Announcement of New Funding to Expand Activities at the Canadian Police Research Centre

Remarks by
The Honourable Stockwell Day
Minister of Public Safety

September 10, 2007
University of Regina, Saskatchewan
As delivered

Thank you, Tom Lukiwski, [Member of Parliament for Regina-Lumsden-Lake]. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention and interest.

The first priority of any government should be the safety and security of its citizens. It is our focus.

We take a two-pronged approach to safety and security. There's enforcement and prevention.

We showed right at the beginning of our mandate how committed we were to enforcement. We committed to begin hiring 1,000 more RCMP personnel, funded totally by the federal government across the country. We also committed to a cost-shared approach with the provinces to hire 2,500 more municipal officers across the country.

We increased resources at our borders by hiring 400 more border officers across the country to eliminate "work alone" situations. For too many years, we have had border officers working alone in remote locations.

We also put another $6 million this year into the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre.

We increased the amount of resources going into our Integrated Border Enforcement Teams, which are teams of officers working not just at the municipal level with RCMP and municipal police, but also across the borders. They deal with everything from contraband to issues of identity theft.

Enforcement is very important; Prevention is just as important.

Later today, I will be making announcements related to funding for local groups in Saskatchewan who have been successful in their crime prevention work. These groups are reaching out, especially to youth in their areas, offering alternatives to gang activity and drug culture. We have been and will continue to support those groups and organizations across the country.

There's the long arm of the law, if you will, and the open arms of the community.

The investments we've made in enforcement and prevention cut a wide swathe.

But it's not enough. We need to know what is working, what is successful. We need to know about the constant and new demands that officers face on the street, in their technical work, in information systems and in labs.

We know that the criminal element in our society does not wait. They are innovative too in their own malicious ways and they are not encumbered by things like legislation, tax rules or borders. They are always aggressively pushing the envelope and threatening our social fabric in many different ways.

We have to know that the most efficient and successful types of programming are moving ahead. Police officers want to know what the best type of equipment is, what the best type of protection is that they can have – everything from high tech equipment in their cars to the types of gloves they wear.

Right across the range, we want to make sure that the things that we are investing in with your taxpayer dollars are actually bringing a return or pointing to more innovative ways of performing the business of safety and security.

And so there needs to be a pooling of that information. There needs to be some kind of a venue, an incubator, where the unique and innovative approaches – the science and technology of policing – are developed and analyzed. Then with even greater assurance, more resources can be directed to the things that are working, be it policy programming or equipment itself.

Because of the hard work of a number of MPs, this notion of a research centre has become a reality. It will complement existing facilities and institutions already in the area – the university, the Saskatchewan police college, the RCMP and the different groups and institutions, including the Department of National Defence.

There were people who were saying the research centre should be in other places in Canada. In the end, the efforts of your MPs here and because of the critical mass of police activity in this region, the centre was developed right here in Regina. I'm happy to announce today that we are funding – to the tune of $10 million – the Canadian Police Research Centre here in Regina, the place that it should be.

Now the hard work starts. The MPs thought they had done the hard work. But now the hard work of putting it in place kicks into gear with funding and resources firmly in place.

Our police officers across the country – whether working out of their cars, on the streets, in the offices and at the academic level – are going to know that the centre of activity is just going to continue to build. Just as we have seen clusters of technology form in other parts of the country and in other parts of the world, attracting similar activities, so too will we see this cluster grow.

We are going to see an increase of high-level, high-tech jobs and research that bring an exciting dimension to them. They're clean, environmentally friendly, long-term, professional types of jobs and research. It will all lead back to what I was first talking about – the enhanced safety and security of our country.

I want to thank everyone who worked together to make this announcement possible today.

This has taken a lot of people. The MPs will be the first to give credit to others in the academic and technical world with whom they have worked to make this all happen. I want to thank each one of you.

I'm looking forward to what comes out of Regina, not just this year or next year, but in the generations to come. It will lead to our country being the safest and most secure nation in the world.