This is a figure that the proponents of defeating Ms. Heoppner's bill like to flout around, that 92% of front-line officers have access to the registry on a regular basis. But then when I asked him about that, he was very candid with me, and I appreciated that. He has some 41,000 members who belong to the Canadian Police Association. But when they did that survey.... In fact they didn't even do the survey; I understand the RCMP did the survey, but that's really not relevant. When the survey was done, only 408 members of the CPA responded to the question “Do you use the long-gun registry?” Now, that's less than 1%. So of the 408 who actually took the time to respond.... And remember, Mr. Chair, this is not some random survey, with people who are chosen at random and therefore are representative of the larger population. This is a survey that, as I understand, was distributed to every member of law enforcement who is a member of the CPA.
Only 408 bothered to respond to the survey, and of those, 92 said they had access to the long-gun registry. So that's well less than 1%. I can manipulate statistics as well as the opposition, so from that analysis I guess I'm free to conclude that over 99% of front-line police officers don't access the long-gun registry, because there is certainly no evidence in opposition to my supposition.
Mr. Momy was not one of the witnesses Mr. Holland put in his motion that would indicate there was sufficient testimony that the bill will dismantle a tool that promotes and enhances public security and the safety of Canadian police officers--much to the contrary, actually.
You will recall, Mr. Chair, that three weeks ago from this Thursday I gave Mr. Momy a couple of hypothetical situations. We keep hearing that the long-gun registry gets 11,000 hits a day. Again, statistics can be manipulated, and although that's probably true, Mr. Momy did tell me that 45% of those hits were automatically generated through CPIC inquiries.
You can't use that to support anything. That's a simple situation where a car has a burnt-out tail light and the police pull it over. They run the plates through CPIC, and that automatically generates a firearm registry search through CPIC. So it's not a specific case of an officer actually accessing the Canadian firearm registry. It's just an automatic computer-generated search.
Nonetheless, according to Charles Momy, the president of the Canadian Police Association, 55% of those 11,000 hits per day--or a big chunk of them--are as a result of police responding to domestic situations. I gave him a couple of hypotheticals. The cops show up at a house and do a search of the owner or a search or the address. If it comes up negative, that there are no registered weapons, do the police officers rely on that search? Do they go in unarmed, walking in backwards? Of course not. Police need to be vigilant. So any time you have a search that shows there are no registered weapons at that residence, you automatically assume it to be wrong. He told me that. You go in there expecting the worse. You go in there expecting that the occupants are going to be armed. You're prepared and ready for that. So a negative search is not reliable, don't rely on it.
Then I posed a second hypothetical to Mr. Momy. What if the registry search shows there is one registered weapon at the residence? Would you rely on it then? Then I carried my hypothetical to the next level. What if you go in, there's a domestic dispute, and the assailant--not to be sexist, but it's typically a man, at least statistically--had a firearm? So you neutralize that firearm and take it out of play. At that point, do you assume that you have a safe crime scene and there are no more registered weapons at that residence? Mr. Momy's response was, “Of course not. We expect there to be more.”
As many of the witnesses said--and I think Ms. Glover acknowledged that some of these witnesses have been declared experts in criminal trials--all the registry really does is count weapons. But I digress.
So the search shows that there is one firearm. They neutralize it. Do they stop? Do they think they have a safe crime scene? Of course not. They continue to be vigilant. They continue to stand on guard for thee. They continue to operate as if they have more weapons until the scene is neutralized, based on some other action than their reliance on a unreliable long-gun registry.
So we have two situations. One is positive and one is negative. They don't rely on either one of them. So it's not reliable. They don't rely on it and they can't rely on it.
It really bothers me when proponents of gutting or killing Bill C-391 say that somehow the long-gun registry promotes the safety of Canadian police officers, because it just ain't so, folks. It's quite the opposite, as my hypothecal situation has just outlined. You cannot rely on that registry.
When Bill Blair was here last week, I asked him about Mayerthorpe. As all the members of this committee will know, I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and Mayerthorpe is a city about two and a half hours northwest of my city. It was a tragic day in March 2005 when four of Canada's finest Mounties were gunned down by a man, Mr. Roszko, who had absolutely no respect for law, no respect for order, no respect for the police, and no respect for public safety.
But Mayerthorpe cannot in any way, shape, or form be used to support the proposition that the long-gun registry enhances the safety of front-line police officers. Quite the opposite. And let me tell you why, Mr. Chair. And this is all on the public record; I'm not making this stuff up. Roszko did not register his firearms. He had two weapons that he used when he was holed up in that Quonset hut on that March morning. One was a nine-millimetre Beretta, not registered; the other one was a Heckler & Koch assault rifle. It is a semi-automatic, so it's a restricted weapon. It also was not registered. And this is what Mr. Blair talked about.
He's really stretching it when he says the gun registry somehow helped in that investigation. It is true that there was a third weapon that wasn't fired that day in Mayerthorpe, and that was a shotgun registered to Shawn Hennessey's grandfather. Roszko pulled the nine-millimetre Beretta on Shawn Hennessey, and as a result, Hennessey lent him his grandfather's registered shotgun. And it is quite true that the gun, which was not fired, was recovered at the crime scene, and therefore led to this elaborate and expensive “Mr. Big” sting operation where Hennessey and his brother-in-law Dennis Cheeseman were ultimately convicted of being accessories to Roszko. And they are spending some pretty considerable periods of time in federal institutions as a result of their involvement in the Mayerthorpe massacre. They did nothing to enhance the public safety of the very brave police officers who were gunned down by a man who did not register his assault rifle and who did not register his nine-millimetre Beretta.
Some of the facts about Mayerthorpe are still in dispute, but locals will tell you that one of the four officers who went into that Quonset that morning was not armed. And none of them had flak jackets; none of them had protective equipment. It is sad, but the reality is that the four RCMP officers were lightly armoured--