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?