Evidence of meeting #16 for Public Accounts in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was registry.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Alex Smith  Committee Researcher
Sheila Fraser  Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
William Baker  Former Commissioner , Canada Firearms Centre, As an Individual
Ian Bennett  Acting Assistant Deputy Minister, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services
Peter Martin  Deputy Commissioner, National Police Services of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
François Bidal  Director General, Canada Firearms Centre
Peter Kasurak  Senior Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

3:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to call the meeting to order. I want to welcome everyone here. I especially want to extend a warm welcome to our witnesses who are here before us today. This is the first public meeting of the public accounts committee in the fall session, although we did have two meetings last week. I want to welcome you back to the session.

We have this afternoon's standing order, a review of chapter 4, the Canadian firearms program, of the May 2006 report of the Auditor General of Canada. With us, ladies and gentlemen, we do have the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser. With her is Peter Kasurak, senior principal.

From the Department of Public Works and Government Services we have Ian Bennett, the acting assistant deputy minister, acquisitions branch.

From the National Police Services of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police we have Mr. Peter Martin, the deputy commissioner.

From the Canada Firearms Centre we have Monsieur François Bidal, the director general, and also with him is Denis Bilodeau, senior counsel and head of legal services.

We are expecting Mr. William Baker appearing as an individual. Of course, Mr. Baker was the former commissioner of the Canada Firearms Centre, and hopefully he will be along momentarily.

Before calling upon the Auditor General to make her initial opening remarks, I believe Mr. Nadeau has a point of information or a point of order.

3:40 p.m.

Bloc

Richard Nadeau Bloc Gatineau, QC

Mr. Chairman, last week we worked on a report on the Firearms Act, specifically on our ninth report. We checked the Internet for what we believed to be the most recent report, but some changes had not been made further to our last meeting.

Is this not the most recent report then? Is a report containing the changes going to be published?

3:40 p.m.

Alex Smith Committee Researcher

A new report will be available for the next meeting.

3:40 p.m.

Bloc

Richard Nadeau Bloc Gatineau, QC

And the changes will have been incorporated so that we can discuss them then?

3:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

The final report will be circulated, I believe, later today or tomorrow, and it will be discussed at our meeting on Thursday. You haven't seen the final report. At our last meeting we did make a number of changes.

The problem, Monsieur Nadeau, was that we were in a period of hiatus because the committee dissolved for a few days. As a result, the clerk couldn't send out the documentation. Now that's been lifted. The revised and amended report will go out, and I plan to discuss that at our Thursday meeting, although we haven't allotted a lot of time because we didn't spend a lot of time on it. We did make some changes. We want every member to have an opportunity to review the changes, and it will come back to the committee, hopefully for final approval, on Thursday.

3:40 p.m.

Bloc

Richard Nadeau Bloc Gatineau, QC

Thank you.

3:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much.

We have with us Mr. Baker. Thank you very much, Mr. Baker.

Ms. Fraser, your opening remarks.

3:40 p.m.

Sheila Fraser Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting us to discuss the audit of the Canada Firearms Centre. As you mentioned, I am accompanied today by Peter Kasurak, senior principal of the public safety team responsible for this audit.

I would like to take this opportunity to provide the committee with an overview of our findings related to the operation of the firearms program. This audit was a follow-up to our 2002 audit of the cost of the Canada firearms program. We were unable to complete our 2002 audit because the financial information that was available was unreliable and did not fairly represent the net cost of the program.

This year we are able to report that the centre has made satisfactory progress in addressing our recommendations, with the exception of accounting errors made in recording the cost of its new information system. This committee and others have already conducted extensive hearings on our reports regarding the accounting errors and the implications of these errors to Parliament's control of the public purse. I will therefore focus on our other findings.

As you know, the government has announced changes to the program subsequent to our audit. The most significant changes involve the transfer of the Canada firearms program to the RCMP and the introduction of legislation to abolish the long gun registry. My comments today take these changes into account, but we of course have done no audit work since we reported in May of this year.

We have found that the Firearms Centre has made substantial progress in setting up a separate agency and in addressing operational and contracting problems. However, I also found some problems had yet to be addressed. The most important of these were: reporting program performance to Parliament; the accuracy of information in the Registry; and ongoing difficulties with the new information system.

In general, the reporting of performance to Parliament had improved since our 2002 audit. At the time of our 2006 audit, much more information was being provided. However, we found reporting remained at the most basic level for reporting results. The Centre had not set any performance targets and had provided few examples of program outcomes. In addition, the Centre's performance reports contained errors, which significantly overstated its improvements in the timely processing of licensing and registration applications.

With respect to the accuracy of Registry information, to support police and reduce risks to public safety, the accuracy of information in the Registry is vital. We found the information in the database to have significant quality problems:

- address information for firearms owners was frequently wrong;

- verification frequently determined that information on the weapon's action, make or serial number was wrong;

- only half of the 1.2 million restricted weapons listed in the old Restricted Weapons Registration System had been re-registered. Information on these firearms was not updated, despite the knowledge that many of the old records were incorrect. Accuracy of the data regarding these weapons is a problem which remains to be resolved;

- lastly, the Centre did not know the status of 62 per cent of the firearms that had their registration certificates revoked over a three-month period in 2005.

Let me turn now to the difficulties with the information system.

The centre has had continuing difficulties managing its registry information system. CFIS I, its first attempt, cost almost $190 million by March 2005, including operations and maintenance costs. While initial estimates of the system's costs were in the order of $13 million to $20 million, the extent of the cost overrun is difficult to estimate because development and operational costs were not separated. A key factor causing cost escalation was the attempt to develop a system before legislation and regulations were finalized.

In 2001, the centre determined that a new information system was required, known as CFIS II, but repeated the error of attempting to build the system before legislative and regulatory changes had been completed. CFIS II also experienced serious overruns, including delay costs of $30.6 million, when the centre put the project on hold. At the time of our audit, CFIS II was more than two years late in being implemented, was still incomplete, and had cost about $90 million.

Mr. Chair, the RCMP is now responsible for the management of the program and for keeping Parliament informed of its progress. As the firearms centre had agreed to our recommendation and proposed corrective actions, this committee might wish to obtain renewed commitment to the undertakings made by the centre regarding our report.

Mr. Chair, this concludes our opening statement. We would be pleased to answer any questions committee members may have. Thank you.

3:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much, Mrs. Fraser.

Mr. Baker, do you have any opening comments?

3:45 p.m.

William Baker Former Commissioner , Canada Firearms Centre, As an Individual

I'm very happy to be here today to answers the committee's questions.

It's probably worth underlining that as of May 17, I ceased to be commissioner of firearms. But I'm certainly here at your disposal to respond to items that occurred during the period during which I was commissioner.

3:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much, Mr. Baker.

Mr. Bennett—who is now the acting assistant deputy minister of the acquisitions branch—I understand you have an opening statement.

3:45 p.m.

Ian Bennett Acting Assistant Deputy Minister, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me introduce to you, Mr. Chair, and to the committee members Scott Leslie, who is the senior director who has worked very closely with the centre and continues to work very closely on this file with the RCMP.

In my opening remarks, Mr. Chair, I want to thank the committee and you for providing me with this opportunity to discuss federal contracting services in relation to chapter 4 of the Auditor General's May 2006 report.

To deliver the best value procurement services, Public Works and Government Services Canada works as a strategic partner with our customer departments. We help them throughout the procurement process from defining requirements and procurement approaches; managing the bidding process; and supporting them in ensuring accountability throughout the contract.

The Department of Public Works and Government Services has supported the Canada Firearms Centre since its inception through the provision of contracting services, including those related to IT.

The department has issued two principal contracts, both competitively tendered and awarded, to support the Canadian firearms information systems, referred to as CFIS I and CFIS II. These contracts are highlighted in chapter 4 of the Auditor General's report.

Managing these two CFIS contracts in an uncertain operating and legislative environment has proven to be a significant challenge. Numerous changes to both contracts have been required over the years to accommodate these evolving realities. We do acknowledge, however, that lessons learned from our experience with CFIS I could have been better applied to the CFIS II procurement, which has proven to be a particular challenge. Many of the assumptions upon which it was based had to be adjusted, as the environment, particularly the Firearms Act legislation, has changed.

With the assistance of third-party analysis, Public Works and Government Services Canada, the RCMP Canada Firearms Centre, and the CFIS II contractor have agreed to halt work to ensure that no further expenses are being incurred while we assess the situation.

The Auditor General cited cases dating from 1997 to 2004 in which the firearms centre retained a number of contractors for several years using PWGSC's informatics professional services database, a tool that allows federal departments to search for consultants based on skills and experience to justify a non-competitive procurement process. The Auditor General reports that in many cases, the searches of the IPS database would yield only the name of an incumbent contractor. PWGSC concurs that these contracts should not be justified as competitive, and we note that the firearms centre ceased this practice in 2004.

The Auditor General recommends that Public Works and Government Services review how client departments use its contracting tools and be better able to provide assurance that the tools are not being used to circumvent contracting policies and procedures. We take the Auditor General's recommendation very seriously and have taken corrective measures to address the issues highlighted in the chapter. Such measures include the training of users on accountabilities, policies, processes, increased monitoring and reporting of usage, and, where appropriate, restricting use of these tools. As of December last year, PWGSC has improved, rebranded, and expanded the professional services online database to allow better monitoring of departmental usage.

In conclusion, we recommend that we must continue to find ways to further improve our services to federal departments while continuing to exercise a vigorous check and balance role in the interest of Canadians. PWGSC is in the midst of transforming the way it does business, and we're seeking innovative ways to deliver services smarter, faster, and at reduced cost to Canadians. We are committed to fair, open, and transparent competitive procurement practices to meet government needs while ensuring equal access to businesses that will withstand the test of public scrutiny.

Thank you. I'd be pleased to answer your questions, Mr. Chair.

3:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much, Mr. Bennett.

Mr. Peter Martin, the deputy commissioner, do have you any opening comments?

3:50 p.m.

D/Commr Peter Martin Deputy Commissioner, National Police Services of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Yes, I do.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Accompanying me here today are senior officials of the RCMP Canada Firearms Centre.

It gives me great pleasure to meet with you today to discuss issues related to the RCMP Canada Firearms Centre.

On May 17, the Hon. Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety, announced some key government decisions concerning the future of the Canada firearms program. The first order of business was to transfer responsibility for the administration and operations of the Canada Firearms Centre to the RCMP. Since that time, we have employed sound stewardship principles to align management functions that have resulted in some economies of scale while remaining focused on the mandate of the firearms centre.

We continue to work toward further alignments of function and operations that will allow the RCMP to invest strategically in important initiatives related to its mandate. We have also reviewed chapter 4 of the Auditor General of Canada's report, tabled in May 2006, and RCMP management has developed an action plan to address all of the recommendations.

I would like to thank you for inviting the RCMP to appear before the committee, and I am ready to take your questions.

3:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much, Mr. Martin.

Monsieur Bidal and Monsieur Bilodeau, have you any opening comments?

Okay, then. That concludes the opening remarks, colleagues. We're now going to go to the first round of questioning.

Before we do so, before calling upon Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, I want to ask members to keep their questions short and to the point. We don't need long, three-minute preambles.

I would ask the witnesses to be short and crisp with your answers. This committee has zero tolerance for long, rambling answers that have nothing to do with the question being asked.

Finally, I would ask members to be aware that this committee deals with the financial issues, with the propriety, the regularity, the economy of the issues at hand and not with the policy: whether or not this country ought or ought not to have gun control. That is a policy issue to be decided by the government of the day, and this committee has no opinion, of course, on that particular issue. I would ask members to direct their questions accordingly.

Having said that, before we go to Mr. Wrzesnewskyj, I want to point out that the auditor general of the province of Quebec is in the room. Perhaps the auditor would stand up and say hello.

3:55 p.m.

Some hon. members

Hear, hear!

3:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Bienvenue.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.

3:55 p.m.

Liberal

Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to begin by going back to the May 2006 status report. On page 129, in paragraph 4.114 at the second line, it says:

The status of the CFIS project (late and over budget) is largely due to early decisions made in 2001 and 2002; the lack of compliance with good contracting practices goes back to 1997; and the current management team inherited an organizational structure that had not stabilized.

But then on the next line down the auditor continues by saying:

The current management team has made notable progress on a number of issues, including the establishment of a new department.

I note that today in the update, in point 6, the auditor says:

We found that the firearms centre had made substantial progress in setting up a separate agency and addressing operational and contracting problems.

So what we see is that there were, quite obviously, birthing problem,s and there were a number of reasons for those. Unfortunately, as was mentioned in Mr. Bennett's opening statement, managing the two CFIS contracts in an uncertain operating legislative environment has proven to be a significant challenge. Notwithstanding that, we seem to have made, in the words of the Auditor General, “substantial progress”.

Now, that same report from May, in paragraph 4.8, goes on to say that in the audit “we did not examine the effectiveness of the program or its social implications”. We can understand the difficulty of doing that sort of audit, but throughout this whole debate and discussion, where costs did overrun—unfortunately, those costs are now sunk costs—we have what appears to be a centre that has made substantial progress, and the only measure I personally can apply to whether or not this centre is effective is by looking at the effectiveness of what its intent is.

I can't help but go to the days after the Dawson shooting, when the Sûreté launched an investigation into a 14-year-old who also posted threats on the vampire.com website. They checked the registry, found his father had firearms, and they removed them. Also, we have an interesting measure here: police use the system 5,000 times a day; last year the system supported 3,000 affidavits; and thousands have had licences denied and revoked.

It's impossible to speculate how many lives we've saved as a result of this substantial progress and the existence of this centre. But I'd like to address the representative here from the RCMP and to ask him, how do you feel about some of these recent successes and some of these numbers, which speak to the effectiveness of this centre—specifically this number that says it's used 5,000 times a day and that last year 3,000 affidavits were supported by the centre?

4 p.m.

Deputy Commissioner, National Police Services of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

D/Commr Peter Martin

The number of inquiries through the centre is escalating on a continual basis. Today the centre is queried approximately 6,500 times a day, and it's going up. The centre provides important information to police officers in the field for investigative purposes, and it also assists them in ensuring they take measures to protect their own safety when they're going into premises where it's known that firearms are located. So it goes on and on.

Through the licensing process the program also carries with it a need for training and preventative measures that people are made aware of as they go through the training process. So it's quite a rigorous undertaking.

The benefits of the centre are enormous. We have examples of where the centre has been beneficial. The less tangible, the preventative maintenance aspect of this, is a little bit more difficult to pin down in very specific terms, but the fact that people can get in there, that members of police agencies right across Canada are querying the centre on an increasing basis day after day is evidence of how important they consider the centre to be.

4 p.m.

Liberal

Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON

Thank you. That's actually very helpful. It also helps to explain why police chiefs across the country are virtually unanimous in their support of the firearms centre.

I'd now like to move on to point 8 of the Auditor General's report. In the first bullet point it talks of address information on firearms owners being frequently wrong. I assume from the other references made to substantial progress, etc., that this is being corrected. In terms of this registry and its accuracy, there are suggestions that the long gun should be scrapped. Would it be more helpful to actually tighten some of the legislation around this whole issue? Would tighter storage be helpful, and would it help address this particular bullet point?

4 p.m.

Deputy Commissioner, National Police Services of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

D/Commr Peter Martin

Issues of legislation are for the government to address, not for the police agency to deal with.

When you talk about the quality of the data using addresses as an example, the Auditor General did point to a concern about the quality of data. We have put together a team to get into the data quality and we have looked at areas of the database where there are problems. Addresses have already been identified as one.

We have prioritized areas of risk. As you can probably appreciate, an address is an important piece of information, whereas a postal code is not as important. We focused on the high-risk points of data quality. To this point, about 25,000 addresses have been fixed. We have about 3,000 left to go, and we continue to make significant progress on improving quality of the data in the database itself.

4 p.m.

Liberal

Borys Wrzesnewskyj Liberal Etobicoke Centre, ON

Thank you.

My final question is this. The third bullet in point 8 talks about only half the 1.2 million restricted weapons listed in the old registry being re-registered. I'd like to tie that in to the comment made by Mr. Bennett that managing contracts in an uncertain legislative environment...and then to qualify that by pointing out that the Conservative government has talked of an amnesty. Has that sort of talk led to this situation, this very dangerous situation, where the Auditor General notes that we have a serious problem in that half of the 1.2 million restricted weapons that had been registered--now we have half of those, meaning 600,000 are no longer registered. People did not re-register them knowing there is an amnesty. Was this one of the considerations when you mentioned managing the centre is a little difficult in a changing and uncertain legislative environment?

4:05 p.m.

Acting Assistant Deputy Minister, Acquisitions Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services

Ian Bennett

No, that wasn't the intent at all. It was really the coming into effect of the regulations, etc., and the organizational changes as the centre evolved. Those really were the program issues I was referring to.

4:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Shawn Murphy

Thank you very much, Mr. Wrzesnewskyj.

Monsieur Laforest, huit minutes, s'il vous plaît.

4:05 p.m.

Bloc

Jean-Yves Laforest Bloc Saint-Maurice—Champlain, QC

Good afternoon.

I too would like to refer back to paragraphs 4.38 and 4.39 on page 124 of Chapter 4 of the report tabled last May.

Madam Auditor General, the Centre's strategic outcome is to minimize the risks to public safety from firearms in the community. In paragraph 4.39, you mention some financial problems and difficulties with setting up the information system. In essence, a number of activities related to firearms registration and licensing have been carried out, but little emphasis has been placed on evaluating program performance.

Did you in fact state in your report that there was not enough statistical evidence at this time to determine whether or not the program was truly effective?