Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security

Comité permanent de la sécurité publique et nationale

EVIDENCE NUMBER 05,
TÉMOIGNAGES DU COMITÉ NUMÉRO 05

UNEDITED COPY - COPIE NON ÉDITÉE

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 - Le mercredi 31 mai 2006

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(1535)

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Garry Breitkreuz (Yorkton—Melville, CPC)):
I'd like to bring to order the fifth meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. I welcome today as witnesses the Auditor General of Canada, Mrs. Sheila Fraser, welcome to our committee; Mr. William Baker, the former Commissioner of the Canadian Firearms Centre, John Sims, the Deputy Minister and Deputy Attorney General; and Ian Bennett, the Acting Assistant Deputy Minister of Acquisitions; and also assisting, Peter Kasurak, Senior Principal.

I think that we'll go ahead with the presentations. The usual format here is to allow you to all make your presentations and then we'll open it up for questions, with the official opposition having a round for seven minutes, as all the opposition parties have, and then we'll go to five-minute rounds after the government has had its seven-minute round.

And without further ado, Mrs. Fraser, please.

[SNIP]

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you.

Mr. Brown, in his opening remarks, I think hit upon something when he pointed out that this is the Public Safety and National Security Committee, not the Public Accounts Committee.

Perhaps I'd like to discuss public safety, as it relates to the gun registry. For the purposes of my questions I'd like to assume that in a perfect world the gun registry would contribute to public safety. What troubles me about the gun registry in terms of its efficacy....

Three examples. The Auditor General mentioned undeliverable mail ranging from 7% to 23%, the Canada Firearms Center does not know the status of 62% of the firearms for which registration certificates were revoked between July and October of just one year, 2005, and in paragraph 4.58 of your report you point out that the Firearms Act required that the 1.2 million prohibited and restricted weapons that were in the restricted registration system were supposed to be re-catalogued, if I can put it that way, into the new system by January 1, 2003. To this very day half of them haven't been catalogued, if I read the thing correctly.

The Auditor General says, of course, the RWRS remains operational, so the information on those firearms is still available. Well, big deal, because under 4.59 it's admitted that the information is outdated and incorrect. How can this system, then, contribute to public safety and national security, given these statistics that the Auditor General has found, number one? Number two, why has the centre been unable to comply with the law with respect to RWRS for three years?

Mr. Baker, and then Mr. Sims, perhaps.

(1710)

Mr. William Baker: Mr. Chair, with your permission, I've asked my colleague, Beverley Holloway, the Chief Operating Officer, if she wouldn't mind responding. She can give a far more clearer response, with your permission.

The Chair: (eb)While Ms. Holloway is coming, Mr. Ganna, you were up at the table previously and you referred to a two-page memo to file, could you provide that to the committee, please and give that to the clerk of the committee.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Madam, did you get my question or questions?

Ms. Beverley Holloway: I'll start with the RWRS one if I may, Mr. Chair and then maybe we could work backwards, because I think that was the main question.

Yes, this is the registration system that preceded our current database and we did have about 1.2 million prohibited and restricted firearms in that database. In 1998 when we went over to the new system we did write out to all of these people. We did try to follow up and tried to get them to register. That's gone on for the last number of years. We've worked with enforcement agencies throughout Canada. We've tried, just as of late in the last year with the Surrey detachment in B.C. to go out and try to find these people. It's an activity that is ongoing. We are trying to find this other half a million people, or the firearms actually, because there'll be less people, to try to correct the situation. It's ongoing, but we have been pursuing it and we do realize the importance of it.

So when the Auditor General reported that the information is available, it's an interim solution. It's a very difficult activity.

Mr. Tom Wappel: But these are not long guns. These are prohibited and restricted firearms and supposedly this system is to help the public safety of this country by knowing where these prohibited and restricted firearms are. By the way, these have been required to be registered since the early '30s, if I remember correctly.

Ms. Beverley Holloway: That's correct.

Mr. Tom Wappel: So how can we say that this system is good, it's worth $1 billion, it's working, if we can't even find 5.6 million prohibited and restricted firearms, never mind the long guns that people are shooting gophers with? How can one say that the system is effective?
Ms. Beverley Holloway: Mr. Chair, it's 600,000 firearms, not--

Mr. Tom Wappel: I beg your pardon.

Ms. Beverley Holloway: That's fine.

We do keep the original system. We do have an address of where these people last were and that's the first step the police access, so we do try to follow back with their last address. That's the information we have at this time.
Again, it's 600,000 out of 7.1 million

(1715)

Mr. Tom Wappel: No, no, it's 600,000 out of 1.2 million restricted and prohibited weapons. Let's not mix apples and oranges. These are the serious...the hand guns that can be concealed, automatic weapons....I don't know what else is under prohibited, grenade launchers, whatever it is. I'm talking about prohibited and restricted firearms where there was some information as to where those prohibited and restricted firearms were, and three years after the deadline that the act required, 600,000 of them are still not in the system. That's troubling to me.

Ms. Beverley Holloway: Yes. Certainly, we have made attempts over the last number of years to locate these people. We do have activities underway to continue to try to follow up and find these people.

Mr. Tom Wappel: I'm afraid that's not reassuring.

Last question, what about the 23% of wrong addresses?

Ms. Beverley Holloway: Thank you.

Yes, a regular return rate of mail is around 6%. This would be when we go out to contact our clients for renewing of licences and on average, after five years, the 6%, that runs with a normal average in the government of returned mail. This 23% was higher because this relates to the revocation of certificates and it's a special project we had underway and we had not contacted these people for a long period of time. This is not our normal ongoing amount, this was a special project.

What we've done with that is we've tried to locate these people as well, and as the Auditor General has suggested and we are going to have in our action plan, we are looking for other ways to have better updating or I guess contacting other databases to try to have a better address.

Mr. Tom Wappel: Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you.

With the committee's permission, while you are at the table, I have another question for you. I have done extensive research as to how many firearms there would likely be in Canada by using import-export numbers and I think you may be aware of some of the research I've done, somewhere between 16.5 million and 20 million firearms are in the country, of which we have 7 million registered.

Do you see any difficulties with the way I have done my analysis?

Ms. Beverley Holloway: I'm sorry Mr. Chair, I'm not prepared, today, for that.

The Chair: You're not, okay. Well, in all fairness to you, I just....using the import-export numbers, it seems that there are a lot of unregistered long guns--as a follow-up to Mr. Wappel's question--we're not just talking handguns here. Less than half the firearms have been registered.