Grey County Grey County Policing Presentation Meeting Transcript — September 22, 2026

00:00:00 speaker_unknown: Eska, thank you for the opportunity to be here.

00:00:02 speaker_unknown: It has been said before.

00:00:04 speaker_unknown: Kim did pass it on.

00:00:06 speaker_unknown: We have a unique situation in Grey and Bruce Counties.

00:00:09 SPEAKER_001: The municipal coordination, Grey and Bruce Police Services, our OPP partners, and our municipal agencies are recognized for the collaborative approach we take everywhere, every day on issues.

00:00:21 SPEAKER_001: And that also leads down to our other partners in the social services in the counties.

00:00:25 SPEAKER_001: So we are ahead of the curve in terms of communication and getting there as we work together through these issues with the group.

00:00:33 SPEAKER_001: There was a slide that came up.

00:00:35 SPEAKER_001: I'll answer the question quickly, just to get David's answer.

00:00:39 SPEAKER_001: Yes, the Waterloo decision did state in the judge's ruling that if you're going to take down or remove an encampment, you better have someone for them to go, an emergency shelter somewhere else to go,

00:00:53 SPEAKER_001: which does cause challenges for us.

00:00:56 SPEAKER_001: But that was part of the ruling, and it is something that is policing, and as our social services partners go forward, is something that we have to deal with:

00:01:03 SPEAKER_001: is what we're going to do and where we're going to move these people if we can move them or get them out of the circumstances they're in and get them true help.

00:01:17 SPEAKER_001: First off, I thought I'd talk about the police.

00:01:19 SPEAKER_001: We see them all the time.

00:01:21 SPEAKER_001: We are the de facto responders because we are available twenty-four, seven.

00:01:26 SPEAKER_001: We do the work because we're out there.

00:01:29 SPEAKER_001: We're visible.

00:01:30 SPEAKER_001: People call us.

00:01:31 SPEAKER_001: We are.

00:01:32 SPEAKER_001: We have our provincial policing partners, which do the exact same job.

00:01:36 SPEAKER_001: There is no confusion.

00:01:37 SPEAKER_001: Every police officer is a provincial constable under legislation and has powers all throughout the province.

00:01:43 SPEAKER_001: But the role of the police is changing.

00:01:45 SPEAKER_001: We have certain legislative requirements directly out of the Community Safety and Policing Act, and I will finally say thank you to the Province of Ontario for putting crime prevention first rather than law enforcement,

00:01:58 SPEAKER_001: because if we're preventing crime and dealing with these issues before, we are saving money in the back end.

00:02:04 SPEAKER_001: We are saving money in the court systems.

00:02:06 SPEAKER_001: We're saving money in the victim services part of it, but crime prevention is our biggest job now.

00:02:11 SPEAKER_001: As of two thousand and nineteen, law enforcement, maintaining public peace, emergency response, assistance to victims of crime,

00:02:20 SPEAKER_001: and our catchall—any other prescribed policing function—that seems to get dropped onto us—that is anything that we are legislatively responsible for.

00:02:29 SPEAKER_001: But we talk about this role that we have since the early 1990s.

00:02:33 SPEAKER_001: Our role has changed.

00:02:35 SPEAKER_001: We are seeing more engagement with the mental health side, with our poverty side, with our social services side.

00:02:42 SPEAKER_001: And I know that I've been in meetings with Kim, Francesca, and Jill.

00:02:46 SPEAKER_001: And I will say this over and over and over again: poverty, homelessness, and mental health and addictions are not a law enforcement problem; they are a public health problem.

00:02:56 SPEAKER_001: If they venture into criminality, yes, then we will respond.

00:03:00 SPEAKER_001: We have an obligation to do so.

00:03:02 SPEAKER_001: But dealing with addiction, sicknesses, poverty issues, and homelessness, these should be in the realm of social services and not bunched into the police.

00:03:12 SPEAKER_001: It's not what we're trained for.

00:03:14 SPEAKER_001: It's not what we do.

00:03:16 SPEAKER_001: We have tons of training now.

00:03:17 SPEAKER_001: Thirty-seven years ago, there was not much training in mental health.

00:03:26 SPEAKER_001: Now we are legislated to do incredible amounts of de-escalation.

00:03:30 SPEAKER_001: We do a lot of work with our partner police services in this to prevent the incidents that we see.

00:03:36 SPEAKER_001: Responding to these, and some of these people are not completely lucid.

00:03:41 SPEAKER_001: We have incidences.

00:03:42 SPEAKER_001: We deal with the media backlash that we see all the time about how the police are beating people, treating people inappropriately.

00:03:49 SPEAKER_001: That is not the case, and I'm not here to wave the flag for policing in any way, shape, or form.

00:03:54 SPEAKER_001: I will just get back, but it's a problem for law enforcement dealing with things that we keep getting dropped onto us that we don't want to do, and we will respond to them.

00:04:05 SPEAKER_001: But again, we're not the experts, and we're not the ones who should be dealing with this.

00:04:09 SPEAKER_001: It takes a community approach to deal with these types of issues that we're dealing with.

00:04:15 SPEAKER_001: Back in 1994, as we saw the cuts coming to our mental health, it's interesting that the chief coroner of Ontario, James Young at the time,

00:04:26 SPEAKER_001: said the police are now the frontline face of mental health in the province of Ontario.

00:04:30 SPEAKER_001: What we want to do is go back to not being the face of mental health and simply being a support and part of the solution rather than the response.

00:04:42 SPEAKER_001: My slide: We can't arrest our way out of poverty, no homelessness, no mental health and addictions, no. We can't.

00:04:51 SPEAKER_001: Why can't we?

00:04:52 SPEAKER_001: There's a ton of reasons why we can't, and we'll go through some of those very quickly.

00:04:59 SPEAKER_001: Sorry, I'm having a problem with my mouse.

00:05:03 SPEAKER_001: Our limitations of arrest-centered approaches.

00:05:05 SPEAKER_001: Our prisons are full.

00:05:07 SPEAKER_001: Our prisons in Ontario are running between 130 and 150 percent capacity all the time.

00:05:13 SPEAKER_001: We've seen in some jurisdictions the Walkerton Brant jails are going to be reopened.

00:05:19 SPEAKER_001: Our province announced in August two thousand twenty-six three billion dollars over ten years to reopen jails.

00:05:25 SPEAKER_001: What could three billion dollars do to our social services rather than incarcerating people that should not be in the system?

00:05:35 SPEAKER_001: High costs to keep a prisoner in Ontario in the provincial system is one hundred eighteen thousand dollars a year.

00:05:41 SPEAKER_001: To keep them in the federal system is exactly one hundred and fifty thousand three hundred and ninety-six dollars, according to Corrections Canada.

00:05:50 SPEAKER_001: That is a lot of money, and if we're running at capacity, we're full.

00:05:53 SPEAKER_001: That money can be used somewhere else.

00:05:57 SPEAKER_001: If we put them into the system, they now have the stigma attached to them of being quote a criminal.

00:06:04 SPEAKER_001: That impacts job opportunities.

00:06:08 SPEAKER_001: That impacts housing.

00:06:09 SPEAKER_001: Everything is connected in one way or another, and it causes impacts.

00:06:14 SPEAKER_001: And I honestly don't believe that we should be putting the mentally ill into our correction system.

00:06:20 SPEAKER_001: It's not where they're going to get the appropriate help.

00:06:22 SPEAKER_001: We are not going to solve poverty and people not being able to pay their bills by putting them in jail.

00:06:27 SPEAKER_001: We're making it worse.

00:06:29 SPEAKER_001: And our recidivism rates, forty percent is what our nation sees all the time.

00:06:36 SPEAKER_001: Here, when you talk to the chiefs of police, our recidivism rate is about sixty percent.

00:06:41 SPEAKER_001: Same people, same issues.

00:06:43 SPEAKER_001: A lot of those issues are directly from homelessness, survival crimes, crimes of desperation.

00:06:49 SPEAKER_001: They are from mental illness and addictions, which they can't control because they are truly sick.

00:06:54 SPEAKER_001: And where are we focusing our efforts?

00:06:56 SPEAKER_001: Is it on the true cause of the crimes, or is it the residual people who are the victims of the people who are bringing poison to our communities?

00:07:03 SPEAKER_001: And bottom line is, we do not address the root causes.

00:07:09 SPEAKER_001: We are bandaiding the solution by involving the police in the criminal justice system.

00:07:13 SPEAKER_001: That's the best way to put it right now.

00:07:21 SPEAKER_001: It was said during my introduction.

00:07:22 SPEAKER_001: We can't solve complex social issues.

00:07:26 SPEAKER_001: We don't have the capacity.

00:07:27 SPEAKER_001: We do not have the budgets as police services.

00:07:29 SPEAKER_001: And again, it is not our role to solve problems.

00:07:33 SPEAKER_001: We will manage them.

00:07:34 SPEAKER_001: We will deal with crime issues.

00:07:36 SPEAKER_001: We will deal with those types of things.

00:07:36 SPEAKER_001: We will do with those types of things, but we need to get back to what the core functions of law enforcement is, not being the social workers that we are not trained for,

00:07:44 SPEAKER_001: and we're not the experts in this type of thing at all.

00:07:47 SPEAKER_001: But if we're going to have true change, we need to start looking at the real problems: livable wages, substance abuse, substance abuse and treatment.

00:07:56 SPEAKER_001: We have to support these people; they're not criminals.

00:07:59 SPEAKER_001: And I will be very honest to everyone right here, full disclosure: in my family, I have mental health and addiction issues, not myself.

00:08:06 SPEAKER_001: I've seen what it does to people, and I can see what it does to a family.

00:08:10 SPEAKER_001: And again, not a police issue.

00:08:13 SPEAKER_001: And community resilience.

00:08:15 SPEAKER_001: The community has to be behind us.

00:08:16 SPEAKER_001: If you look at the news today, there is a horrible article in a very large periodical for the city talking about zombie zones in the city, but they're dealing with homeless, those poverty and addictions.

00:08:29 SPEAKER_001: When our media is calling them out of control zombies, no-go zones.

00:08:35 SPEAKER_001: What message are we sending to the public?

00:08:38 SPEAKER_001: And that is part of the problem: is the community perception of what the issue actually is.

00:08:42 SPEAKER_001: They're not criminals.

00:08:43 SPEAKER_001: They're sick.

00:08:44 SPEAKER_001: They need our support.

00:08:45 SPEAKER_001: They need our help.

00:08:46 SPEAKER_001: And that is what we need to do as a collective group, rather than in our individual silos.

00:08:56 SPEAKER_001: That was quick, but I was told ten minutes tops, and I tend to go over sometimes.

00:09:01 SPEAKER_001: So, not to upset Francesca.

00:09:03 SPEAKER_001: I kept it very short.

00:09:04 SPEAKER_001: But if there are questions later, I'm more than happy to answer them.

00:09:09 SPEAKER_001: See, the only policing I can do is on a Zoom call.

00:09:13 SPEAKER_001: Thank you so much for.