It's the verification on transfer. Under the old firearms acquisition certificate program that was introduced in 1977 and strengthened under the Conservative government in 1991, people had to present their firearms acquisition certificate--theoretically--when they purchased firearms. In stores, a record was kept of the person who had purchased the guns, and the guns they had purchased, and those records were kept for a period of time.
The challenges were.... If you go back to the testimony of law enforcement officers at that point in time, the problem was that often the FACs had been issued five years previously and people who had undertaken criminal acts in the interim still had an FAC in hand.
Another problem with that process was it was very difficult. For example, I know that in northern Ontario there were cases of people routinely selling firearms at garage sales. Theoretically, the seller should check to ensure that someone had a valid FAC, but as no record was actually kept of the firearm being transferred, there was no way to really hold the original owner responsible for that weapon, that firearm. In the United States, straw purchases and the diversion of legal guns to illegal sources are an ongoing problem. The same situation existed in Canada. Law enforcement also talked about the problems around guns being stolen and not being reported stolen.
One of the real challenges in this legislation is not just the elimination of the registration and the accountability measures, which police have said repeatedly, with few exceptions, are essential to doing their job and to public safety, but also the elimination of the requirement that a licence be verified when a gun is purchased. I could have a licence that I got in 1999 and I could be purchasing a gun a few years later. When I present my licence, there's an automatic check made to ensure that the licence is valid, that there are no prohibition orders against me, and that there are no outstanding concerns. With the new system, that will no longer be the case.
We know, from the testimony of people working in the firearms centre, that there have been a number of cases where the process of verification when firearms were sold actually has resulted in criminal charges being laid. For example, a very large smuggling operation out of Toronto was stopped because, during the course of processing the transaction, the licence was checked and red flags came up. It was stopped.
With this law, those provisions are going to be absent. People have said they support licensing. If you support licensing, this law undermines licensing in a very serious way.