Saskatchewan Firearms Office building new ballistics lab

Firearms have become a topic of conversation in many households across the province, whether the discussion is about safety, knowledge or enforcement.

The Saskatchewan Firearms Office (SFO) announced it has a budget of $12.5 million for the year.

With part of that budget, the SFO is building a new ballistics lab to help law enforcement across the province. In 2023, the office signed an agreement with the Saskatoon Police Service to house the lab temporarily in its headquarters.

“That’s really where we need to be putting our efforts if we want to do anything about gun crime,” SFO commissioner Robert Freberg told The Evan Bray Show on Thursday. “We need to do education (and) we need to work with law enforcement partners.”

While the SFO is working on bringing in its own staff, an officer from the Saskatoon Police Service is helping out with the lab.

Freberg said the lab will help police officers across the province with weapons tracing, an area in which he said Canada struggles.

“We need to find out where they are coming from,” said Freberg. “If there’s a U.S. connection and work with our (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) partners and our RCMP partners and others to find out where we can really stop that.”

The other thing Freberg said was important was being able to trace the shell casings from the crime scene to a gun.

“We may find brass at a scene and no gun because the perpetrators have left,” said Freberg. “But not a month later (or) a year later, all of a sudden this gun shows up in the back of somebody’s vehicle on a stop and we could discharge that gun and compare the brass.”

Murray Cowan, a former deputy chief of the Estevan Police Service and the current deputy commissioner and chief firearms officer of the SFO, said the lab will help smaller communities.

“Coming from a smaller service … we certainly have to lean on organizations like the firearms office,” he said, “and for that matter, larger organizations like the Regina (and) Saskatoon police services and the RCMP at times.”

Cowan added this type of investment would be too expensive for a police service like the one in Estevan.