Justice committee  What I can tell you is we had about 40 offenders with at least one prior conviction in this graph for the four-year minimum firearms offence.

Justice committee  We had about 40 offenders who've had at least one prior conviction for a four-year minimum firearms offence.

Justice committee  Absolutely.

Justice committee  What we have done and provided to you is...we have plotted the rifle-shotgun homicide rate and so forth.

Justice committee  I'll refer you to slide 10 as well. What we know from our data is that the elapsed time from first to last court appearances for these cases of firearm offences, most serious in the four-year minimum mandatory.... We have seen an increase in the average number of days from firs

Justice committee  In terms of the number of cases that were heard in adult criminal court, it was less than 1% of the entire caseload for the jurisdictions we presented. And that complete caseload for 2003-04 was about 400,000.

Justice committee  In terms of jurisdictions, there's Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the Yukon. They're indicated on your slides in terms of the input level.

Justice committee  It's far less than 1% of 400,000.

Justice committee  We don't have any data in our courts program that speaks to any of the processes around plea negotiations and so forth. What we do have in our data is...we know there were fewer guilty pleas for firearms cases over the course of this time period.

Justice committee  If you take a look at slide 9 in your package, you'll see that since the implementation of the legislation in 1996, the proportion of those firearms cases that have been convicted has been falling. It was 47% in 1996-97. It was down to 36% in 2003-04.

Justice committee  We haven't examined the data at that level.

Justice committee  Yes, there are countries that we have not included on this particular list. We were only trying to give some particular reference points. But we've put out a publication with a more complete list of countries, and we can certainly provide you with a reference to that. In fact,

Justice committee  I can ask John to speak to you about the way in which we collect information in terms of gang-related homicides, and so forth. He can also speak to you in regard to the details of the way in which we collect data. Through our uniform crime report statistics, we are collecting p

Justice committee  I'm not sure if I should respond. On slides 5 and 6 you can see some of the trends in the data. Now, the purpose for plotting some of the legislation in slide 6 is not to imply a causal link, because there are many factors that can impact these kinds of trends. But what it does

Justice committee  What we can speak to is the fact that as you can see on slide 5, prior to 1985, shootings were more popular, in terms of methods to commit homicides. But after that point, stabbings and shootings each accounted for about a third of homicides annually. It fluctuates from year to y