Mr. Speaker, in the House on February 20 I tried to get the Minister of Justice to address the injustice of having three and a half million citizens in an RCMP databank called FIP or Firearms Interest Police. All three and a half million are, without their knowledge or consent, in direct contravention of the Privacy Act of Canada, an act for which the minister herself is responsible.
Sources in the RCMP and the Sûreté du Québec confirm that there is a 50% error rate in the FIP databank. Sources in the Sûreté du Québec advise us that municipal and city police forces do not follow section 5 of the Firearms Act when loading personal information into the FIP.
The Sûreté du Québec has advised us that it took one investigator eight hours to clear the name of one improperly red flagged individual. Is this the culture of safety the minister envisioned with her billion dollar error riddled gun registration scheme?
The minister brags that potentially dangerous individuals have been blocked from buying guns or have had their firearms licences refused or revoked. How could she brag about a so-called success when the same thing could have been done 20 years ago with the FAC program? How could she call the FIP a success when it is based on information that is wrong 50% of the time?
The Minister of Justice says she is fully accountable and responsible. However she looks the other way when the personal information of three and a half million Canadians is loaded into an RCMP databank that contravenes all seven privacy rights guaranteed in the Privacy Act.
On February 16 the Privacy Commissioner of Canada wrote me a three page letter outlining his concerns about the RCMP's Firearms Interest Police database. Here are the key concerns Mr. Radwanski described in his letter.
First, the FIP database contains names of individuals that should not have been entered and even “contains the names of witnesses and victims”. Second, the police information and the FIP leads to investigations based on “unsubstantiated, hearsay and incorrect information”. Third, the police loaded incidents in the FIP not relevant to section 5 of the Firearms Act. Fourth, the police are conducting unnecessary investigations because the FIP file contains information on “cases where the charges have been dropped and the individuals have been acquitted”. Fifth, he said that there is no process in place to ensure that “improper or duplicate entries in the FIP files are removed or corrected”.
The last point that I would like to raise, and these are not exhaustive, is that the way the FIP database is set up makes it “extraordinarily difficult for individuals to exercise their access and correction rights”.
The government told Canadians that they have nothing to worry about if they have done nothing wrong. The privacy commissioner's letter proves that everyone has something to worry about, especially the three and a half million citizens in the RCMP's FIP file. When police are kept busy chasing down incorrect and unreliable information in this police database, it is possible for some criminals and truly violent individuals to escape detection.
My question is this: when will the minister implement the privacy commissioner's recommendations and fix this mess?