Public Safety committee  Businesses and.... Most of them are verifiers, and they do use the Criminal Code to identify the classification of firearms. Where the problem comes in is that there are varying degrees of regulations that have now been put in place that the businesses may not be aware of. When they deem a firearm to be non-restricted because of the barrel length, they don't recognize that there's another order in council or there's another regulation.

Public Safety committee  I don't have those stats.

Public Safety committee  No, I don't have that data.

Public Safety committee  I would add that they can retain what they have, but going forward, the manufacturers would no longer be able to manufacture those airsoft guns that resemble real firearms. They would have to be modified in some way going forward, either in colour.... This is the consultation that is happening right now with industry.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for that question. We're actually progressing quite well. It's an end-to-end process, and I have to stress that point, because it's not only the training but the process of how they deal with these files. Right now we're reviewing the training to ensure that it has the correct information in there from a police perspective—that's the UCR coding—so that they understand that timeliness is very important, and then that would go directly to a CFO as well, so that when it's identified to them, they know that they can action as quickly as possible.

Public Safety committee  It's actually the RCMP online system, but we're also going to use that tool to educate as well.

Public Safety committee  This is actually part of that process. When the police of jurisdiction open a file, the file has to be scored. That scoring will automatically send a flag to a chief firearms officer if a firearm is involved or if it's a file that we want to be aware of. The timeliness of that scoring is very important.

Public Safety committee  Currently, restricted and prohibited firearms do require that validation of a licence. Through Bill C-71, as you've identified, for non-restricted firearms, it would be a requirement to have a valid licence and the registrar would validate that.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  It's a licence verification.

Public Safety committee  Sorry?

Public Safety committee  Unfortunately, with regard to tracing to this level, we've only been collecting this information for a few years now. It does vary from year to year.

Public Safety committee  We saw 60%, but we haven't seen a higher number than the 73%. Again, it's based on a very small subset. These figures vary significantly by type of firearm, by region and by year. So this is a national picture. For example, while 85% of the traced long guns were domestically sourced from a national perspective, the handgun figure for Ontario shows 79% of traced handguns were foreign sourced.

Public Safety committee  I do believe this number is very high.

Public Safety committee  It depends on where you're looking at the statistics, yes, but they are much smaller, so they're easier to smuggle.