Public Safety committee  Again, I don't know exactly what the number is, but it is quite high. We're working hard to turn that into an electronic format, similar to what we do with real-time identification processes. In the future we'll be able to turn that around in minutes, if not days.

Public Safety committee  There is that potential. There will be some cases where records aren't in the system and won't be called up when a police officer queries them.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We do have a backlog in criminal records. Everybody who is either convicted of a criminal offence or charged with a dual procedure or an indictable offence is required to be fingerprinted. In most cases those fingerprints are submitted manually. We are currently working on a technology that will allow us to do that electronically and speed up the process.

Public Safety committee  I can tell you that there is a significant number of records that are not electronically scanned right now that contribute to the backlog. I do not have an exact figure of how many records that would be. I would say it's in the thousands.