Public Safety Committee on Feb. 15th, 2011

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

That is correct.

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

Thank you.

To your knowledge, is there any law in Canada that forces a police force to send you fingerprint forms of people who are charged with offences?

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

No, there isn't. As I mentioned previously, the only legislation that requires submission is for young offenders.

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

So if there is some inaccuracy or some error rate vis-à-vis the reports of convictions for summary convictions or dual offences convictions or the amount of information you have in your data system, any discrepancy between the two is because the police force in certain jurisdictions didn't advise you of it.

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

That's correct.

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

Thank you.

With regard to the length of time, I think it was mentioned that it can take up to four months or 120 days for manual fingerprints. Would I be correct in saying that this is the outside, that it's out of the norm; in other words, that it's not the average, but would be the exception?

Do you have some data that you could provide to us with your experience currently?

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

It would be important to differentiate a couple of things here.

First of all, if the person doesn't have any fingerprint holdings at all, then if we're doing the electronic submission it's going to be very fast, as we discussed.

I don't know that we can give you an average of what it would be right now, because under the vulnerable sector we have all these fingerprints that were sent in manually, and as I mentioned, it's taking nine weeks at the current time before we can manage them.

But again, in the 85% to 90% of the cases in which people don't have a record, the process is actually very quick. In fact, in most cases the police wouldn't even submit fingerprints, because they can do name-based checks. If they do have to submit fingerprints, if they do it electronically it would be very quick. The situation in which it will take longer and in which this 120 days normally comes is when the person has a record; then it means that we actually have to do some checking. We have to go back sometimes to the originating police agency, because we may have not received the disposition; we may have to go to the courts; we'll also have to check what is in our holdings that are not up to date yet.

That process will take longer, and it's fair to say that it could easily take up to 120 days. But this is, again, for a relatively small percentage of the population and concerns people for whom we have fingerprint holdings.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Henschel.

We now move to Mr. Kania, please.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I believe we can all agree that this is a non-partisan issue. We want you to be successful in terms of these records and making sure that Canadians are protected. So I'm just going to ask you some practical questions.

First, in your presentation on page one you indicate that the national repository of criminal records “was a paper-based manual system”, and you say:

As a result, a major crown project, called Real Time Identification or RTID, was initiated to automate the criminal record system. While the development of RTID continues, significant components of the criminal record system still require manual processing, which is time-consuming.

What is your action plan in terms of correcting that, and how long will it take?

A more practical question is this. You are here today before the public safety committee, and in a lot of the areas that I'm going to touch on in five minutes I want to know from you how we can help you. What do you need? Do you need more people? Do you need more technology? Do you need more money? It's our job to facilitate this, so tell me what you need, after analyzing the question.

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

RTID is in effect the automation of the criminal records system. It is a major crown project. I think it's fair to say that it's significantly more complex than anyone could have imagined when it first started, as is often the case with major undertakings such as this. As we have gone along, we have automated certain components, but that development is ongoing. As in any major project, we make adjustments as we go along, as we learn certain things. We learn that some things are maybe more complicated or more difficult to implement.

So this is an ongoing process. I'm not able at this point to give you an exact end date, to say that on such and such a date it will be completed. It's something we're actively working on, and it's a priority for us.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

As part of the government's focus on law-and-order legislation, let's say that the Minister of Public Safety decided that it was a priority to make sure these records were brought up to date and made reliable as soon as possible.

What would you say to the Minister of Public Safety, if he or she said we want this done as soon as possible, in a reliable manner, and we're willing to devote resources to this, so how many people do you need and how fast can you get this done? What are you going to say?

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

I'm going to say that it's significantly more complicated than that. While it's easy to say that more resources will solve the problem, it's really not that simple. We're going from several or many legacy systems to an automated system. There are all sorts of issues, such as how much equipment is available to even do the conversion. There are issues such as, for example, staffing issues—can you hire people and keep them in those jobs?—because a lot of the manual work is done at the entry level in government. One of the challenges we face is that folks can get a permanent job and immediately look for another job in government, because these are manual jobs that are at the very bottom scale of government jobs.

So there are all sorts of different challenges. I wouldn't be able to say just “give me more money” or “give me more of this”; it's a combination of things. Internally we have reallocated resources and are constantly looking at strategies to improve the allocation, but it's not a problem we're going to solve overnight. It's one we pay attention to, one we make every effort to improve, but it's very closely linked also to the automation of the whole system.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

I'll ask the same question about the national repository of criminal records, because there's a significant backlog there as well. You say: “Although the RCMP has allocated as many resources as we can to this important function, the backlog continues to present significant challenges.”

When I read “has allocated as many resources as we can”, the words suggest to me that perhaps it would be helpful to have more resources, and I will ask you the same questions, in my limited time. How can we help you accomplish this goal? If you were speaking to the Minister of Public Safety, who had decided to focus on this system as one of the priorities of the government, what would you suggest, and how could we help you accomplish this faster?

You may not be able to answer now. Maybe you could submit something to the committee as a proposal after considering it and speaking with people as well.

[A/Commr Peter Henschel]

Automation is the big piece. You can't drive that any faster than you can drive that. Yes, we could use more money, but we also realize that financially this is a very difficult situation for everybody, and there are other priorities. What those priorities are is a government decision.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Henschel.

We'll now move to Mr. McColeman, please.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for being here.

First of all, I want to thank my colleague across the table, Mr. Kania, for recognizing that we are the government of improving public safety for Canadians and that we are moving ahead on numerous pieces of the legislation to increase public safety.

[Andrew Kania, Liberal, Brampton West, ON]

Can I have a point of order, Chair, since I never said that?

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Second, I was thinking about this in terms of the NEXUS process. NEXUS, I know, is using similar technologies, and it's being shared between U.S. border authorities and Canadian border authorities for issuing NEXUS cards to people and doing screening prior to issuing a card. Is any of that technology applied to what you're using? Is it the same technology? Are you familiar with it?

[Guylaine Dansereau]

Some of it is similar, because they're respecting the same international standard, but it's not the same. The two systems are not connected.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Okay. I wouldn't expect they would be, but it seems to me--

[Guylaine Dansereau]

The technology for taking fingerprints?

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Yes.

[Guylaine Dansereau]

It's the same. The reliability or the accuracy is the same.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

Good. Excellent.

I know that's been well received by Canadian border security, and hopefully we can expand that system to increase public safety, making sure that as many people as possible enrol and get pre-screened to create efficiencies at our borders.

Are you aware of police services in the country working together to put this technology in place? It seems to me that some police services would have more resources than others would. When I sat on my local police services board, we had joint agreements and memorandums of understanding with another regional force in our community. We shared resources back and forth. Do you know if that's being worked on in any jurisdictions in Canada?

[C/Supt Charles Walker]

What you're describing is occurring. I can't give you specifics, but I personally have been involved in conversations and have been approached and asked about whether small groups of police services in a geographical area could perhaps jointly invest in RTID technology.