Public Safety Committee on Feb. 1st, 2022

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses for being with us here today to help us through this very important study, helping Parliamentarians develop good policies to keep Canadians safer.

I'm going to start with Mr. Webber.

Thank you for giving your evidence. If you were given the opportunity to reallocate the resources that you already have, what steps would you propose in the immediate future to come up with some solutions that would be helpful for you and your members to do your work more effectively? I'm thinking particularly of land border crossings.

[Mark Weber]

Thank you for the question. Definitely more people would be needed at land border crossings. As I said, we have borders that couldn't operate without overtime. For rail operations, where we really have no ability to do any kind of searches at our borders, I think the infrastructure would have to be built, along with putting people there to actually work it.

Another solution would be looking at having us use the facilities that are available on the U.S. side to do that work, if they would allow us to do that. Those would be the two main places that I would start. I would say marine as well could probably use a boost staff-wise. There would have to be some money spent on upgrading the telephone reporting systems, which are outdated. A lot of them are in areas where, even if someone were to report and we wanted to see them, they are hours away from anywhere we could get to, to the point where we're not actually going to go out and see them, which begs the question, why do you have a telephone reporting centre there?

I think that kind of infrastructure work would have to be done along with adding personnel.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

I was quite disturbed by your comments about inability to inspect trains as they come across land border crossings. I think you were saying that zero per cent, basically nothing, was being done there—that there are no investigations done at all.

What's the solution there? Are we looking for better technology for automated inspections or is it just more human resources?

[Mark Weber]

It's more human resources and building the infrastructure to allow us to do those searches.

Currently, at most crossings in Canada, there is nothing there for us to do the search. We have to take the car off. It's more than just opening the door and having a peek inside. It's quite a bit of work to get that done. It's unfortunate that this has not happened before now, but it's something that our members have been highlighting to the CBSA for many years. We have people who target rail, and they know that their targets will never get anywhere because the car is not actually going to be opened and looked into. It's all about getting data.

If you look at gathering data, it's the looking. Gathering data has been crucial throughout the two years of COVID. The gathering of information has been essential in getting a clear picture of the extent of the pandemic. Testing less would only have resulted in being ignorant of the full extent of the problem, perhaps wrongly assuming that it was not as widespread.

I look at testing like searching; if we're not looking, we're not going to find things. If you don't look, you don't really know what the extent of the problem is. We need people to actually be looking and searching.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you for that.

You had made reference to CBSA officers' inability to inspect between border crossings and that you rely on the RCMP for that. Perhaps you could expand on that a little bit. Is this something your members would like to take on if they had the resources available? That of course leads to another human resource challenge: You don't have the people to do that.

[Mark Weber]

Absolutely, that is a role that we would like to participate in. We're not saying that we want to participate in it to the exclusion of the RCMP, but to participate more than we are doing now. Our involvement is very little, I could say, in marine mode. Even when we're invited out with the RCMP, the CBSA's response is, "No, you're not going." The attitude seems to be very much that you are to sit at your port of entry, and anything outside of there is not your problem. Phone someone.

I don't think that's the way to run a border. We're the Canada Border Services Agency. I think morale-wise you can't imagine what it does to our members to see a car fly through and to be able to do absolutely nothing about it, but make a phone call. That's our border, and we protect it. I don't think that's the right way to go about it.

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you.

[Mark Weber]

You have 10 seconds. How would you like to use them, Mr. Van Popta?

[Tako Van Popta, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

I will thank the witnesses once again for coming here and sharing their wisdom with us.

Thank you so much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Jim Carr]

Yes. I would like to thank them too.

Now we go to Ms. Damoff, who has five minutes.

The floor is yours.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thanks so much, Chair.

Thanks to all the witnesses for your testimony, for your hard work and for the very practical suggestions you've already given to our committee.

I have a couple of fairly straightforward questions for the RCMP. The first is how many handguns are currently in circulation and how many individuals have a licence to own a handgun? I know those two numbers will be very different.

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Approximately 2.2 million individuals currently hold a valid firearms licence and approximately 4,100 businesses are licensed in Canada.

In terms of the number of firearms—

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

No. I want to know about handguns.

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Yes. I'll add that in.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Okay.

[D/Commr Stephen White]

In terms of overall firearms, we have a total of approximately 1.1 million registered firearms, and 96.7% of them are handguns. Basically, approximately one million handguns are registered in Canada. I think there are approximately 275,000 owners of those one million registered handguns, but I will defer to Ms. Paquette to confirm that.

[Kellie Paquette]

You are correct: it's 276,000.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

That's great. Thank you.

I worked on Bill C-71 at committee. Prior to Christmas, we passed a motion to refer the regulations back to have them come into force. One of the things was that it would require someone selling firearms to check that the person purchasing a firearm from them had a licence. I was quite shocked that we weren't already doing that.

Can you confirm that these regulations we've put in place require someone selling those firearms to check that a purchaser of a firearm has a valid licence?

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Yes, that is correct. The seller of one of those firearms must verify that the person they are selling to has a valid firearms licence.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Okay. The regulations as they're worded state they must check.

[D/Commr Stephen White]

Yes. I'll just ask Kellie to confirm that.

[Kellie Paquette]

Yes. That is correct.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

What happens if the seller doesn't check and is selling firearms?

[Kellie Paquette]

It's an illegal sale.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Okay.

One of the things that I was quite concerned about when I met with the Danforth families was that the firearm used in that shooting, while it was illegal, had started out as a legal firearm in Saskatchewan. They told me that the magazine purchased for that firearm was legally purchased in the Durham region.

Do you require a licence to buy a magazine for a firearm?