Public Safety committee  I do. As I said in my presentation, I believe that training, screening, and licensing of owners are the cornerstones of it.

Public Safety committee  I want to take you back to the first part of your dissertation. You talked about the traffic in firearms and firearms being smuggled. The firearms that are being smuggled into Canada from the United States are not long guns, rifles, and shotguns, but handguns. The gangster on t

Public Safety committee  Knives are a far more predominant as weapons than rifles, shotguns, and handguns.

Public Safety committee  Mostly we encounter knives--

Public Safety committee  --because they are secreted on the person, and often when they are found, they are found in various places like.... For some people we've transported to our detention centre, when they get searched really closely or skin-searched in our detention area, we end up finding weapons o

Public Safety committee  Oh, by far.

Public Safety committee  We don't do that on street checks. When we're doing a street check of an individual, that's not something that my people do: we query CPIC. Through CPIC, running somebody's licence plate will automatically generate a CPIC query on the individual. That will bring up whether he has

Public Safety committee  Absolutely.

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  I have one question for Mr. Leef.

Public Safety committee  When you say “accessing a registry”, what are you asking?

Public Safety committee  Well, they don't. The point that I've tried to make--and I speak for my jurisdiction--is that we conduct checks on CPIC and on the individual just in running the plate. That may not be the individual in the vehicle; that's just to whom it is registered. Those queries come back, a

Public Safety committee  When they qualified me, the courts gave me very broad latitude. In addition to the operation and classification of firearms, I also provide the crown with opinions on aspects of the law pertinent to a particular case at hand.

Public Safety committee  That's true. I've not been qualified by the court with it. That comes from 25 years of being on the street as a front-line police officer and as a person who worked in major crimes for a period of time.

Public Safety committee  The registry is a police-access database. To the best of my knowledge, firefighters do not have access to it, paramedics do not have access to it, social workers do not have direct access to it. From my experience and my position when I was in professional standards, to divulge