Illegal guns enter Cda from U.S. but police, politicians don't know extent

By Steve Mertl, The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER - It was almost 5 a.m. when a suburban Vancouver police officer nearing the end of his shift watched a car's uncertain journey down a street a few kilometres north of the Canada-U.S. border.

"He wasn't certain that perhaps we've got an impaired driver, somebody who is lost...," Const. Sharlene Brooks, spokeswoman for police in Delta, says of the routine traffic stop last Sept. 27.

Instead, a search of the vehicle, triggered by the occupants' suspicious behaviour, turned up several gym bags filled with handguns and an automatic machine pistol. Curtis Coleman had been caught red-handed smuggling a shipment of guns into Canada from the U.S. Again.

With more than three dozen gang-related killings in the Vancouver area in the last year and 11 murders in Toronto in the first six months of 2008, police and politicians say illicit American weapons fuel much of the deadly gun play.

But 10 years and more than a billion dollars after the federal government introduced tough new gun legislation, law enforcement officials admit they don't have a clue how big the smuggling problem is.

Ontario government figures indicate about 70 per cent of the crime guns seized in that province came illegally from the United States.

However, there are no comparable Canadian figures because, despite a legal mandate for one, a national crime-gun database has been on hold for a decade. Federal officials say it may finally be implemented this fall but Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day is non-committal.

"Any regulation that comes up for review, especially one that's been on the books but never implemented for a number of years, is always addressed to make sure it's current," Day says.

"That'll be done over the next few weeks and we'll know if it'll stay in its present form or not."

Canada Border Services Agency seized 662 guns at crossing points last year, three-quarters of them handguns, and confiscated 2,289 guns between 2004 and 2007. But those figures don't tell the whole story.

"Quite simply, you only know about what you catch," says Terry Alverson, one of three Canadian-based agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "Until the guns actually show up here, we have no idea that they're here."

Firearms experts say the national crime-gun database could at least reveal patterns of gun traffic that would help in what is largely an intelligence battle against smuggled arms.

They've had notable successes but with Coleman, they just got lucky - both times.

The Seattle, Wash., resident is one of a freelance army of gun smugglers who arm the criminals who rule Canada's drug underworld.

Police say most have no firm ties to organized crime but are part of the pipeline that sends Canadian marijuana south and sees hard drugs, cash and weapons come north.

Four years before his arrest last September, RCMP acting on a tip from U.S. border officers grabbed Coleman and an accomplice as they crossed into Canada on foot in a rural stretch south of Vancouver. Mounties found them with backpacks carrying three dozen guns, including two machine pistols, 24 diamonds and US$100,000 cash.

Coleman was convicted of smuggling and possessing prohibited or restricted firearms anddeported after serving most of a two-year sentence.

This time he pleaded guilty to a single count of being in a vehicle with the contraband guns. The judge condemned him for his role in trafficking guns that put the Canadian public at risk and he drew 36 months, less time served awaiting trial.

Officials at Canada Border Services Agency declined interview requests but Dan Leibel of the Canada Customs and Excise Union, which represents border guards, said the number of guns seized at the border is a fraction of what gets across.

"I've heard estimates in the range of we get one to three per cent of what actually is getting through, but that's just rumour," Leibel says.

For now, if you want a national picture of the impact of U.S.-sourced guns in Canada, you have to ask the Americans.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which publishes an annual report tracing crime guns in all U.S. states, now also receives data from Canada and Mexico. The agency has released the information, to The Canadian Press, for the first time.

Last year, 1,399 illegal American firearms were recovered in Canada, about a thousand of them handguns. Ontario and British Columbia were the top two destinations, followed by Quebec and Alberta.

If the federal government finally implements the database - part of the 1998 Firearms Act - it would be mandatory for all police to report details of seized firearms, including the source, if known.

The unused sections of the Public Agents Firearms Regulations would give all law-enforcement agencies a year to report guns they currently hold and 30 days for any newly recovered firearms to the Canadian Firearms Centre, which also handles the federal gun registry.

There is an Oct. 31 deadline for the regulations to come into force - two years after the last scheduled implementation date, which had already been put back from September 2005.

Implementation this fall hinges on a final review by Day's department.

One of Canada's top firearms investigators is keen to get access to such a reporting system, which he says would make it easier to see patterns that could identify traffickers.

Supt. Geoff Francis, who heads the RCMP's Firearms Support Services Directorate in Mississauga, Ont., says in the past it took up to a year to process information on seized guns and even then there was no central repository for the data. A smuggler might make several runs across the border in that time.

"If you get at the smugglers early enough, you prevent distribution of the firearm," says Francis, who pushed for the database along with the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.

There's an alphabet soup of police agencies responsible for countering the illegal gun trade in Canada, including national and provincial branches of RCMP, the Mounties' border-integrity units and border services' own intelligence unit.

While he appreciates all the police work, Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley thinks Ottawa could do more. The federal government is in charge of the border and should step up security, says Bentley, who met with Day in March to discuss the problem.

In a follow-up letter sent in May, Bentley proposed the government implement measures Canada agreed to several years ago requiring gun makers to put additional markings on weapons to make them easier to trace.

Ontario also wants Ottawa to close what it says is a loophole on importing unfinished gun frames that are then assembled into firearms, and to share federal prosecutors with the province's guns and gangs task force.

"They're all relatively either no-cost or low-cost initiatives," says Bentley.