Public Safety Committee on May 31st, 2006

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

Mr. Norlock, I have to inform you your time is up.

Mr. Chan, for five minutes.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, both parties.

First of all, I just want to put it on the record that the true mistake identified by Madam Fraser in the accounting practices is not a political decision by the minister.

[William Baker]

Mr. Chair, certainly for the year of 2003-04 when I was responsible, there was no political direction received with respect to the resolution.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Right.

[John Sims]

Mr. Chair, certainly for 2002-03 there was no political involvement whatsoever in that decision.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

The second question I have is for Ms. Fraser.

With your auditing, you have not identified any money missing with the firearms registry centre.

[Sheila Fraser]

All of the payments that were made were recorded. As I mentioned earlier, we do have some work that is ongoing on certain contracts, but with all of the funds that were recorded, we know where the money was spent.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Right, so there's no scandal so far.

[Sheila Fraser]

I hesitate to start saying if something's a scandal or not.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Right, but at least right now you have not discovered anything--

[Sheila Fraser]

On the contracting, we have not reporting anything to Parliament.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Secondly, as the Auditor General, who makes judgment calls on whether a system is efficient or not, you referred earlier, in response to a line of questioning, to police department usage as perhaps a good indicator of whether this system is productive or not. Would you say that if this has been adopted and police departments have been using it about 5,000 times a day, this would be a good indicator that the system is useful?

[Sheila Fraser]

I believe that the indicator of the 5,000 hits a day is more of what we call an activity indicator than an indicator of effectiveness. So those law enforcement people who use the registry would have to give an assessment as to whether or not it was useful to them.

There could be 5,000 hits, and they could say yes, it was very helpful and helped me in this way; or they could say no, it wasn't helpful because the information wasn't correct. It takes an additional degree of interpretation or information to assess effectiveness.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

But police chief associations have said it has been very helpful for them.

[Sheila Fraser]

This is one indicator of performance, but I don't believe the centre reports that itself. We would expect the centre to develop its indicators of performance and to report and track them over time to see if improvements or adjustments are needed.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

I appreciate that.

The other question is for Mr. Baker. In referring to Mr. Norlock's comment about the firearms registry, he claimed that this information is in the hands of the federal government. I've been a system engineer before. I know the difference between information in the hands of government and information in a database—in an information system that's accessible. For example, filing a paper with the government is not useful, because no one can get access to that information within minutes without using manpower to go through the file.

Your comment about the difference between this firearms registry managed by the Canada Firearms Centre, regarding the accessibility of data, compared to the one before....

[William Baker]

Mr. Chair, first of all, I apologize; I haven't had personal exposure to the old firearms acquisition certificate regime.

I can point out a couple of key differences, of course. One is that the real change occurred with the Firearms Act of 1995 coming into effect, which required universal licensing of all firearms users, regardless of the type of firearm, and registration of all firearms. The numbers of people and firearms covered by the Firearms Act is considerably greater than what would have been entailed by the FAC regime.

Secondly, with respect to discussion on expenditure, a considerable feature of the Firearms Centre is a central database that makes information on all users and firearms available to police or others across the country.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

I have one last question about the accuracy of the data in the registry, because there have been questions along the line of how much of the data has been verified. I don't think that is a good indication of the database's accuracy. I think a better question would be, what is the accuracy of the verification process? For example, out of a thousand households that you tried to verify, how many did you find to be false, or how many did you find to be accurate?

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Mrs. Fraser, can you answer that?

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes, Chair, we have two indicators of data quality. As indicated in paragraph 4.61, one is of the actual registration of the firearms, whose values ranged on different elements. For example, 9% of registration certificates needed to have information on a firearm's action corrected; 12% needed to have the firearm's make corrected; and 3% needed to have the serial number corrected. But there's also another proportion, which is the addresses. We noted rates of undeliverable mail as an indication of incorrect addresses. The rates of undeliverable mail ranged from 7% of licence renewal notifications to 23% of revocation notices.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Mr. Chan.

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

In other words, close to 75% to 80% of the data is accurate.

[Sheila Fraser]

I couldn't make an overall assessment. These are certain rates that we picked up, but—

[Raymond Chan, Liberal, Richmond, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.