Thank you, Madam Chair.
There is one system that is central to the operation of the entire Canadian firearms program, and it's the database. It is not just for the registration of all of the firearms that are in the system and is not just the means by which police access the data; it is also the database that captures information on all two million plus licence-holders in the country. So it is all that together.
You referred to some issues with respect to the quality of the data in the system. I know that the matter to which the Auditor General is referring is with respect to the data on firearms themselves, the registration of firearms. The deadline for firearms to be registered under the Firearms Act was December 31, 2002. For a lot of reasons, including resistance on the part of some people and some concerns or doubts as to whether the requirement would actually continue to be there, many of these firearms were registered in the months preceding and after the deadline, and in fact, we received over a million firearms in the year following the deadline, in terms of registration.
The government's approach to the data in order to manage the volume was to take the information submitted by the firearms owner at face value and just do a very cursory review of the data to ensure that there was nothing obviously faulty. Clearly, there are some errors in the data. One thing we can report, and it is acknowledged in the Auditor General's report, based on verification of the data that we did in the last year or so, the criterion that is most critical is whether a firearm is restricted, prohibited, or non-restricted, because that dictates the use of the firearm and the type of licence the person must hold. As indicated in the report, the incidence of errors at that level is very, very small--less than 0.01%--but there still are clearly some errors in the database that are being fixed up as we go along.