Gun Deaths in Canada

According to Statistics Canada,4 816 Canadians died from gun-related injuries in

2002 (i.e., 2.6 out of every 100,000 people), including suicides (80 per cent),

homicides (15 per cent) and accidents (four per cent). Although the total number of

gun-related deaths had

due to a sharp drop in suicides rather than a reduction in the number of homicides.6

Gun-related crime continued to be a serious social problem. The following list

denotes some notorious gun death tragedies in Canada:

Toronto Boxing Day shooting On December 26, 2005, a 15-year-old girl

who was out shopping with her family was shot and killed on a busy Toronto

street filled with holiday shoppers. The shooting stemmed from a dispute

among a group of 10 to 15 youths.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police On March 3, 2005, four Canadian RCMP

officers were shot and killed while investigating a marijuana grow operation in

Northern Alberta. The shooter committed suicide.

Taber tragedy On April 28, 1999, a 14-year-old boy opened fire with a .22-

calibre sawed-off rifle inside W.R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta. The

attacker had been a student at the school but had dropped out. One 17-year-old

student was killed, and another was wounded.

Concordia University shooting On August 24, 1992, Professor Valery

Fabrikant used three handguns to shoot and kill four other academics at

Concordia University. Fabrikant was angry because he had been denied tenure

on several occasions. Patrick Kenniff, Concordia Universitys rector, became

an outspoken proponent of gun control.

Montreal massacre On December 6, 1989, Marc Lepine entered a classroom

in the engineering school at the University of Montreals cole Polytechnique

carrying a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle. He separated the men and

women and then opened fire on the women. Within a few minutes, he had shot

28 students and teachers and killed 14 young women.

Canada has a long history of firearms control (see Exhibit 1). The current firearms

control legislation, Bill C-68, was passed in 1995. The Canadian Firearms Program

(CFP) was established by the Department of Justice in the same year.

Program Implementation to Date

The CFP was a multi-jurisdictional program that regulated the mandatory

registration of all firearms in Canada and set the licensing requirements for

firearms owners under the Firearms Act. The Act applied to any person (including

visitors to Canada) and any business that owned, wanted to obtain or use firearms,

or wanted to purchase ammunition. The purpose of the Act and the program was to

promote responsible ownership and to keep firearms out of the hands of those who

might misuse them in other words, to promote shared outcome of Safer homes,

safer streets in Canada.7 On April 11, 2003, responsibility and accountability for

the CFP was transferred from the Minister of Justice to the Solicitor General.

The CFP was implemented in three main phases:

Licensing phase: the Firearms Act called for the licensing of all firearms

owners as of January 1, 2001.

Registration phase: the Act set the deadline for the registration of all firearms

as of January 1, 2003.

Ongoing operations phase: focus shifted from licensing and registration to

solidifying management practices, risk management, client services and quality

assurance.

According to the Government of Canadas Firearms Centre website,8 as of

September 30, 2005, approximately two million individuals had received firearms

licenses, including:

1,230,000 Possession Only Licences (POLs)

748,000 Possession and Acquisition Licences (PALs)

5,000 Minors Licences.

This website also indicated that approximately 7.1 million firearms had been

registered in the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS), representing an

estimated compliance rate of 90 per cent for licensing and registration:

6,840,000 firearms were registered to individuals.

236,000 firearms were registered to businesses.

43,300 firearms were registered or recorded to public agencies and

museums.

Program opponents have challenged the compliance rate figure, arguing that it

accounted for law-abiding citizens only, and that active and would-be criminals

would never voluntarily comply.

Between December 1, 1998, and September 30, 2005, the chief firearms officer

(CFO) refused 6,119 applications and revoked an additional 9,846 licences.

Reasons for refusing or revoking an application were typically related to an

applicants history of violence, unsafe firearm use or storage, drug offenses,

providing false information, or mental illness.

Since the Canadian Firearms Registry was first launched on December 1, 1998,

police and other public safety officials have queried the online database a total of

4.6 million times. As of 2005, the system received approximately 5,000 queries per

day.9 By September 30, 2005, more than 5,450 affidavits had been provided by the

Canadian Firearms Registry to support court proceedings in firearms-related

crimes.

Since December 1, 1998, more than one million firearm transfers had been

completed (i.e. from one individual or business to another individual or business).

An additional one million firearms had been exported, destroyed or deactivated,

and removed from the system during this time period. Summary activity data from

December 1998 through December 2004 are provided in Exhibit 2.

Information Systems

Prior to the implementation of the CFP, a variety of national database systems had

been developed over time, primarily by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

(RCMP), Canadas national police force. These systems included, for example, the

Restricted Weapon Registration System, the Canadian Police Information Centre

System, and the Firearms Interest Police database.

The Restricted Weapon Registration System maintained data on prohibited

weapons, the only firearms that were subject to registration prior to December 1,

1998. It was a manual, non-shared registry maintained under the authority of the

RCMP. Information in this system dated back to the early 1930s.

The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) system was a centralized national

system, first developed in 1966, and accessible to police forces nationally. CPIC

was maintained by the RCMP and contained records related to criminal activity,

property and missing persons drawn from a variety of other systems. One

subsystem maintained in CPIC, for example, was the Firearms Interest Police

(FIP) database. This database was compiled by extracting data from local police

departments. All items were related to firearms incidents (such as name and age of

person involved) and were used to track individuals who might present a risk to

themselves or others.

The new system proposed to support the Canadian Firearms Program, introduced

on December 1, 1998, was called the Canadian Firearms Registration System

(CFRS). The CFRS was to replace the Restricted Weapon Registration System and

would be integrated with the various other police information systems and

databases, such as CPIC and FIP, to provide administrative and enforcement

support to all partners involved in firearms licensing and registration. As with the

other national systems, the information technology branch of the RCMP would

manage the new system.

In 2001, the Canadian Firearms Centre (CAFC) admitted that the three-year-old

system was not working very well. Its technology was expensive, inflexible, out-

of-date, and could not be modified at a reasonable cost to support future

operations.10 Tremendous political and public controversy ensued.

The Firearms Control Controversy

Although the CFP had been in place since 1995, recent controversy regarding

massive cost overruns had aggravated the publics concerns regarding not only its

implementation, but also its legitimacy.

Supporters continued to assert that the program promoted responsible gun use and

was essential for quelling the misuse of firearms. The registry provided a record of

who owned what kinds of firearms and where they were located at any given time,

making it much easier for police to track both legal and illegal firearms. This

improved public safety and, at the same time, respected lawful ownership and use

of firearms. According to criminologist Neil Boyd, In three separate forms of

statistical analysis exploratory, time-series and structural researchers have

found evidence to suggest that gun control has had an impact on homicides and

firearms homicides.11

Opponents responded that the program had done nothing to increase public safety.

To the contrary, the program had created a thriving black market in firearms

trading and smuggling. One member of Canadas Recreational Firearms

Community described it as the most needless, ineffective, costly, dangerous,

deceptive, error-ridden, wasteful, offensive, incompetent, undemocratic and odious

pieces of garbage legislation.12 It was argued that the program would not make

Canadians safer and that it was only one step on the way to the confiscation of all

guns in Canada. There were also concerns expressed regarding loss of privacy due

to the collection and use of personal information. For example, it was argued that

some of the personal history questions on the firearms application form13 needed

to be revised or eliminated because the program had not established a sufficient

need to collect such personal information.

Implementation Challenges

The program had experienced a number of severe implementation challenges.

The first challenge related to the deficiencies and subsequent changes to the

program delivery structure. For example, the program did not initially have a full-

time chief executive officer (CEO) to provide central leadership and co-ordination,

resulting in an unintended escalation of features and processes in order to meet the

interests of the different stakeholders. One informant to a Department of Justice

internal probe noted: There were too many actors involved Partnerships were

good, but they led to over-complexity.14 In response, a Commissioner of Firearms

was appointed as CEO.

A second challenge had to do with opposition to firearms control among many

existing firearms owners, including members of Canadas Recreational Firearms

Community.15 CAFC management and politicians had to spend a great deal of time

addressing these challenges and trying to convince Canadians of the importance of

the program. In addition, several of the provinces (such as British Columbia and

Alberta) chose to opt out of administering the Firearms Act, which increased

program delivery costs in these regions and may have hurt the perceived credibility

of the program nationally.

The third set of challenges was more technical in nature. Numerous CFRS system

failures were reported, and users complained about long processing wait times.16

Furthermore, firearms officers in the field did not typically have access to high-

speed Internet services and were forced to call personnel at their regional office to

access CFRS information. To make matters worse, quite a few jurisdictions did not

have electronic connections to their provincial court databases, which meant that

prohibition orders were not automatically captured and entered into the CFRS.

Instead, courts sent in hard copies of orders, which were (eventually) manually

entered into the CFRS.

Fourth, according to the CAFC, several issues were threatening effective

integration of the CFRS with the CPIC/FIP database (described earlier).17 First,

policing agencies were not following consistent data entry procedures e.g.,

some agencies entered full names, while others entered surname and first initial

only, resulting in problems identifying individuals and in additional follow-up

work. Second, significant procedural inefficiencies were cropping up e.g.,

anytime a FIP record was modified by a police agency, no matter how small the

modification, the system generated a flag indicating that the CFO should review

the record. This resulted in a huge volume of flags, which not only placed a great

burden on the CFO office personnel but also increased the likelihood that high-risk

data could be overlooked among large amounts of irrelevant or duplicated data.

Finally, weak internal and external communication, program rescoping, changes in

implementation deadlines, changes in fees, complexities related to initial and

ongoing licensing and registration, and related errors led to growing confusion

among firearms owners and the general public.

Program Cost Overruns

When Bill C-68 received Senate approval in 1995, the budgeted cost for the CFRS

was $119 million, to be offset by $117 million in registration fees, resulting in a $2

million cost for taxpayers. Exhibit 3 represents known costs incurred since 1995.

In 2002, Auditor General Sheila Fraser delivered an internal audit report on the

CFP. She determined that cost overruns had resulted from loss of control since the

beginning of the program and that Parliament was ignorant of the escalating costs.

Fraser reported that, by 2005, gun registration would have cost around $1 billion,

with registration fees offsetting this by only $140 million. Other key findings from

her report18:

1996: The Department of Justice stated that it needed additional money because its

original processing cost estimates of $5.50 per owner licence and $4.60 per

firearms registration were too low. These estimates were revised to $23.75 for

processing licences and $16.28 for registering a first firearm. As a result of these

revisions, the Department of Justice estimated that it needed approximately

$60 million in additional funds.

1998: The Department of Justice obtained Effective Project Approval from the

Treasury Board of Canada, and a total of $544 million was allocated to the

program for the period 1995-2003. By February 2000, the total estimated costs for

this period increased to $764 million.

February 2001: The government approved a plan to restructure the program and

reduce future costs by $180 million from 2001-2005. Apparently, the restructured

plan was ineffective. By December 2001, actual costs had reached $527 million.

April 2002: An estimated $629 million had been spent on developing and

implementing this program. Estimated costs to date included19:

$2 million to help police enforce legislation;

$60+ million for a public relations programs, including television

commercials;

$227 million in computer costs (complicated application forms resulted in

slower-than-expected slowing processing times, which drove costs higher than

anticipated);

$332 million for other programming costs, including on the employment costs

of staff to process the forms.

In February 2003, the Liberal government announced an action plan to address the

problems with the gun control program, based on recommendations provided by

external management consultants. The goal of the action plan was to reduce the

gross costs of the gun control program in Canada to approximately $67 million

annually by 2009.

In March 2003, despite public outrage and widespread condemnation of the rising

costs, the Liberals voted to bolster the gun registry with an additional $59 million

in funding.

On February 13, 2004, documents obtained by Zone Libre of CBCs French news

service suggested that the gun registry had actually cost Canadian taxpayers nearly

$2 billion so far.20

Exhibit 1

THE HISTORY OF FIREARMS CONTROL IN CANADA

In 1934, the first real registration requirement for handguns was created. Registration certificates were

issued and records were kept by the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) or by

police departments that provincial Attorneys General had designated as firearms registries.

In 1951, for the first time, the registry system of handguns was centralized under the Commissioner of the

RCMP. Additionally, automatic firearms were added to the category of firearms that had to be registered.

In 1968/1969, the categories of firearm, restricted weapon and prohibited weapon were created for

the first time. The introduction of these categories ended confusion over specific types of weapons and

allowed for the creation of specific legislative controls for each of the new categories.

In 1977, firearms control legislation (Bill C-51) was passed in the House of Commons and established the

first general screening process for prospective firearm owners. The legislation also introduced

requirements for Firearms Acquisition Certificates (FACs) and requirement for Firearms and

Ammunition Business Permits.

In 1991, changes to firearms control legislation (Bill C-17) were introduced and largely strengthened

many of the 1977 measures. The new legislation required a more detailed screening check of FAC

applicants, which included requiring applicants to provide a photograph and two references; imposing a

mandatory 28-day waiting period for an FAC; a mandatory requirement for safety training and expanding

the application from to provide more background information.

In 1995, the current firearms control legislation (Bill C-68) was passed. Major changes included a

Criminal Code amendment providing harsher penalties for certain serious crimes where firearms were

used (for example, kidnapping, murder, etc.); the creation of the Firearms Act, to take the administrative

and regulatory aspects of the licensing and registration systems out of the Criminal Code; a new licensing

system to replace the FAC system; mandatory licenses for the possession and acquisition of firearms, and

for the purchase of ammunition; and registration of all firearms, including shotguns and rifles.

The central component of the 1995 firearms control measure was the Firearms Act. The Act and its

related regulations controlled the acquisition, possession, use and movement of firearms, other weapons,

devices and ammunition. More specifically, the Act required individuals to have a license to possess or to

acquire a firearm, and to acquire ammunition and crossbows. It also required businesses to possess a

license if they were to engage in activities related to firearms, other weapons, devices or ammunition. In

addition, every firearm was required to be registered. There was a transitional period allowed for gradual

implementation of the law: individuals had until January 1, 2001, to obtain a firearms license, and had

until January 1, 2003, to register their firearms.

As a result of the firearm control changes introduced by Bill C-68, the Canadian Department of Justice

established the Canadian Firearms Program (CFP). The CFP was created for the purpose of supporting

the implementation and administration of the 1995 firearms controls. This program placed special

emphasis on licensing all firearms owners and users, and on registering all firearms.

The CFP became operational on December 1, 1998, the same date that the Firearms Act came into effect

and the Canada Firearms Centre started accepting and processing license applications from businesses

and individuals.

In 2003, Bill C-10A, an Act to Amend the Firearms Act, was passed. Bill C-10A was critical to achieving a

firearms program that would better respond to the needs and expectations of Canadians while maintaining

public safety. It included amendments to the Firearms Act that would provide better client service and reduce

costs. These amendments would reinforce the programs contribution to public safety by improving access to

program services.

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