Public Safety Committee on June 7th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Your time is up, Monsieur Ménard.

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

It is for people who are eligible.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Mr. Comartin, if you're prepared.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister, for being here. I apologize for being late, but I was in the House giving a speech on the other crime bill.

With regards to the question Mr. Ménard just asked, the estimate we've been hearing is that if you took away the long gun registry, you would save about $2 million to $3 million, because the registry for restricted weapons would still be needed and would stay there, and all of the computer access that we have from the police forces around the country would remain. All of those costs would remain, as you'd have to have the services available for that checking.

Is that information not accurate?

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

I think we need to take a couple of steps back and look at the big picture, and then zero in specifically on the amount you talked about.

The $2 million figure resonates in an ominous way, because that was given to us back in about 1996 as being the total cost of the entire program. Actually, at first, when the program was initiated, we were told it was going to be revenue neutral and was going to cost $2 million. I know you shared the concerns when costs skyrocketed. The recent report of the Auditor General put the costs, if you include this year's costs, at just over $1 billion.

Some improvements were made in administration over time, thankfully. The cost of running the entire program is estimated right now to be about $83 million. We have identified, through the hard work of people at the Firearms Centre, approximately $10 million in administrative savings. Now that it moves over to the RCMP, they may well come up with other cost savings, because of their former expertise in that particular area.

When you look at eliminating the long run registry itself, this was a portion of the program that was very expensive, and also unreliable, according to the Auditor General. She said that the data were not reliable.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

The data on restricted weapons are also unreliable.

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

That is possibly true also. However, we don't feel that the restricted firearms should also be deregistered. We feel it's appropriate that every effort is maintained to verify the accuracy and to see if there are some questions there about reliability.

Other costs that are never taken into account would be the possible cost of trying to maintain follow-up on somebody who has, for instance.... As we know, because of the unreliability of data, you could be subject to a variety of legal sanctions if the data registered in the firearm licence centre wasn't correct. So it's very difficult to estimate the costs that this has and could continue to run. To maintain a program that is simply not efficient, and we're talking about the cataloguing of the unregistered long guns, when we should be directing our resources certainly into hand guns, where we see an increasing problem with gang-related activity.... Any savings that we can achieve by deflecting savings on the long gun registry to crime prevention using a variety of methods are worth doing.

Also, keep in mind that all of the other provisions still remain. The hand gun registry is still in place, restrictive firearms still in place, and the requirement to have a licence if you're going to possess a firearm is still on the registry. As I indicated in my opening remarks, a police officer approaching a house and wondering, in fact, if there is the possibility of firearms present would still have that indication, because that would be on a person's file.

And also keep in mind, as I close it out on your good question there, Joe, the harsh reality is that people of criminal intent rarely, if ever, register their firearms.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Commissioner Zaccardelli, now that it's transferred over to you, has the RCMP initiated any kind of an analysis of the costs and the savings, just of the long gun registry?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

We're in the process of a complete review and audit of the registry. We are clearly looking for savings in a number of areas, simply by being able to integrate some of their programs with the existing programs, so we expect to see some clear savings there by the economies of scale and so on. On the specific long barrel guns, we have not done anything and we haven't any specific information on that. We will clearly be looking in all areas to possibly make some savings here in terms of managing the registry.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Do you have any sense of timelines for that analysis to be completed?

[Commr Giuliano Zaccardelli]

I've given the instructions to my audit team to do it as quickly as possible. I'm reluctant to give you a timeline, but I would like to, in the next couple of months, have a clear report on where we're at, sir.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Minister, on the issue of the oversight committee, are we going to see the legislation in the spring or in the fall?

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

That was just asked. You were attending your duties in the House of Commons and missed that. I'd like to see it move ahead in the fall. I don't want to state right here that that's absolutely when it's going to happen, but I'm hoping the agenda will be sufficiently open to do that.

I also indicated to the previous questioner on this that there was a very solid input from all members who were involved in that committee. I know you have some particular interest there. So a lot of it is well advanced. I'm hoping that with the briefing material that will be sent out to members who will be looking at this, everybody can make sure they're up to speed, and we can just deal with some of the issues of concern that haven't been fully addressed before.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

We had have a very extensive consultation process in the last round. Are you proposing to initiate that before you table the bill?

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Okanagan—Coquihalla, BC]

I don't want to go over ground that's already been covered, but I want what you found out in your previous consultation available to everybody. I'm not anticipating redoing all that. I think you did good work on that before.

[The Chair, Conservative, Garry Breitkreuz]

Thank you.

Mr. Brown.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank all of our witnesses and the minister for coming today. I think it's great that we have the heads of all of our public safety agencies here today. I think I can speak on behalf of all Canadians to thank them for their role in thwarting this alleged threat that we had on the weekend. You can understand why I used the word “alleged”, but it's great that we saw such success.

I happen to represent a border riding south of Ottawa, on the St. Lawrence River. I have some real interest in the Canadian Border Services Agency, so I welcome this opportunity to ask a few questions of the president, Mr. Jolicoeur.

The first one is about your marine enforcement unit in Halifax, specifically. Do you have a boat for that enforcement unit?

[Alain Jolicoeur]

Do we have a boat?

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Yes.

[Alain Jolicoeur]

We have very few boats in the organization. The reason is that currently the way we conduct inspections--except in special circumstances where we have concerns, say, about the crew--is that we mainly inspect containers. We need to have special facilities to scan those containers, and when we feel there is a need to open them, we need to have a building in which to empty those containers. So most of our work is done on land. We do not really have a responsibility beyond the ports of entry themselves. Other agencies have that responsibility. So fundamentally, that's how we do our business.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Your lookout system is of great interest to me, because we've heard a lot recently about situations when there have been work refusals. Some of that may have been related to the fact that our service agents were not armed, and of course, the government has announced a change in the budget, and I commend the minister for pushing that through. I know that a lot of the agents who happen to live in my riding are very happy about that.

There is this whole business of the lookout system and the fact that it has led to some work refusals. Can you confirm that avoiding work refusals is not something that's considered when deciding who should be on that lookout list?

[Alain Jolicoeur]

There is absolutely no relationship at all. The work stoppage situation was related to employees feeling vulnerable because there was information that somebody dangerous might come in at a border point, and as you say, not being armed, our officers felt vulnerable. We've had situations like that, and we might have more of those situations, because we will not be able to have completely deployed armed operations for many years.

The question of the lookout and information that's available to our officers is a very complex one. Many pieces of information are analyzed by people who are behind the border, who are in some specific centres across the country--intelligence officers--and we also have a national risk assessment centre. And that's where the information is analyzed. It uses input from our sister agencies in the field of security. It uses input from the police on occasion, and very often, in fact every day, input from similar agencies in the U.S.

All that information is analyzed, and using that information and also the commercial information we get, and pulling that together, is how decisions are made about looking at somebody in particular, looking at a container in particular, or worrying, because of safety considerations, about one individual or another. But it has absolutely nothing to do with being worried about work stoppages.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

I'll wind up with one more question to you. I want to mix it up a little bit.

Is it true that persons described as armed and dangerous and wanted by the FBI as terrorists, for example, who have some Canadian connection are not in the lookout system?

[Alain Jolicoeur]

The difficulty in answering that is in speaking strictly of the lookout system. As I was saying, the information that's available to our people when we do screening or when we face one individual comes from different databases. Some of them, for example, are in the immigration database, where we would have flagged them, in the example you gave, as wanted. That information would be in there and would be available.

There are different subcategories. One of them, which I presume is the one that triggered your concern, is the subcategory of individuals we want, but who we also want you to know are particularly dangerous. So if we have on our lists, in our system, one individual we are looking for, a match with that individual will or will not be made depending on the situation, whether it's a dangerous person or not.

[Gord Brown, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville, ON]

Thank you.

I want to mix it up just a little bit. I want to ask a question of Commissioner Coulter. It has to do with the number of non-citizens who are in federal custody or on conditional release and how much it's costing us to keep them in there.