A committee headed up by Battlefords MLA Herb Cox made its way to the home constituency of the chair Tuesday.
The Caucus Committee on Crime Reduction was in the Battlefords to get a local perspective on crime and public safety issues.
Premier Brad Wall called for the committee to be formed back in late November with a mandate to look into the crime issue across the province.
“Crime is an issue that is front and centre on people’s minds in a lot of areas,” said Cox at his constituency office Tuesday, where the committee was meeting for the day.
While the crime issues of the Battlefords have been well publicized, crime is an issue all over Saskatchewan in both rural and urban areas. The makeup of the committee includes MLAs across the province.
“We’ve got members from pretty much each corner of the province as well as representation from the two major centres, Saskatoon and Regina, to try to just feel what the issues are out there in both rural Saskatchewan and in urban Saskatchewan, and hopefully to see if there’s any common thread from these areas and come up with solutions that may solve some of the problems.”
The committee includes Saskatoon Fairview MLA Jennifer Campeau as vice-chair, as well as another area MLA, Cut Knife-Turtleford MLA Larry Doke. Also on the committee are Estevan MLA Lori Carr, Canora-Pelly MLA Terry Dennis, Regina Coronation Park MLA Mark Docherty and Cypress Hills MLA Doug Steele.
All were in the Battlefords on Tuesday for a full day of meetings with various stakeholders and officials.
Those included municipal officials from the RMs as well as the City of Lloydminster and City of North Battleford. Cox indicated meetings with concerned citizen groups would take place in the afternoon as well.
At city council Monday, it was indicated Mayor Ryan Bater and members of council would meet the committee. Community safety co-ordinator Herb Sutton spoke about what the City intended to present.
“The plan is to outline what the City is doing to address crime,” said Sutton, as well as “talk about what we see moving forward.”
Previously the committee has been to Regina, Estevan, Yorkton and Meadow Lake and the plan was to meet in Saskatoon and then Prince Albert in the two days following their North Battleford meetings.
The next week will see the committee meet in Swift Current, La Ronge and finally La Loche.
So far, Cox said the committee has heard similar concerns in many of the communities they have been in. One common theme they have heard is problems stemming from substance abuse.
“The overall thing is the underlying cause of crime, whether it be rural or urban crime, is a drug related problem. Whether it’s people committing crimes when they’re under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or making bad decisions, or trying to get property they can sell to support their drug habits. And that’s kind of an underlying theme that we’ve heard in a lot of different centres we’ve been to.”
Another issue of importance to the committee is law enforcement efforts.
“We’ve had some excellent presentations from RCMP,” said Cox. He said those have included information from F Division in Regina as well as from several detachments in the centres they’ve been to.
“We’ve had some excellent input from those police forces, and they’re working together with us and they’ve made some good suggestions and hopefully some of them we can incorporate into our report.”
In the Battlefords, Cox said they are hearing concerns similar to those in other areas.
“Each area has specific problems but the underlying thing is crime is crime, whether it is in Estevan or Meadow Lake.”
At the end of the consultations, the committee will get together and go through the information they have gathered as well as written submissions, and come up with a report and recommendations.
Those recommendations will be made to the Ministry of Justice as well as to cabinet and the government caucus.
“Hopefully those will be implemented going forward,” said Cox. He did not offer specifics about a timeline, but suggested some recommendations could be implemented in the near term while others could be long term.
