Thank you.
Fortunately, on very short notice I was able to get some statistics for British Columbia on the lower mainland district, which is essentially from Vancouver out to the Fraser Valley and Hope. So it's not a huge area in British Columbia, but it's a fairly concentrated area.
In 2006 we had a total of 20 homicides involving firearms, and a further 83 incidents of attempted murder and woundings with firearms. We also recorded 268 incidents involving confirmed shots fired calls for this one region.
In 2006 members of the RCMP and municipal agencies in that area seized 447 firearms in relation to their duties in a one-year period in the greater Vancouver district, an average of 1.25 firearms a day.
Of the 268 calls for confirmed shots fired that we attended, 29 were in residential areas and 222 were in public areas. That is staggering when you think about public safety. We're going in to deal with shots fired calls when a vehicle has been sprayed by gunfire in a very open area—a parking lot of a mall in broad daylight—where obviously a lot of civilians are present and have been hit. We've had some fatalities as a result of that.
Just prior to leaving to come here late last night I was able to get one small snippet of information. I picked one jurisdiction, Abbotsford, which is out in the valley. They've had a high number of incidents of gang violence out there in the last few years. I contacted one of the members out there and specifically said I was looking for something on firearms and bail applications. But it wasn't a case of finding one; it was a case of narrowing them down to one.
They were able to provide me with information on a recent file concerning a two-year project that was undertaken involving several known gang members who were involved in drug trafficking and weapons trafficking at a very high level. At the culmination of this project, arrests were made and two of the four members who were targeted were arrested in possession of a huge number of semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons, kilogram levels of cocaine, and a large amount of cash.
They were subsequently turned out on bail. There were three more incidents after that when they were released and arrested and released, with more shootings and more firearms. At this point they're still out on bail on the same charges, with multiple shootings and multiple arrests over the course of six months.