38th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

(October 4, 2004 - )

Edited Hansard • Number 147

Thursday, November 3, 2005

Questions on the Order Paper

Hon. Dominic LeBlanc (Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, Lib.): Madam Speaker, the following questions will be answered today: Nos. 177, 178, 180, 182 and 199.

[Text]

[Hansard Pages 9444 - 9445]

Question No. 178--

Mr. Garry Breitkreuz:

With regard to the statement made by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness on June 16, 2005, that “since December 1, 1998, more than 13,500 individual firearm licences have been refused or revoked. The program is accessed over 2,000 times a day by front line police officers”:

(a) how many of the firearms licences were refused or revoked because the person had committed criminal offences, were placed under prohibition orders, restraining orders, bail conditions, and/or committed other violent acts that were reported to police;

(b) how many firearms licences were refused or revoked because of the information provided by the applicant on the licence application;

(c) how does the program track the addresses of these 13,500 now too-dangerous-to-own-firearms persons once their firearms licences have been refused or revoked;

(d) how does the Minister know that the program is actually being accessed by “front line police officers”;

(e) what specific types of information in the system are actually being accessed and accessed most often by police; and

(f) how many times per day do the police actually get information from the system compared to not-in-the-system responses?

 

Hon. Roy Cullen (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, the reply is as follows:

a) (i) Criminal offences and/or other violent acts are considered along with other public safety factors in evaluating the eligibility of an applicant for a firearms licence; however these are not specifically identified as the sole reason for refusal or revocation of a firearms licence.

(ii) From 1998 to December 31, 2004, 5,893 licences were refused while 8,104 licences were revoked1. Factors leading to a refusal (538) or revocation (2,518) of a firearms licence in 2004 included:

Factor	Refusals	Revocations
Prohibition/probation order	37%	76%
Violence	25%	12%
Mental health	10%	12%
Potential risk to others or to self	24%	10%
Domestic violence	6%	8%
Drug offences	9%	7%
Unsafe firearm use and storage	7%	7%

 

 

 

 

 

Beginning in 2004, chief firearms officers, CFOs, can report in the Canadian Firearms Information System, CFIS, all of the factors that cause the refusal of an application or the revocation of a licence; for this reason, total percentages are greater than 100%. Prior to this date, CFOs only reported a single reason per decision.

b) The information provided by a licence applicant is one of several factors considered in evaluating the eligibility of an applicant for a firearms licence. Firearms licences are considered for revocation using current information from continuous eligibility checking along with information provided on the original application. In 2004, approximately 1% of refusals and 10% of revocations were due to the provision of false information(1).

c) The Canada Firearms Centre, CAFC, does not track address information for individuals whose licence has been refused or revoked. In the event one of these individuals makes a new application for new firearms licence, the previous refusal or revocation will be considered in the application process. Individuals applying for a new firearms licence are “client-matched” in the CFIS using their name and date of birth, along with other historical data in the database, for example, photograph, reference information, eye colour, height.

d) Approximately 360 police agencies, representing 59,906(2) police officers, have access to the Canadian Firearms Registry Online, CFRO, through the Canadian Police Information Centre, CPIC. CPIC is a resource of National Police Services, which is administered by the RCMP. Police agencies, as well as a small number of investigative and enforcement branches of other federal and provincial departments query CFRO through CPIC. CFRO can only provide the total number of queries made by all agencies with access to it.

e) The following list contains the types of queries which may be performed in CFRO in the descending order of their frequency of use:

Name
Address
Firearm serial number
Licence number
Certificate number
Telephone number
Owner
Firearm identification number, FIN
Corporate

f) Over the last quarter, an average of more than 5,000 queries have been made daily to CFRO. Each query generates a response and provides useful information that can be used by the police to assess public and officer safety risks or determine whether enforcement or other interventions are needed.

(1) 2004 Report of the Commissioner of Firearms, tabled in the House of Commons, July 20, 2005
(2) Statistics Canada table 254-0002, September 9, 2005