play a very active role in drug enforcement.
The community has changed drastically in the last number of years, but to go to your question - I'll throw it open to my colleagues to identify a country to epitomize - I just can't come up with one.
Chief King: I just know from attending the International Association of Chiefs of Police for the last 18 or 20 years that the same problems come up everywhere. They have a round table. Terry is on that committee to represent Canada and give our input.
I would say the answer to what you're maybe saying could come from asking: are there different experiments going on that are going to try to eliminate a problem here or there? I guess some of the difficulty is that people will throw out certain countries and say that we should look at what they're doing. But this may be on the basis of one paper that has been done on one project, and that hasn't been revisited three or four years later to find out whether it might have displaced another problem.
There are initiatives. I would say that when we take a look at some of the things that go on in different places like England and Sweden, this is one of the things that has caused us to pull our heads out of the sand and say that there are some options we should look at. If we want to move forward, it's not just by sitting here and saying that we just need all the authority to lock everybody up as the way to solve the problem, because that just doesn't work anyway.
I would have to agree with Terry. I'm limited in that I haven't been in all the countries of the world, but in talking with those people, when I'm there, I focus on talking about the subject they're interested in.
I would say many of them are quite happy with what we're doing, particularly when you take the education aspect. I'd say we're actually ahead of the proactivity, and have been for years.
Take even the community-oriented facet of the English bobby in policing. Until the last couple of years, they didn't go into schools for educational programs. They're on the corner and talking to people downtown or in their villages, but Canada has been far ahead in terms of a sustained and committed drug education program for at least the last 10 to 15 years.
Mr. Michel Perron (Senior Policy Analyst, Law Enforcement Strategy Group, Department of the Solicitor General): If I may just add to that, one point with the police in the international context is that when they look at Canada, they do see it as very progressive insofar as the area of collaboration is concerned, at least with health and treatment. It's very rare when we attend international fora that this same group of individuals is sitting around the table actively discussing types of projects and programs that we could put into effect.
To that extent, Mr. Hill, we have been looked upon, I think, in Canada as very progressive in that regard.
Mr. Grant Hill: I have actually heard other countries describe Canada as a leader. I think as a committee we should know that we are not down the tubes or uniquely bad. Sometimes, when you hear all the horror stories, you forget that we do have some strengths here.
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Finally, if I could, the dividing point between street-level drug use and trafficking is always an area that I have trouble with. Where do you divide it? Could you tell me as police officers where you make that division?
Chief King: I think it's a combination of things: it's technique and it's what's required in certain municipalities and locations.
I was the chief of police for eight years in Sault Ste. Marie, which is a border city and a very isolated community. That was a different type of policing from what happens now for me as the chief in Brockville. Previous to that, I was a superintendent with the Peel Regional Police. I also policed Pearson International Airport.
They're all different. In some cases where your official stance may be for one organization to target up only, the only way you can do that is by starting at some of the lower levels to get sufficient information to work your way up, which is a long process.
In other areas you have the ability to run parallel - if you want to call it that - investigations or street-level sweeps to do that type of thing. Consider school searches and local hangouts. Others are working strictly on targets who are well known from the past and are working at that level.
Terry could probably expand on that, but it's not easy to say that the national police will be responsible for this and the other police will be responsible for that. There's too much overlap and blending, I would say, of the same people involved.
Mr. Ryan: I'll just pick up on that. I totally agree with what Chief King has said: it's extremely difficult. The serious problems in a little town like Florenceville, New Brunswick, and the problems on the streets of Toronto are so varied that the policy and approach has to be totally flexible so as to allow our officers to address trafficking in small areas.
We have a definite program mandate laid out for our one thousand police officers. Quantities are suggested in there that they should be concentrating on. I don't have them off the top of my head, but there are different amounts for cannabis, naturally, and lesser amounts for heroin due to the severity of it.
But those are only targets anyway. With the first real bottom level, where there's a person standing on a street corner selling to somebody, we try to push that as street-level enforcement. We're looking at the next level and beyond, whereby you have the person maybe bringing it into the province. The person that brings it into the province starts cutting it down, and he's supplying to the street-level dealer. This is all above street level, so it actually gets down quite a ways.
We also encourage our police officers to work on task forces with the street members so they may work on a target at the street level. Once they use that to identify the suppliers upward, they'll move upward from that. So they are doing some street-level work to start a program off, and then they move upward from that.
But because of the limited resources and because we have to make sure there's a concentration on the major traffickers interprovincially and internationally, a thousand officers across Canada is not very many. That's why we have to make that dividing line. As for street-level enforcement, we see a municipal responsibility for bearing some of the costs within the municipality and a provincial responsibility as well to bear some of the costs within a province.
The Chairman: Andy Scott.
Mr. Andy Scott (Fredericton - York-Sunbury, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Earlier in your presentation, you mentioned your desire to have sort of a range of remedies or sanctions in the case of possession of, let's say, small quantities of marijuana. You talked about decriminalization versus legalization and ticketing and so on.
I'm curious: what circumstance in your minds would distinguish between what you would consider a ticketable offence and something that would prompt a more severe reaction?
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Chief King: Consider communities where the police officer may know the individual. Keep in mind that databases won't pick up all of this information right across the country. Take someone who has a small quantity, and there are no other offences involved at the time. Depending on the circumstances - I wouldn't say just simply the attitude, but that comes into play as well - they find themselves in, I think first and foremost you're going to have to remember that those types of enforcement are really handled by the patrol officers. The patrol officers have three calls waiting in the queue, and they have accidents to go to. They have little time to spend an enormous amount on one individual call, which is of course why we have detectives to take up the long-term calls.
Just to give you one example, consider impaired driving now. It takes a police officer anywhere from two to three and a half hours to deal with just one case of impaired driving because of all the forms that have to be filled out and the tests that must be done.
So from the point of view of whether the officers would use this, I would say that they would be quite glad to use it. They would use it more in areas where there wasn't a multiplicity of offences occurring at the time. Consider an environment in which possibly this person was found with a small amount of possession, but was right by a school and was repeatedly returning.
Mr. Andy Scott: Here's the reason I asked the question. It appears to me that there is a way to remove the arbitrariness from this in the context of... You mentioned a school. You mentioned other offences that may be occurring simultaneously. There may be some kind of a record and past experience and so on. It occurs to me that there are all kinds of precedents in law - I presume. I'm not a lawyer, but I presume it allows you to say that in the case of a first offence, you take this action, but in the case of a subsequent offence or something that has happened simultaneously, or something else, you take a different action.
I was curious as to why it would necessarily be the case that the range has to be available rather than prescribed. I guess that's my question.
Mr. Ryan: Right now, if you look at the legislation as it exists today, the range is really not available. Here's what you may have happening. A police officer comes across somebody who only has drugs for his own use. He ends up maybe destroying the drugs and not charging the individual. The officer himself could be criticized later on down the road. There could be complaints later on. It leaves him in a very awkward situation. Lots of times he ends up taking the case before the courts, because that's really technically his only alternative. It would go into the crowded court system.
Say you have that range of alternatives whereby he can still seize the drugs and still go through certain processes and account for it. As Barry mentioned, you look at where the drug was seized. Was it next to a school? Was it involved in impaired driving? Was it involved in violence or disturbances? Then with your partners, you start determining what should be done with that particular case.
Mr. Andy Scott: I think we're saying pretty much the same thing. I was interested in why we wouldn't be able to deal with this less severely to some extent or perhaps have the opportunity to have a lower threshold with the option of exercising more severity, rather than the other way around.
I may be reading this wrong, but it seems to me that the population I'm interacting with on this issue, in which there's a full range of all kinds of opinions, has some sense that... Let's say softer drugs, marijuana or whatever, demand a certain response while harder drugs demand another. Is that a real distinction?
Here's one of the reasons why this is an important distinction for me. I graduated from high school in 1973, so I was a targeted group, I would say, in the context of the educational process we were engaged with in the country. That was the post-1960s drug culture, and so on and so forth. So a lot of attention was paid to my contemporaries in terms of our minds around these things. When you linked what I think was understood to be a relatively soft drug with some of the harder drugs, it hurt the credibility of the message.
My parents didn't happen to drink, but if they had done so, arguments could have been made that marijuana and alcohol consumption were not significantly different in terms of the impact they would have on judgment or whatever. I don't want to get into the debate, but I remember it vaguely.
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Consequently, when you had people telling you that awful things were going to happen to you for behaving in a fashion that was relatively similar to the way your parents behaved, as against understanding that if someone did heroin... That's a far cry from what my parents were doing, at least in my mind. So I'm curious: is the distinction between marijuana and heroin real or not?
Mr. Ryan: I'll start it off.
A lot of the time, we don't even like the distinction between hard drugs and soft drugs. From our approach, they're all harmful. We are firm believers that one leads to the other, so we do create a link there.
Again, when you look at the diverse responsibilities that the RCMP has, and when you look at drug abuse and the attitude of the public in small communities, some small communities take a very hard line. They demand a very hard response to cannabis, for example.
While I'm talking about cannabis and what it is today as opposed to what it was in 1972 or in the 1960s, there's a big difference in the strength of cannabis now, especially because of hydroponic growing. Cannabis had a THC level of about 4% or 5% at that time, and that was high. Now, however, it's not unusual to have THC at 27%. It is becoming an extremely potent type of drug, and as you know, hydroponic growing in Canada is becoming a very serious concern.
In reality, there is a difference. When we look at heroin and the public attitudes toward heroin, and when we look at cocaine and the public attitudes toward cocaine, there is a difference in attitude. When you're talking about enforcement - and I'm again talking about the street level, about the types of efforts we make at the street level - there is very little difference in the simple possession approach. But when you're dealing with cocaine and with heroin especially, you're looking at the larger centres, with a very minimal use in the smaller centres. Cocaine and crack now have spread much wider, and simple possession within a small community is looked at as extremely serious.
Chief King: I fully agree that ``hard drugs'' and ``soft drugs'' have never been in my terminology, and I certainly don't like to use those terms. But if we look at this from the perspective of what the parents are looking at, of what the teachers are looking at, for the people we deal with on a regular basis in that environment - whether it's sending officers to make presentations to service clubs, whose members are business people as well as parents, and people who have concerns if they find something in the child's room - I think the big issue is that there is no such thing as a soft drug. If there was and we agreed with that, then I think a large majority of people would believe it does become a gateway to harder drugs. Not everyone will escalate up, but if you do get a high and feel good, it doesn't come as fast or as readily after awhile, and you're looking to try something different.
To take that one step further, if we lighten up without some sort of a plan, without some sort of common sense application, then we're going to have increased users. If we decriminalize today, we'll have increased users tomorrow. I don't think I have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out. Beyond that, although I can't give you the statistics scientifically, if we have increased users, there is a very real potential crime is going to increase, social costs are going to increase, and so on and so forth.
There is one other issue that I just wanted to talk about for a moment. You asked why we shouldn't have a standard as opposed to having the ability to have ticketing as an option. It's because discretion is necessary in virtually everything law enforcement does, unless you want to have black-jacketed, high-boot police officers out there playing a role that this is the law and we're doing it. If we want to be problem solvers, if we want to be community police officers, we have to treat the officers in the way we're trying to treat them now: as individuals who are educated. They're being trained to go out there.
I have 53 officers; I'm not with them 24 hours a day. Terry has 17,000. We want to give them options. We want to give them ranges to solve those problems. We have complaint processes if they fail to do that. We have internal systems that look at them if they go beyond, and I think that's what society wants. Whether it's a traffic ticket or whether it's a young person who has been picked up on the way home because he's had too much to drink at a school dance, I think the parents, our citizens, are saying to look at the circumstances and deal with things in that way. We can't deal with everything in the same way.
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Staff Sergeant Michel Pelletier (National Coordinator, Drug Awareness, Royal Canadian Mounted Police): I would like to make one additional comment, Mr. Chair.
From the demand reduction education side of things, I think you'll find a vast difference between the scare tactics approach to drug education in 1972 and the lifestyles and healthy approach we have today. You'll probably find your children have a more comprehensive education as far as substances are concerned. With our partnerships in health services in New Brunswick and other provinces, we would also include alcohol and tobacco as an issue, for instance, as well as cannabis and the other drugs. Again, we stay away from the harder drugs because we would target the youth in that community when working in partnerships. If there was no heroin problem in Fredericton, we certainly wouldn't be talking about heroin. Maybe we'd talk about alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis issues.
The Chairman: I'll go to Mr. Dhaliwal, and then I have a couple of questions.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal (Vancouver South, Lib.): I have some general questions. One is on the link between crime and drug and alcohol abuse. Are there any statistics that you can give me as to crime in general? What percentage is linked to drug and alcohol abuse? If you want to tear down drug and alcohol abuse, it would be interesting to find out what the links are there.
Chief King: Alcohol is certainly a major problem across this country.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: Do you have any percentages associated with that at all?
Chief King: No. The one thing I mentioned earlier is that we're involved with the CCSA, the SolGen, and Health in starting a study that mounts on top of the economic cost of crime study that was released last year, but which didn't have very many statistics on Canada. We're now doing attributable fractions on crime related to substance abuse. We have a researcher from Europe, as well as one from Montreal. Through pilot projects we're hopefully going to actually assess right at the intake level. They'll do research there, as well as a literature review. They're also looking at the correction statistics that are available and the interview process that's available there.
We've always said - without scientific credibility, I would have to say - that 60% to 80% is attributable either as the motivation or the immediate factor, whether it's trying to get the money for drugs or alcohol or whether it's causation because the person has been under the influence. As I say, we want to be able to legitimately codify this. We can then come in in the future and be able to say things with some definite support in order that people can make decisions on a better basis.
But I will tell you that in all my experience as a patrol officer, a detective, and an administrator, a very large percentage - whether it's family violence, child abuse, robberies, break-and-enters - go back to that linkage as part of what's caused it, either for the person involved at the time or because there's some motivation to get that money for the person or for a friend.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: I've heard figures that say 75% of crime can be linked to drug and alcohol abuse. To you, that seems plausible or quite acceptable.
Chief King: For ten years I have said 60% to 70%, while wanting a study to confirm it. I have a feeling we're going to be right in the ballpark, if not a little low.
Mr. Ryan: From the RCMP's perspective as well, I totally support what Barry is saying. We're very anxiously awaiting the results of that study, because to this day there has been nothing scientific on which to base any realistic figures. We're hoping this study will give us the answer.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: I'll go to my next question. In your judgment, do you think drug and alcohol abuse is on the increase or on the decrease?
Chief King: From my perspective in a small, 20,000-person municipality, I would say that until four or five years ago in Ontario, at least, ARF statistics were going down. This was especially so among the kids that we started to educate 10 to 15 years ago, and I think there was a correlation. But with the social contract and other priorities coming into effect, with attitude changes, with 101 things, I believe some of the statistics are unfortunately starting to increase again. I would say alcohol has always been up there because it's available, it's legal, and all they have to do is go in and get it, or get a friend to get it.
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I'm not an expert in this area, but I think some young people feel as if they belong to a lost generation. When they finish university, they find there are no jobs available. They figure they probably would have been better off to have gotten a grade 10 education and then gone to a place where they could get a job right away. Another issue is the economy hurting them to the extent it is. Many of them move to other communities and then have to move back home with their parents when they're 30 years old because they can't find jobs. I think all of those things contribute to the reasons people drink.
As I say, I think if we become too soft in the drug area, pretty soon the bottle of beer isn't going to be sufficient. People who previously have not done so are going to want to turn to some other drugs. I think it's at the point where it's either not decreasing or starting to move up. Look at the number of students who can't afford to return to school because they made no money in the summer. There's a lot of lost hope out there.
I would say that if our economy starts to percolate, as we hope it will, if there is an increase in the number of jobs available and if some of these other social factors are addressed, then I think we would be able to address the problems and work towards solutions.
Mr. Ryan: Perhaps I could just add a couple of words to that. I totally agree. It's annoying when statistics start to indicate a possible increase in use, especially in the area of cannabis.
When you look at what has happened in relation to the positive impact of educational programs with regard to smoking and the resultant reduction in smoking and the positive impact of a lot of the efforts in relation to the use of alcohol and impaired driving, you will see that a lot of these are straight educational programs. It's our feeling that the potential is there to have the same impact in relation to drug abuse. But it has to be a continuous effort with no gaps in it whatsoever. You have to reach every age group on a continual basis.
There are a lot of factors involved as to why there may be a change. Hopefully, it's just a blip. But we see the need for a really strong push in the direction of educational programs and the necessity to keep the momentum going.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: I have just one final question regarding the issue my colleague, Mr. Hill, mentioned, and that is the experience of other countries. You mentioned that in India the number of users is very low but that now it may be increasing. Maybe you could expand on that comment.
Mr. Ryan: I've travelled quite extensively and have attended international conferences on drug use. The comment was made at a couple of conferences that there had been a change in the user population in a number of countries. A country would be a producer but not a user, but because of the availability of drugs within that country, it would start to be a user as well. Then that country could actually see the negative impact from drugs. I'll use Colombia as an example. For years Colombia was a supplier of drugs and not a user at all, so they wouldn't see the impact of drug use on their own population. But once you see the impact on your own population and look at the international community as well, then it causes a change of attitude within a country with regard to enforcement approaches and international cooperation.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: In the two examples you've given, my understanding is that drugs were fairly easily available at a very low price. Is that correct?
Mr. Ryan: Which country are you talking about?
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: I was referring to both India and Colombia. I know that in India it's easily available at virtually very little cost because it's grown right in the fields in the villages. The profit in India is very small compared to, say, Canada and the U.S.
Mr. Ryan: But it depends on what level of drug you're talking about, because in a lot of countries the production to the refined product is not done in the fields or at the local level. It has to be refined in stages to the completed product away from those areas. Some of it may come back to the country, but a high percentage of it may leave the country and never come back.
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There are different types of use. You can chew the cocaine leaf, for example, and that's one level of use within a country. That doesn't have the same impact as when you go up the chain and use it after it has been through the refining process. That's that type of use I'm talking about.
Once the refining starts in a country and the purer drug starts to go back to the street level, you see the impact. There's social acceptance in a great variety of countries of the use of drugs at a certain level, and that's been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. But I'm talking about starting the refining processes and the refined drugs going back to the user population. I don't have anything on the prices of the refined street-level drugs in any country.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: There's a lot of argument that if we take the profit out of drugs it will help to reduce the crime factor, and there are ways we can deal with that. A huge amount of crime is committed because people need $500 a day to deal with their addictions. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Chief King: In order to do that you'd have to legalize every drug, because if you didn't you would still have the profit from the drugs that were illegal, and people are human beings. As I say, I think there is an escalation of sorts.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: Isn't there something in between, as opposed to total legalization? Is there some other way of supervising those people who are drug addicts that we can deal with?
Chief King: There are alternatives and there are experiments that are going on in different parts of the world. That's one of the reasons we're saying there's really a serious need for research. So it's not just a matter of you reading one article in the paper and us reading an article in a magazine, or going to a conference and having a 20-minute discussion.
In Canada, if we want to continue to go ahead and be seen as leaders, we have to do some serious research and put down some serious ground rules. If we're going to try something then let's get together and do it, as opposed to one part of the government deciding it's going to do it and the other part cleaning it up later if it doesn't work. We want to work in concert to try to make a difference with something that works.
Mr. Ryan: If I can pick up on that, alcohol and tobacco are regulated substances, and we have extensive resources in Canada devoted to the illegal traffic in alcohol and tobacco. They are still illegal commodities, with the profit and cost associated with them. I don't think a type of legalization or market would resolve the problem at all. It would create other levels, other markets, other controls, other regulations, other suppliers, and other black markets, and you would still have a regulated market and a black market, because the supply is there.
I had the occasion to visit Switzerland when it had the Needle Park area, where there was free use of drugs. It was trying to devise a system of supplying drugs and having houses where you could bring your own drugs and use them under the supervision of people. It was the most degrading situation I had ever walked into in my life when I walked into Needle Park in the Lentin district in Switzerland. The first thing I saw was a man with his pants down trying to find a vein in his leg. A girl who was probably about 19 had overdosed and the medics were trying to revive her. The circulation was gone in the arms and legs of several people who were walking around. It was the most degrading thing I had ever seen. They were experimenting with free drug use, and it was a failure.
Mr. Harbance Singh Dhaliwal: Thank you very much.
The Chairman: I just want to say to the committee before I put my questions that once the witnesses have concluded, I'd like the committee to stay for about five minutes or so. We have a motion we might want to deal with before we finish.
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During the morning some references were made to ``scarce resources''. That's always a problem in any organization, I would think. It would seem to me the way you solve that is you can either get more or better deploy what you have.
One of the things I've always found curious - and I saw it again a couple of nights ago, as I was driving along the Queensway... If there's any such thing as a routine accident, this was a routine accident. Somebody had obviously just rear-ended a person. I just drove by in the other direction, but it looked as if a couple of cars had a couple of dents, and they managed to attract six police vehicles. I have often wondered how much of that was need and how much was ``this is the fire in the neighbourhood, let's go see it''.
Why would you have those numbers there? Would that just be coincidence? I've seen that kind of thing. Or as I drive by I see two police officers giving out a speeding ticket; that kind of thing. Deployment: are you comfortable with the question of the best utilization of your scarce resources in drug enforcement and other areas?
Mr. Ryan: I totally agree with some of the comments you've made. When you see that number of police cars at an accident scene you have to question exactly what they're doing there. I know in a lot of jurisdictions across Canada there is no longer a requirement for police to be present at a motor vehicle accident where there is simply damage and there are no injuries unless there's a danger or what have you. A lot of that is being addressed, but still there are instances where that would happen.
On the utilization of resources, as you know, we have gone through major reorganizations within the RCMP in the last number of years, with major cutbacks. We have made every effort to do all our cuts not on the front line but within our support services, our admin, finance, and what have you, and to leave the front lines intact. But that has been a very difficult approach.
On a federal approach, with a thousand police officers dealing with drug enforcement across Canada, with no changes since 1987 but the changes in technology, the changes in how transportation and importation and trafficking are done, the changes as a result of the charter in how we do business, the complications of the business, we are having, no two ways about it, a difficult time staying abreast of the problem with the resources we have. With the extra emphasis we're trying to put on education, prevention, and treatment, working in that area in the community-based police model...these are actually more resource-intensive than the old approach, because you have to have all the systems in place to deal with it. It actually takes more.
We have always taken the approach that we can't put our resources into prevention and education at the expense of enforcement. There have to be new resources to do it. We have tinkered with it, but we're very careful. We're tinkering a little now in British Columbia by taking nine resources and putting them straight on the drug awareness program. But we're concerned that if we start taking the resources from enforcement we would merely open up a flow of drugs into the country that would take years and years to address. One shipload off the east coast of Canada hitting the streets of Canada - the example I have in front of me is that of the five tonnes seized in Nova Scotia in 1994 - is equivalent to about 21 million hits of cocaine.
The resources have to be there. I think we're using them as best we can within the limitations we have.
The Chairman: On another line of questioning, Chief King, do you consume alcohol?
Chief King: Yes, I do.
The Chairman: I was interested in that in the context of your comment about hard versus soft and your comment that if you get a high on the small stuff it's a stepladder to the big stuff. Why do you drink alcohol?
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Chief King: I guess it's a social peer pressure type of relaxation. It's what most of our friends do. If we went to a reception tonight, probably the majority of us here would have a drink.
The Chairman: If you played back the last two sentences, you would find that's exactly the same rationale for a lot of people who take drugs.
Chief King: I don't know if I'd agree with you on that.
The Chairman: They do it because their friends do it.
Chief King: That aspect of it, but I'm thinking there's a number that probably... If you're a heroin user, I don't think you start off using heroin at the cost of heroin. I think you start it off with something else and then you didn't get what you wanted, or for other reasons, whether it was peer groups that enticed you into it or dealers we have out in Vancouver who are giving it to young kids to get them hooked first so then they can use them as couriers... If you can buy a bottle of beer for $2, I don't think you're going to pay $25 for a hit.
The Chairman: Chief, I don't come at this from a particularly moralistic standpoint. I was raised in a small Protestant sect that told me I was going to hell if I touched alcohol. By the time I got old enough to try it, I didn't like it, so that's why I don't drink it. When I was young I didn't get to try the drugs, and now I'm scared to try.
Having said all that, I have always had difficulty seeing the distinction between the drugs we've talked about this morning and the drug called alcohol. I have a real difficulty. That's why I put the question to you. It seems to me that...and this is an editorial. This is me, not the chairman, but me, a member of the committee, just telling you my view on the issue, and I'd like your reaction.
It seems to me that they're one and the same, that both alcohol and drugs are ways of, as you said, getting a high. It seems to me you can graduate from one to the other. I have difficulty understanding how we tolerate the one but not the other.
Chief King: The only answer I can reasonably give you is that one is legal and the other isn't. Our society has deemed that and our legislators have deemed that, and as long as it is, what we have to do as police professionals or enforcement people is deal within the laws we have.
The Chairman: We appreciate that, but part of the reason you're here is that we're the people around the table who, with others, can change the law. What I'd like to hear, apart from the legalities, is some rationale as to why we should be treating one differently from the other. Do we have unequal laws in this respect?
Chief King: I'd say to an extent we do, and I would also say if you tried to make alcohol illegal, no politician in the country would be re-elected. I think it would be that bad.
It's much like us. We have 12-hour shifts in policing that are tremendous for the wives of our officers and for the families. They're home an awful lot. It hasn't helped us administratively to see those officers on a consistent basis.
You probably read about Metro Toronto. They're trying to get rid of those shifts and go back to the eight-hour shifts, where the officers are at work another 70 days a year. They're going to have an outcry down there. And it's not just the police officers on the shifts; it's their families and everyone else.
With some of the things, unfortunately, to try to go back is an extremely difficult situation.
The Chairman: Forget the politics of it. Perhaps none of us should get re-elected, but that's another issue.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
The Chairman: Terry, tell us, in your view, do we have an unequal law? Should we be having the same kinds of restrictions on alcohol as on drugs?
Mr. Ryan: First of all, I would say that two wrongs don't make a right. When you go back in history through prohibition and what have you, we've gone through that with alcohol.
I look at alcohol in one aspect. I know it's regulated and to a certain extent we know what it is and what it can do. We know now the health impact of it. Even with moonshine and illegal products and what have you, to a certain extent the impact is well known.
When you get into the area of drugs, be it marijuana, heroin, or cocaine, the impact of those... Some of them are depressants, some of them are stimulants. There's such a wide variety of impacts. The full medical impact of drugs is not known. Even with cannabis, people can sit down and talk about what exactly there is in a cannabis cigarette and what the impact is.
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Law enforcement and society in general have no tools to deal with drugs in relation to impaired driving. As an example, there are no laws that allow us to do blood samples. We have no techniques to use to determine how much somebody has, how much somebody has consumed, or how it will respond. A lot of these things are not known to society.
Lots of people can offer medical evidence. I am not qualified to do so, but from experiences and from discussions and conferences, when I look at the impact of heroin, cocaine, and other drugs, my personal feeling and experience is there's no comparison between that and alcohol.
S/Sgt Pelletier: I want to reiterate something on the demand reduction side and education. Alcohol is considered a drug as well. When we do the education approaches to youth, we talk of alcohol and tobacco as well as the street drugs.
What we have to be careful of when we're talking to youth is sending mixed messages. We seem to be tightening the ropes around the tobacco issue and loosening the same ropes on the cannabis issues. So when we do demand reduction efforts, we should treat alcohol and tobacco, especially alcohol, as drugs, just as much as the other street drugs.
The Chairman: Chief, go ahead.
Chief King: We quickly have to give you a few recommendations that hopefully will be helpful for you, and we do have a copy to provide at the end.
First and foremost, for supply reduction, additional resources are required. It's been 10 years with virtually no increase across Canada in staff assigned to those areas.
Number two is demand reduction. Prevention and education have not had additional increases since 1987 basically, and staffing in that area is very resource-intensive to get these programs. Some programs are 17 return visits to one school.
On training, because of early retirements and the massive turnover in government and in policing as well, we have to now re-educate the police officers who go into schools and train new ones, and hopefully the education system will train their teachers who are involved in that and co-presenting with us.
On research, as I said, there is a need for an informed research to aid in decision-making. Our program evaluation is required very seriously. Just last week the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse let go all of their staff except for their executive director. That was our only national link and national coordination.
As for a national strategy for substance abuse, which I know you are considering, we have to maintain a well-funded and a well-thought-out strategy for safer communities for the future. We'd like to be a part of that with you and not in isolation from you.
As representatives of the citizens of this country, help us to help you, because we're willing to do that. Officially HEP, the Health and Enforcement in Partnership, which has been a loose coalition, should be confirmed or strategized to help do that.
The final thing is the legislation impact. Increased efforts are going to be required monumentally to get the message out across Canada when Bill C-8 is enacted, because it changes an awful lot of things. As I say, it's not just some PSAs on television; it's all of those things together.
It's not just a cry for money; it's saying if we want to move ahead and if we want to have an effect, then in some things we require some assistance.
The Chairman: We thank you, Chief, and your colleagues for giving us the benefit of your insights this morning. They've been very helpful. During the course of writing the report, we might be in touch with you again - and when I say ``we'', I mean the people who do the work here: the clerk and the research officers.
Thank you very much for coming.
Don't go away, John Murphy. We need you badly.
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The Chairman: Okay, if we could get the law out of the room, we'll do what we really came to do, which is to pass the motion.
You may be aware that the draft regulations with respect to the tobacco bill were tabled last week and then referred to the committee. I expect we'll be dealing with them sometime next week. This week got to be a little crowded with the extra event tonight with the French deputies and so on, so we'll probably deal with the tobacco regulations next week.
Secondly, regarding the dinner and the event this evening, the committee is meeting at5 o'clock. Some of you, I understand, cannot be here, but most of us have indicated we will be here. If there's any change in your plans one way or the other, please let us know, because we have a number of guests from France here, and we'd like to at least have a reasonable showing in terms of numbers. So far it is the case, I believe, that eight members have indicated their intention to be here. As I say, if anything changes there, please let the clerk know.
Bonnie's committee on Bill C-47, because of the number of witnesses it's bringing in from various parts of the country, needs more money, so I would entertain a motion that a supplementary budget in the amount of $35,000 be approved and submitted to the budget subcommittee of the liaison committee. Again, this amount is totally to accommodate that extra requirement for witnesses with respect to the Bill C-47 hearings.
Mr. John Murphy (Annapolis Valley - Hants, Lib.): I so move.
The Chairman: Is there any discussion? Are we ready for the question?
Motion agreed to
The Chairman: The other bit of information I should have mentioned to you is that regarding the committee's request for an appearance by the minister, Mr. Dingwall, we don't have any response other than they're looking at it. We don't have a date yet, Pierre. As soon as we get something, we will let you know. Is there anything else?
We have a panel on alcohol on Tuesday morning, a week today. See you this evening at5 o'clock.