Ontario Hansard - 07-October2009

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: It's a pleasure today to be part of this debate, second reading of Bill 203, the Interprovincial Policing Act.

Of course, in the city of Ottawa we're right beside the province of Quebec and our twin city, the city of Gatineau. There are a lot of synchronicities that occur in the city of Ottawa because we are the national capital. We have a large organization called the National Capital Commission that is part of our city governance and our federal governance in our municipality, and we often have a couple of levels of policing in our own community. As you're aware, we do have the city of Ottawa police, Ottawa's finest, with our Police Chief Vern White, whom we-

Mr. John O'Toole: Who you got from Durham.

Ms. Lisa MacLeod: -got from Durham. You're darned right. He had a great time there, he did tell me.

We also have the OPP. We have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who are also on our streets on federal properties and lands, and they police the National Capital Commission roads. In addition to that, we also have military police. I've just found out that we also have OC Transpo police; I see them on the roads a lot. So there's lots of security in our own community in the city of Ottawa. I think that means that we could be doing a lot more even within our own province in creating synergies in policing.

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I have nothing but the highest respect for our policing community. I was privileged to grow up in a household where my father was the former president of the Canadian Association of Police Boards. That was a wonderful experience for him before he passed. We made a lot of great friends throughout Canada. He was the police commissioner for the town of New Glasgow, which had 26 police officers, and he used to sit with Norm Gardner, who had about 26,000. He was the chair, and the folks from Toronto were working with him.