Home Newsroom 2006 Speeches Day: 2006-02-22

Excerpts from a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Surrey, BC

The Honourable Stockwell Day
Minister of Public Safety

Surrey, BC
February 22, 2006

As delivered

Thanks for having me here today.

I’ve given a number of speeches in the House of Commons over the last two years where I’ve talked about government responsibility. And a number of times I’ve said the first responsibility of any government is the safety and security of its citizens. Little did I realize that that portfolio would one day be handed to me. Security is not a state of being that happens by accident. It’s a little bit like poverty and prosperity. They are two states of being which in the most case don’t happen by accident either. In some cases they do but in most cases either poverty or prosperity are a result of certain principles being applied or not being applied. And it’s the same with safety and security.

I can tell you that after about two weeks on the job -- and I say this not just to get kudos for our people without there being substance for that -- I can say I sleep better at night. I usually sleep well anyway — but I sleep better at night from what I’ve seen in the last two weeks not just on the site visits but having an idea of what makes up the safety and security element of our country. It’s all under this umbrella called public safety, security and emergency preparedness.

Let me just run a few numbers by you to give you a sense of the order of magnitude here and the services that report under this umbrella. The RCMP -- 16,800 members across the country, 700 detachments. I couldn’t even tell you the number of arrests and investigations but they are gigantic. There are 190 Aboriginal settlements alone where RCMP contracts are being employed. The range of services is huge. And not just in the normal areas of policing that you might think of out there, catching the bandits in the normal run of things, but some fantastic areas I’ll touch on in a minute. That’s just RCMP -- 16,800 members out there every day reporting for duty with your safety and your security in mind.

Then of course we have the Canada Border Services Agency. Just in land ports alone -- 119 of those. And there are about 12,000 people who work in the agency, about 5,000 of them usually in uniform across the border. That’s a gigantic operation. Again, people out there every day. And regardless of how you feel when you’re going through the border while they’re questioning you, they’re out there every day and night on their minds is the safety and security of our country.

The other security agency is CSIS -- our intelligence, our spy agency. I’d like to tell you how many spies and where they all are but if I tell you that they’ll have to kill me so I can’t. But they are very significantly involved in areas like counterterrorism and intelligence gathering, again to protect us.

And then some of the results of those three agencies and all their hard work is seen in all the corrections institutions, some of which I have visited. In the Correctional Service of Canada, another 16,000 people are working, 10,000 of them in institutions, correctional officers monitoring over 20,000 - this is in federal prisons - over 20,000 federal prisoners, about 8,000 of whom are out. I don’t mean escaped — don’t be alarmed — but rather out on some kind of a conditional release, supervised in the community.

These are huge tasks. And that doesn’t even start to get into emergency preparedness. We know how much that is on people’s minds these days whether we’re talking about pandemics or avian flu or natural disasters that could come our way at any moment.

What I’ve seen, just in the first round of visiting some of these agencies and a number of their facilities, has actually made me feel a little more secure. Not just because of the people themselves who are dedicated to the task but the capabilities they have, increasingly sophisticated capabilities they have each in their lines of work.

When you are approaching the border coming back into Canada after doing your shopping just south of the border, do tell the truth at the border because standing in that booth, as I was a few nights ago at another border crossing — I’ll be down at the border crossing this afternoon here — your license plate flashes up on that screen as you’re driving towards the booth. By the time the officer is asking you questions he already knows a lot about you. Do tell the truth. Do tell your real name and what your real purpose was.

Another thing that made me feel a little more secure is that the vast majority of truckers, the high percentage that come to the border, their manifests have already been electronically sent ahead as a requirement to the border crossing. So when I was standing at the booth where the trucks were coming, that particular officer in the booth already had what was in the shipment on his screen. So when he or she is talking to the truck driver they already know a lot about them. In spite of that, every two or three out of a hundred trucks are sent off into a little siding area where the gamma ray truck awaits them.

So I got into that x-ray machine because I’ve waited too long for a CAT scan and I wanted to get one right away. So after they scanned my brain and found nothing I was sitting there with the officers looking at the gamma ray machine. It’s a big arm that goes right over the truck being checked. While the arm travels along the side, on the screen you can see everything in that truck. And it just happened they pulled one guy over because they said, “Have you got anything to declare?” “No.” “Any alcohol, tobacco?” “No, no, no, no.” And sitting there on the gamma ray screen you could see the 12-pack under his seat. So it’s a really incredible capability.

There are 260,000 people a day that cross just the land borders. Every ship that is coming into our ports has also had to send in an electronic manifest in terms of what’s on that ship. The same goes for the planes that are coming in. We have developed a high-tech way of doing risk management. Just by what’s on the ship, who the owners are of the company that runs the ship, who the captains of the ship are, who’s doing the shipping, right away there’s a risk weighting that comes through, so that once the ship hits a certain high rating, people who are monitoring electronically can send somebody out to the port to say, “You may want to check this out.” It’s an amazing array of capacity.

And is it all for naught? I mean are there people actually out there who want to do bad things? Yes, there are. And I’ve been meeting some of them in the prisons that we’ve been visiting. But just at the border alone it’s amazing what our border officers face out there. Within the last year, 8,700 drug seizures. And you know that wasn’t people voluntarily driving up and saying, “I’ve got some drugs I’d love to share with you.” You know those were tense moments that took place 8,700 different times.

In the last four years, there have been over 5,000 times when the person was asked, “Do you have anything to declare?” “No, I don’t,” and it turned out they had a handgun. Imagine that: over 5,000 times one of our unarmed border officers - you’d think I was giving some hints here and you’re right - over 5,000 times apprehended handguns at the border. Just this last year, 74 missing children were found by our border officers.

So these are the realities that we face daily in a country like ours; these are the men and women who do the things that they need to do to keep us safe. And, again, the capability… Last week I visited the DNA facility in Ottawa. I don’t know if you have seen that. Amazing. It’s actually way ahead -- Canada is way ahead, of what we see on CSI (the television show). They develop the DNA equipment there and what they have developed is state of the art. As a matter of fact, they have recently been able to sell some of the stuff that’s been patented here in Canada to other countries, to other law enforcement agencies.

We also see the RCMP on our streets and our highways night and day. I’ve seen them an unfortunate number of times on our highways in the past where they’ve wanted to share things with me as I’ve driven too rapidly down the road. And we’ve shared and I’ve paid. And I don’t do that anymore because I’m the Minister of Public Safety now. It’s affected my driving. I said to my wife I cannot go through yellow lights anymore in this particular position. Above and beyond where we see the officers every day – there are 25 different countries where our RCMP are out there training people, some in emerging and brand new democracies, on how to do the important work of safety and security.

And it comes at a price. Last Friday I did the official puck dropping at a fundraising hockey tournament. It was in honour of an officer from our area who had died in the line of duty. So these are the realities. It’s not just the high-tech fun stuff but the realities that hit us. Like the border and corrections officers, these are the men and women serving us every day in all these various capacities. Security is very important for this area and I know your Chamber here is focussed on this. I know your mayor is focussed on these types of things.

There are 1,400 trucks a day going across the border right here. 1,400 -- that’s just trucks per day. It seems to me in this area not too long ago there were some entrepreneurs involved in tunnel making, is that correct? Not too long ago. You know it was a Canada Border Services agent who first discovered that then involved RCMP and others and they were able to watch that operation for quite a while. They faced a significant risk. But they got the job done.

These things are important because as much as safety and security is key for us as a country it is also tied to prosperity. That’s why we want to make sure that the prosperity agenda for this region, for British Columbia and for the nation is maintained, recognizing that safety and security has been provided by these men and women in so many different agencies. Absolutely critical.

I’ve said it a number of times and I’ll continue to repeat it. We want fluid access, quick access for all law-abiding travellers and businesses. And we want no access for rogues who have other things in mind. 12,000 times last year Canada Border Service agents had to remove people who were trying to get here on false or dangerous pretences. These things are all key to prosperity and that’s why we’re making sure the development of things like the FAST lanes and the Nexus lanes continues.

We want to use as much of the technology as we can to make sure that business at the border continues to flow. I know your mayor is proud and others are too -- that this community really pulls together to make it prosperous, safe and secure.

You may not be aware -- that Constable Ross Lundy heads up a program here called the Junior Police Academy. So here’s an RCMP officer running a Junior Police Academy with five- to twelve-year-olds. Last year there were 900 of them from Surrey involved in that program. Basically they get to see some of the neat stuff that I’ve been seeing just the last few days. They get to see a lot of what police officers do.

Can you imagine the effect of that in one year? 900 young people being tuned into not just the exciting stuff but the sobering stuff that police officers do? What an effect that has! As the program continues it will continue to have an effect here in a community where young people are at risk of youth-related crime. Programs like this will be a factor in diminishing that risk.

I can remember the first time I ran into an RCMP officer as I was about to head out on a life of crime. It was a Saturday morning. I was with some of my criminal buddies. We were each seven years old and it was wintertime.

We had been throwing snowballs early in the morning at people’s bedroom windows. We thought it was a great way to wake people up on Saturday morning. We thought it was quite hilarious.

We went all the way down one alley and came around the corner. Suddenly an RCMP car pulled up. The RCMP officer got out, walked slowly towards us. He was -- I’m sure he was 11 feet tall. The boots alone were easily five feet tall. We were shivering and not from the cold as he approached. And he said something like, “You boys been throwing snowballs at windows?”

We became instant canaries. We confessed on the spot. We were blubberers. “Yes, he did.” We were pointing at each other. My knees were trembling and all I could see was this huge holster, I thought “We’re done. He’s going to do us in right now. And we deserve it.”

In a slow and serious voice all he said was, “If you boys do this again your names will go into the Black Book.” Now we had heard legends about the Black Book. We knew if your name ever appeared in it a second time you basically disappeared from planet Earth. That was how their early intervention police work had an impression on my buddies and I as young people, steering us from a life of crime.

So can you imagine what Corporal Ross Lundy has done in a year with 900 young people? That’s just one example of many of how the men and women in these agencies that I’ve talked about also reach out to make their communities better places.

I just want to close by again thanking my colleagues who have already been introduced for bringing forward the ideas that they’re hearing from you to make for good government, so we can see the types of things happen in your communities that you want to see happen.

And I want to congratulate this city of parks. Six thousand acres I’m told of designated parkland is just within this city. What you have going here in this city, this Chamber, small and medium sized businesses with those initiatives we’ve heard about on a community basis, means that it’s not just 2010 that’s looking good for Surrey in the future, but 2010 and beyond.

And thank you for making that happen and thank you for having us today.