SoVote

Decentralized Democracy

Ontario Assembly

43rd Parl. 1st Sess.
April 26, 2023 09:00AM

Thank you to our House leader for his comments. Safety looks different in different parts of the province. Being from a northern riding, I wonder if my colleague can tell us a little about what the policing needs are in northern Ontario, which can be very different. Maybe in some areas of the province, we need far more police; in other areas, it’s mental health supports. What do things look like in northern Ontario?

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I appreciated my colleague from Oshawa’s comments, especially her comments about her experiences riding along in a police cruiser and her passion for the issue of human trafficking. I wonder if she wants to expand a little bit on what we’d like to see in legislation to address human trafficking.

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Thank you to the member from Barrie–Innisfil for her comments.

I appreciate any measure to help recruit police officers, but I’m just wondering—the Premier made a comment that this would open up a pipeline for recruits, and I just don’t see anything in this bill that will do that. I hope that the tuition measure does something. But there are all kinds of policing programs in community colleges across Ontario, and those are the kids who are coming out of high school and wanting to get into policing, and that’s where I think you could really help, at the ground level, with recruitment. The change with post-secondary education—I think the police already can hire people without post-secondary education, and I’m not sure if that’s going to really do much either. So I’m having trouble understanding this pipeline of recruits that it’s going to open up. Maybe she can enlighten me.

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