CPA ACP

WHO WE ARE

The Canadian Police Association (CPA) is the national voice for 60,000 police personnel across Canada. Membership includes police personnel serving in 160 police services across Canada, from Canada's smallest towns and villages as well as those working in our largest municipal and provincial police services, and members of the railway police, and first nations’ police personnel.

WHAT WE STAND FOR

As the national centre for police labour relations, the role of the Canadian Police Association is to:

• promote the interests of police personnel and the public they serve, in the national legislative and policy fields;
• provide a collective support network for Member Associations to successfully improve representation and conditions for their own members in collective bargaining, education and training, equipment, health and safety, and protecting members’ rights;
• advocate for adequate and equitable resources for policing;
• identify key national issues which impact on Member Associations and facilitate the resolution of these issues;
• react and respond, upon request, to local policing issues that may have national ramifications; and
• liaise with the international policing community on issues affecting Canadian police personnel.

PARTNERS IN COMMUNITY SERVICE

We are proud of our relationships with parliamentarians from all political parties.  Like you, our members want to make a difference in their communities.  As the national voice for front-line police personnel across Canada, we bring a unique perspective on policing and public safety.

The CPA provides a unified and coordinated voice for front-line civilian and sworn police personnel at the federal level. Our activities are usually broken down into three distinct areas:

• Advocacy: The CPA regularly engages with government officials and political leaders in order to advance our key issues, which are regularly updated with input from our Board of Directors, as well as our membership at our Legislative and Biennial Conferences.

We actively maintain strong relationships with key public safety and justice decision-makers, whether in the public service, the federal Cabinet, or elected Members of Parliament from all political parties. Our National President is often asked to provide expert testimony to Parliamentary Committees, whether in the House of Commons or Senate of Canada regarding the impact of proposed legislation on front-line policing, and we are regularly consulted as key stakeholders when new policies are drafted by governments.

• Information: The CPA works to ensure that all of our member associations benefit from the collective efforts that each individual association undertakes on a daily basis. With over 150 member associations across Canada, we act as a “clearing house” to facilitate the exchange of information between associations and members on a regular basis, and organize annual conferences that host experts on current, hot-button topics that confront police associations on a daily basis.

We maintain memberships with international police organizations, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the International Council of Police Representative Associations (ICPRA) to ensure we are informed of any global policing trends that could affect our members.

The CPA is also one of the largest funders of police-related research in Canada, to ensure that our advocacy efforts are always evidence-based, and to ensure that our member associations benefit from relevant, up-to-date data whenever possible to support their local advocacy efforts. In the past five years alone, the CPA has collaborated with researchers across the country to produce in-depth studies of issues such as Body-Worn Cameras (BWCs), Workplace Impairment policies, Street Checks and the effect policing has on the work-life balance of the members we represent. We also work to ensure, whenever possible, that our research has practical recommendations that can be put into practice, or can inform our member associations when dealing directly with their employers. A good example of those efforts was a full-scale operational review of the Winnipeg Police Service that we conducted with researchers from Simon Fraser University that was more practical and relevant than one conducted under contract by the Winnipeg Police Services Board itself.

The CPA also produces an annual “Big Ten Wage and Benefit” comparison booklet to help support our member associations in their collective bargaining efforts.

• Communication: One of our most important roles is to act as a strong and effective voice for front-line police personnel, whether thru the traditional media channels, or in the increasingly important world of social media. We publish op-eds in support of front-line police personnel, respond to media interviews in print, television, and radio formats. We also maintain an active presence on social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook (where our CPA page has curated over 420,000 followers, making it the largest Canadian law enforcement outlet on the platform, and have a similar-sized audience compared to established media pages such as the National Post, or Toronto Star).

The CPA also has the capacity to work with local associations on specific public relations campaigns, based on local needs. We can work collaboratively with your association to help plan and execute a local communications strategy to address any pressing concerns (for example to counter efforts to remove school resource officers, to advocate for funding for specific initiatives such as mobile crisis intervention teams, or to counter “police defunding” campaigns).

Additionally, the CPA regularly conducts targeted “polls” of Canadians on a variety of issues to ensure our activities are informed by what Canadians think when it comes to public safety in Canada.

Along with those three main pillars, the CPA also works with partners such as the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, and the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto to provide expert training to new police association executives in areas like collective bargaining, governance and financial literacy, and strategic planning for associations. This program is available to all member associations, and the CPA offers a bursary program specifically tailored for associations that may not have the financial capacity to send local executives to Ottawa for the training sessions.