I'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity to appear today to present data for your consideration with respect to Bill C-35, reverse onus in bail hearings for firearm-related offences.
Let me begin by outlining where we can and cannot provide data relevant to this bill. We cannot provide data on the granting of bail—for example, how often bail was granted when an accused was charged with a firearm-related offence. We also cannot identify where an offence was committed by an accused on bail.
What we can provide is information on the number of police-reported incidents where the offence involved a firearm and to which this bill specifically applies.
We can present national data for three offence types under consideration: robbery, discharging a firearm with intent to cause bodily harm, and weapons trafficking. We can also present information on kidnapping, extortion, attempted murder, and sexual assault levels 2 and 3 from a subset of police services representing just over 60% of the national volume of crime. As well, we can provide data from our courts statistics program on the processing of cases involving firearm-related offences. Finally, we can look at the use of pretrial detention with our Correctional Service data. For any data, the limitations are noted in the footnotes on the slides.
If you turn to slide 2, for the three offence types with national coverage of police-reported incidents, we see that in 2005 there were just over 3,500 robberies with a firearm. Of these, 1,117 were cleared by the laying of a charge by police. There were 252 police reported incidents of discharge of a firearm with intent, and 111 were cleared by way of charge. In addition, as a group, there were 147 weapons trafficking offences, which in our data set include Criminal Code sections 99, 100, 101, 103, and 104.
On slide 3, with respect to the other offences covered by Bill C-35, we have information on the number of incidents involving a firearm from a sample of police services representing 62% of the national caseload; thus this chart may underrepresent the total number of such incidents.
Kidnapping includes forceable confinement and hostage-taking. There were 258 such incidents reported in 2005, and 134 of these were cleared by way of charge. We also know that based on this sample of police services, with respect to Bill C-35 offences, robbery with a firearm makes up the large majority of such offences, about 80%. This is the largest offence by volume on the list.
Turning to slide 4, we also know that the rate of robbery with a firearm has been dropping over the past decade. It's down about 50%. In total, there were almost 29,000 robberies in 2005. The robbery rate was 3% higher than in 2004; however, this was about 15% lower than a decade ago and 25% lower than the 1991 peak.
Over half of the robberies reported to police in 2005 were committed without a weapon. Firearms were used in 12% of robberies in 2005, while just under one third involved another type of weapon.
If we turn to our courts data for 10 jurisdictions, where we can identify a firearm offence, we can look at the processing of offences identified in Bill C-35. For 2003-04, we found that 871 cases, representing 1,633 charges with an offence identified in Bill C-35, were disposed of in adult criminal courts. These 871 cases include cases where multiple charges have been laid, and at least one of these charges was for a C-35 offence. It may not, however, be classified as the most serious offence. So while it may be labelled on the graph as a drug-trafficking case, there is within this case a Bill C-35 charge.
Given what we saw on our police-reported data, it is not surprising to find that robbery accounts for over 40% of BillC-35 cases disposed of in 2003-04. Weapons trafficking represented 15% of Bill C-35 cases. In approximately two-thirds of the cases—563 of the 871—a Bill C-35 charge was the most serious offence in the case.
If you turn to slide 6, also from our courts data, we see that the overall conviction rate for cases with a Bill C-35 charge is 40%. This is significantly lower than the 58% overall conviction rate for all federal statute offences in 2003-04 and lower than the overall conviction rate of 48% for crimes against the person offences. One possible reason for this, as we've seen in our data, is that an accused person is less likely to plead guilty to a more serious charge and/or one that carries a mandatory minimum sentence, which we know applies for a number of the Bill C-35 offences.
Once a Bill C-35 case is found guilty, 77% of these cases result in a term of imprisonment. The average length of custody for these cases was 1,101 days. This reflects the average sentence imposed on the most serious offence in the case. Overall, the average case processing time for cases with a Bill C-35 charge was 221 days, which is almost the same as the average for all federal statute offences in 2003-04.
If you turn to the next slide—
