Thank you. I appreciate being here. It's pretty cool to be a Canadian and to be part of how democracy functions. I think that's a pretty wonderful opportunity in my life, so thanks for letting me be here today.
I want to talk a little bit about the situation that I and my fellow police officers in my community find ourselves in. Abbotsford is a city of 135,000 people, with 210 police officers. We're 70 kilometres east of Vancouver. We're the first community that's not really a suburb of Vancouver, and we are situated in the middle of the Fraser Valley. Abbotsford is actually the biggest geographical city in British Columbia in that it's 140 square miles, much of which is active farming land.
In terms of this issue, in 2008 there were 58 murders in the Fraser Valley and the Lower Mainland, and in 2009 there were 56. In both of those years, we were in the midst of active gang wars. Abbotsford has found itself actually at the very centre of those gang wars. What happened, I suppose—and I'm still trying to figure this out—is that Vancouver successfully pushed some of its grow ops out into the valley, where the farmlands have better places for hiding huge grow ops in the outbuildings, and we ended up with hundreds of them. Young men grew up in this industry and made a lot of money in Abbotsford, and the gangs flourished. I joined the Abbotsford Police Department as its chief two years ago and I'm still trying to understand how this farming community ended up being the focal point that it is.
However, in 2008 and again in 2009, as soon as it gets declared by Statistics Canada, Abbotsford was and is the murder capital of Canada. We had 11 murders last year in a small community of 135,000 people. Two of those aren't technically ours because they're 50 metres into a reserve that is actually policed by the RCMP, but they were two young boys from one of our high schools who were murdered, ages 18 and 17. They are our murders and they are part of the 11. Eight of those murders are gang- and drug-related murders.
So it's our number one issue. I guess that's kind of a “duh”, but it's a thing that we are facing. We have just created a gang squad. I spend lots of my time in the schools talking to young people. We are doing all kinds of preventive things, but we are in trouble. I've just finished a count. We have 130 gang members living in or working their trade in the Abbotsford area. We have put them on a list to go after.
One of the things that happened is that the Bacon brothers grew up in and live in Abbotsford. You may have heard their names. They were the heads of the Red Scorpion gang, which became the gang that the other gangs wanted to kill, so a lot of the violence ended up being on our turf, even though it was a larger battle.
About 90% of the guns used in shootings are either handguns or assault rifles, and they're brought illegally across the border from Washington. Abbotsford is one of those places that has a long unprotected border. There is lots of backpacking through the mountains, if you will, and across what we call “zero avenue”. Cocaine and marijuana and handguns are the commodities that people trudge across with. Our problem is primarily in relation to those kinds of weapons, and I want to bring that thought to this committee around what it is that we're really facing, at least in our part of Canada.
This is a dynamic problem that's a growing problem. It's not a static situation, and I believe that what's going on with guns in Canada is a reason this gang war has been so very violent.
I grew up in policing, and my wife never worried about me as a police officer. My young son is a police officer in Vancouver, and my wife asks me almost every other week if our son is safe. I don't have a great answer to that question anymore, because he's encountering far more handguns than I ever did.
What can be done? With the greatest of respect, I understand the focus around the long-gun issue and I will talk about that in a moment, but I believe we need to actually step back and develop a comprehensive program around all gun control issues in Canada. I think it's time to have a look at what's going on. I think we're in trouble. It has a lot to do with our American neighbours. It has a lot to do with the drug issues that we struggle with.
I take the view that we have taken the wrong approach to handguns. I have a handgun that I wear. It is only designed for one purpose, and that is to shoot another human being. I do not believe any person should have that gun who is not essentially required to use such a device in their profession to protect the public. I believe it should be prohibited in all cases. On this target-shooting idea by private holders of handguns, I think Canada has taken the wrong approach.
Assault rifles should never be in the hands of any private person. There's just no reason for that. If we want to create special systems for them to be in gun ranges, that's fine, but I don't think they should be in any private person's home, ever.
I believe we should be working on simplified powers for police in order to be more effective in our search and seizure, both in the warrant powers that exist under the Criminal Code, which are overly complex in comparison to any other developed nation—our warrant powers are unbelievably complex in all areas—and in warrantless search powers as well.
I am concerned about domestic violence. It is a huge issue. It's one of the six priorities we have in our community. It's something we are focused on. It's a real problem. One of the things we should be doing about that is doing a much better job around who holds a possession and acquisition licence. We should be doing way more.
I have a friend who wanted a possession and acquisition licence, or PAL. I got a phone call as part of his background screening and was asked horrible, closed-ended questions by this clerk on the other end of the phone about whether this person should or should not have a PAL. If one of my interrogators ever asked those kinds of questions, I would want that person fired. They simply said, “Is this person prone to violence? Will he kill people if he has a gun?” Of course, I knew the right answers that I was supposed to give in order for my friend to get a licence.
That's not how you conduct an interview. That's not how you find out what the issues are with somebody.
Let's invest more money and expertise into who has one of these PALs. Let's do way more open-source checking on the Internet with social networks. Let's put more money into that part of the system, please.
It was interesting to hear the detective from Toronto talk about the great work done in that city around gun control and investigatively going out after guns. It was after a young girl was murdered that this great investment started to take place in Toronto. I would love to have that money invested in British Columbia and the rest of Canada without a horrific incident like that to spark it. I see a need for that.
We are being inundated with high-quality American firearms and we're not being able to stop it. It's difficult. I know we have an open border, but we need to do something about that and go after it from an investigative perspective.
We have 909,000 registered guns in British Columbia, and 76,000 of those are possessed by people with lapsed PALs. We aren't going after the system that's designed to look after this. Why is that?
I believe the registry exists for the right reasons, but there are two significant issues with the registry.
One, it's my firm belief that the registry is horrifically inaccurate. I talk to my investigators and I talk to my gun expert, and in story after story, whenever they've tried to use it, the information in it is wrong. I believe the reason we haven't gone after these people with lapsed PALs in my province is that when we went out to do it, we found that the information about even which ones were lapsed and what guns existed at that residence was wrong. That's a problem. I have no confidence in the current system.
I also believe, in talking to my own experts—and this is one of those tough ones, like how many grow ops exist in Abbotsford right now—there are well over a million long guns, easily, in Canada that aren't registered in any way, shape, or form. The system has not been successful.
So I find my investigators actually don't rely on the registry. They are obligated to check the system when there's a domestic violence situation, because we should use everything we have, but I think a flawed system is worse than any system. If we can't fix it, with the greatest of respect, the long-gun registry should be scrapped.
The other thing I'll say--and I wouldn't have necessarily known this before it happened--is that the use of criminal law to ensure compliance has utterly failed. We now have literally hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are committing a criminal offence because they either have not registered the weapon or have lapsed PALs. That's a horrific way to undermine a very important system in our country, so if we're going to continue, we need to change that system as well.
My real point is this: on the issue of the long-gun registry as one part of the whole system of dealing with this gun control problem, which we really do have, we ought to retain this registry only if we can fix it. We've had it for a long time, but if we're not going to ensure that we have an accurate long-gun registry in this country, I don't believe it should be part of our arsenal to deal with this issue.
I would only rely on CPIC if I believed it worked and I would only rely on this registry if I believed it worked.
Thank you.