B.C. Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth says he is “very, very concerned” about funding cuts at RCMP forensic labs that are preventing some illegal firearms seized by police from being analyzed.
Postmedia has revealed over the last week that the two national RCMP labs that do forensic examinations of guns used in crimes don’t have the capacity to handle all the requests they are getting.
And that means, in some cases, criminals caught with illegal firearms may not face any gun charges.
Farnworth told Postmedia on Thursday that the situation is unacceptable and that the RCMP lab capacity must be increased.
“We are very concerned about this because of this whole issue of gang violence we are facing in this province,” Farnworth said. “A big part of dealing with it is getting prosecutions, and if there are gaps because of a lack of capacity, that is a problem. It is a big problem.”
He said he has been in touch with his federal counterparts about the issue and hopes some funding that was promised by Solicitor-General Ralph Goodale in November 2017 could help address the lab problem.
“We have got a proposal to increase capacity and hopefully deal with this,” Farnworth said.
But B.C. might also open its own provincial forensic lab, as Ontario has done, to process and track illegal firearms seized by police, Farnworth said.
“We might have to have our own lab here in B.C.,” he said. “We have our own proposal, but I can’t give you the details of it at this point.”
The B.C. government’s Illegal Firearms Task Force recommended in its 2017 report that the province establish its own firearms tracing hub, as well as getting capacity increased in the RCMP labs — neither of which has yet happened.
Task force head and retired RCMP Asst. Commissioner Wayne Rideout told Postmedia last week that the reduced lab capacity has impacted some criminal prosecutions.
“At the same time we are seeing an upswing in the firearms, we are seeing decreased capacity to do analysis,” Rideout said.
Farnworth said the whole idea of the illegal firearms report was to identify the changes needed “to be able to get better intelligence and know where firearms are coming from.”
“So the idea that we don’t have the capacity to track and to have a lab to test firearms is ridiculous,” he said. “This is a serious issue. It has to be fixed. It may require us (creating) our own lab here in B.C. if the feds aren’t going to fix this at their end.”
The lab crunch stems from 2014-2015 cuts to the RCMP’s budget that resulted in the National Forensic Laboratory Services downsizing from six facilities to three — only two of which process firearms.
One of the remaining firearms labs is in Vancouver on the RCMP’s old site on Heather Street. A new forensics lab is under construction at the RCMP’s new Surrey headquarters, which is expected to open next summer.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Tania Vaughan said in an email from Ottawa that “firearm analysis will be temporarily paused” in B.C. as lab services transition from Vancouver to Surrey.