FIREARMS FACTS - UPDATE

RCMP REPORT 37,090 RESTRAINING ORDERS IN CANADA

February 25, 2004

NOTE: The following information was provided to the Library of Parliament by the RCMP.

"Restraining orders" are captured in a number of areas within our CPIC Persons File - Probation category, including: Alternate Measures; Conditional Sentence; Conditional Discharge; Conditional Supervision (Young Offender); Open Custody (Young Offender); Probation; Recognizance (Peace Bonds); and, Suspended Sentence. A number of these areas could include conditions set out by the court for individuals to "stay away from" or "not be in contact with" other individuals, and as such the tracking of exact figures would be difficult and would probably not give a complete or necessarily accurate picture. 

As per your request as of 2004-01-24 there are a total of 37,090 entries in the recognizance sub-categories entered with a Canada-wide radius and 2312 entries entered with a province-wide radius, the majority (2089) from Ontario.

As a side note, the fact that they are entered Canada-wide would mean that any agency in Canada would get a hit when querying the subject of the entry. If province-wide, only agencies within the same province as the agency entering the record, would get a hit on the subject.

The breakdown is as follows for the 37,090 entries made with a Canada-wide radius only:

YT:            29

NWT:        30

NVT:         21

BC:        2683

ALTA:   2691

SASK:     369

MAN:    6149

ONT:   18226

QUE:     5612

NB:          493

NS:          380

PEI:          125

NFLD:     282

A word of caution: the entries above would be mostly peace bonds type of entries. A lot of restraining orders, e.g. no contact, stay away from, are also made post-convictions via probation orders. We do not have numbers for this specifically.