Public Accounts committee  If you talk to the police chiefs, I don't think they would agree with that, because on a domestic, as an example, if the--

Public Accounts committee  As an example, we have--

Public Accounts committee  The officers don't, but the system is checked 5,000 times a day.

Public Accounts committee  The number of times the system is accessed is growing on a daily basis. The exact number as of the second quarter of 2006 is 6,699.

Public Accounts committee  It's accessed for the benefit of police officers.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much for that question. As a matter of fact, this one came up when I accompanied Minister Day at a meeting of the Treasury Board. The thing about information in the police environment.... What we're trying to do is be as efficient as possible with information and avoid duplication.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. In the operational procedures in those places where there's not an automatic feed into the registry in a com centre, if a com centre operator receives a call for a check on a person for certain reasons, when they launch that query, they will go into the registry as well.

Public Accounts committee  I don't follow.

Public Accounts committee  They are in the criteria, there are other criteria that are used, and I think it is beneficial; however, no system is perfect, and we're constantly monitoring for improvements.

Public Accounts committee  First off, I'd like to thank you for making the linkage the Auditor General was looking for. I don't know. I would have to assume they've gone to Statistics Canada. If I heard the Auditor General right, she didn't say the data wasn't there; she said the linkages weren't being made.

Public Accounts committee  We will license individuals—that process involves security checking, education—and we will register firearms as well.

Public Accounts committee  First off, it allows us to integrate with the infrastructure inside the RCMP. We are able to benefit from the fact that the RCMP already has a human resource component and a financial administration group, so the duplication on the administrative side is eliminated right away. Because the Commissioner of the RCMP is at the deputy minister level, we don't need to replace Commissioner Baker, so there are some inherent savings on the management team.

Public Accounts committee  Programmers.... One of the things we are engaging in is a knowledge transfer from consultants over to employees of the government. As we complete that knowledge transfer, we are terminating the consultants, and it will eventually result in the termination of the contract with one of the vendors, EDS.

Public Accounts committee  I think some of the information is already there, and a lot of good work has already been done. The introduction of new analytical tools that allow us to analyze will help in that regard. But just to give a couple of statistics, right now there have been 17,861 firearms licences revoked.

Public Accounts committee  We have implemented analytical tools that will now allow us to go into the database and do certain checks. Certain makes of firearms have a sequence of numbers that will allow us to predict whether the validity of the serial number is right or wrong. This program came over to the RCMP on May 17, and the address issue is one example of how some of the data in the database has been corrected.