Public Safety Committee on Feb. 1st, 2022

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Thank you very much for your question.

I would just reiterate what was discussed at the previous committee meeting.

There were over 30,000 firearms seized last year, in 2020. We received tracing requests for 2,094 and were able to successfully trace 1,472. Seventy-three per cent of those were deemed to be imported legally or manufactured in Canada, and 27%, as mentioned, were smuggled or possibly smuggled. Of that 1,472, 71% were long guns and, of these, 85% were domestically sourced, while 29% were handguns, and 58% of those handguns were identified as smuggled or possibly smuggled.

I don't have any further details with me. If you're asking about their being traced back to particular provinces, I would assume that the largest populations in Canada, by city, are where most of the handguns, for example, are seized. I would think that most of them would be traced back to those locations.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

I guess what I'm looking for with the 73% is, how did they get into the hands of people who are committing these offences? Are they in the hands of people who have acquired them legally, or are they stolen weapons, or have people bought them from a straw purchaser? Could you give us some indication if you have that kind of information?

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Yes. Obviously, the majority of them were long guns, rifles. For a lot of them, depending on the nature.... You have to go back to the source of the investigation. A lot of them could be legally purchased and acquired and used in a crime. Some of them could be straw purchases. Some of them could be lost or stolen firearms that were subsequently obtained and used in criminal activity.

Unfortunately, I don't think we have those stats as part of the tracing centre, but I would invite Kellie Paquette, the director general of the firearms program, to answer if she has anything additional to add.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Please go ahead.

[Kellie Paquette, Director General, Canadian Firearms Program, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

No, I don't have anything to add except possibly that we're looking at the national picture, but if you start looking at each province, as you've indicated, you'll see different variations on how many of those are lost, stolen or smuggled. But we are seeing all of the above happening, as Mr. White indicated.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you. So—

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Mr. McKinnon, how do you want to use your last five seconds?

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

I'll give it back to the committee. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you, sir.

We'll move to Ms. Michaud for six minutes.

The floor is yours.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being here and for their comments on an issue that concerns us significantly. I specifically want to thank Mr. Weber for pointing out the problems, particularly within the Canada Border Services Agency.

Mr. Weber, you spoke about a lack of resources and an extra workload. You answered my colleague's question by saying that there should be about 1,000 additional officers.

Is a labour shortage preventing the agency from having enough officers, or is there not enough money to hire them?

[Mark Weber]

Thank you for your question.

Given the complexity of the issue, I'll respond in English, in order to be as clear as possible.

In terms of whether the CBSA has the financial ability to hire a thousand more officers, that would not be for me to answer. What I can say is that the system of hiring that's in place now is very different from what it was a few years ago, and it makes it much harder to get those recruits through the program.

They've doubled the length of the program, and recruits are no longer paid to go through the program. Recruits, rather than going back to the region they were hired from, are now sent anywhere across the country, to eventually then try to get deployed back to where it is they came from. When you present that to someone as a career path, for instance—“come work for me for free for 18 weeks and you'll have a job, but we're going to send you anywhere we want to across the country”—it's far less attractive than what it was previously.

It's all that extra time to get them through to be full border services officers who are able to be on the ground and working.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Thank you.

I've been following this issue closely recently. I saw an interview in which you proposed several solutions, including expanding the mandate of border officers. The fact that they can't move between ports of entry seems to be an issue. You think that this might give them the ability to seize more weapons.

In 2020, you sent a letter to Mr. Blair, who was Minister of Public Safety at the time, proposing a specialized border patrol. It reminded me a bit of the Bloc Québécois's suggestion to the government a few weeks ago to create a partnership or a special squad involving different organizations that could work together to seize more firearms.

Do you think that this proposal is similar? Also, have you received a response from Mr. Blair?

[Mark Weber]

Thank you for the question.

No, we've not received an answer. You've identified a lot of the concerns that we brought up as well.

If I could provide an example of port runners currently, if someone drives through the port, we have no ability to stop them. All we do is call the police and hopefully the police apprehend them somewhere down the road. Those are simple things that would only require simple legislative changes to allow us to effect change and stop that kind of smuggling from happening.

With regard to patrolling between our ports of entry, our understanding really is that the interdiction to patrolling between the POEs is based on a 1932 order in council, and that it would only take really minor amendments to the existing legislation to make it possible for us to do that.

The point we're trying to bring across is that the men and women who do this work all day, every day are the experts because all they do is try to find smuggling. They know how it's done. They've seen it hidden in any manner you can imagine, but that's simply not being used between ports. We think that's a real waste of resources in a way.

[Kristina Michaud, Bloc, Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

It seems quite obvious.

You were talking about maritime and rail infrastructure that's either insufficient and outdated or completely non‑existent.

Do you feel that you have the government's support to carry out these patrols or to perform more work? Or do you feel that the government doesn't really know that, if it were to devote more resources to the rail and maritime component, this could improve the situation?

[Mark Weber]

I can't speak for them. I'm hoping my presence here will help with that awareness.

We have significant gaps, I would say, in rail likely more than anywhere else. Currently, we don't really have rail examination capabilities at first port of arrival in Canada. Trains that, for instance, used to be looked at in Fort Frances, Ontario, when coming into Canada, now are being looked at 400 kilometres away in Winnipeg. This means that the train enters Canada and then travels over 400 kilometres, unfenced and unsecured, to get to somewhere in Winnipeg where we don't really have the facilities to do a full search and we usually don't do the search anyway.

Many locations are not conducting any kind of cargo screening of rail. Most locations don't even do complete crew reporting. In Fort Frances right now, there's over a million dollars in AMPS—we call them AMPS, administrative monetary penalties—sitting on a manager's desk that are not being applied. We find that the latitude given to rail carriers is far and above anything that's given to any other kind of industry, such as trucking or air. The CBSA has not forced rail carriers to provide rail inspection facilities at the first point of arrival. This is despite their legal ability to do so under section 6 of the Customs Act. That's really the same act that enforces private bridge operators to build CBSA offices if they want to operate a crossing. The CBSA enforces it there, but with rail it doesn't seem that anything is being enforced right now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Weber, and Ms. Michaud.

I'd like now to turn to Mr. MacGregor for his six minutes.

The floor is yours, sir.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to our witnesses for aiding our committee in this important study on firearms and their trafficking.

I'd like to start with the RCMP, following Ms. Dancho's line of questioning on the Canadian National Firearms Tracing Centre. It does exist to process requests that can assist national and international law enforcement agencies in their investigations. There has been some discussion about the resources the tracing centre has.

Mr. White, seeing that you're here in a virtual room with policy-makers, I'm wondering if there is anything else required from a regulatory or legislative standpoint to strengthen the tracing centre and maybe to bring the subject a little more strongly under a federal wheelhouse, if you will.

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Thank you very much for your question. It is a very important issue, and we are working towards that. We've engaged with the firearms subcommittee of the CACP to start having those discussions. We're getting great support from them hopefully to initiate across the country, with police services, education and awareness, the importance of tracing firearms, to really try to significantly increase the number of firearms that are coming in for tracing, especially all of the firearms that are seized or.... You know, even if these are not moving forward for prosecution and they may still have some valuable intelligence with regard to criminal activity, even getting all of those firearms in for tracing as well would be very beneficial.

I'll use this example, because we have one of our experts here today from the labs, which is that the same thing goes for firearms cartridge casings. You may have a shooting in a particular city or location, anywhere in the country, with no victims or suspects identified. Police do recover cartridges from that shooting and send those in so that we can do the same thing and try to examine, assess and possibly trace those cartridges to other shootings across the country.

Think of the intelligence if you have a gang shooting in Toronto. You have a cartridge from that shooting, but you don't have the firearm. You upload that into our ballistics system, through the forensic laboratory systems. You get another shooting a month later out in B.C. You get another cartridge casing, but you have no firearms. You upload that. You get a match between those cartridges. That starts to build really, really good intelligence. If a gang shooting in Toronto and a gang shooting in B.C. have the same firearms, obviously you now have linkages between those two provinces.

So it's about more tracing of the firearms that are seized and more tracing of the assessments and analysis of the cartridges seized from shooting scenes as well.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you for that information.

On the subject of cartridges and ammunition in general, we've been talking a lot about firearms. I've seen in the news lately that some people have become quite innovative and are starting to 3-D print firearms components to put them together. A firearm is a relatively simple device to put together. You need to devise something that can strike a cartridge to fire a bullet.

Can you tell the committee a little bit more about the smuggling of ammunition and what your efforts have been like in that regard specifically?

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Yes, we have had seizures of ammunition. I think in my opening comments I referred to a seizure of ammunition.

I'll pass this to Deputy Commissioner Mike Duheme and Assistant Commissioner Michel Arcand. Perhaps they can comment on some of the seizures they are doing from federal policing at the border with the border integrity teams, if they are seizing amounts of ammunition.

[Deputy Commissioner Michael Duheme, Deputy Commissioner, Federal Policing, Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

Thank you, Steve.

Sir, just to come back to some of the questions, detecting the source of illegal firearms is difficult, given their clandestine nature. We don't seize everything that's coming in-between the ports of entry.

When we're talking about firearms, I'd like to widen that to other pieces that are attached to the firearms, like an extended magazine, which is illegal in Canada. We've also been seeing far more imports of silencers that originate from China that people are ordering, and that are also prohibited.

To your question with regard to the 3-D printer, owning a 3-D printer is not illegal, to my knowledge, but in searches—in Quebec, for sure—we have come across people who with the 3-D printer have printed the bottom part of the handgun. It is a concern. There's no legislation around 3-D printers, which could have many uses, but we are seeing an increase in the number of silencers and in the fabricated pieces of weapons by 3-D printers.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you so much.

Do you have anything else to add with regard to the ammunition piece? I have about 20 seconds left.

[D/Commr Michael Duheme]

The only thing I can add, sir, within 20 seconds, is that we've done several searches over the past year where we've seized a considerable amount of ammo stored by certain individuals. Again, you buy a box of ammo here, a box of ammo there, and eventually it starts building up. That's also difficult, I think, to control.

[Alistair MacGregor, NDP, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Thank you both very much for being so attentive to our time.

That's the end of the first round of questions. We'll move right away into the second round. It will be either five minutes or two and a half minutes, depending on the party.

Mr. Van Popta, you have five minutes. The floor is yours, sir.