Provincial ballistics lab opens in Saskatoon

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Police forces throughout Saskatchewan are hoping a new ballistics lab in Saskatoon will speed up investigations and solve gun-related crimes.

In the past, when police seized a firearm, bullets or casings during an investigation, they had to send them away to the RCMP National Forensic Laboratory Services in Ottawa or Surrey for technical firearms lab analysis.

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This meant long delays that could slow down or even prevent a trial.

“Somebody can only sit, charged, in remand for so long — and then those individuals have to have their due process,” said Corrections, Policing and Public Safety Minister Paul Merriman. “And if they can’t have their due process due to delays from the lab, (then) they have to be let out. …

“Those individuals who have discharged a firearm in an illegal way, we don’t want them back out on the streets.”

According to Merriman, getting results back from the national labs can take up to 24 months.

In this new lab, dedicated to Saskatchewan firearms investigations, he is “hoping for a 15- to 30-day turnaround, in most cases,” he said.

The new lab will also study trends related to illegal firearms and gun crime in Saskatchewan, and “maintain strong relationships” with other Canadian labs and national databases, Merriman added.

Especially when guns have been used in multiple crimes across Canada, or even in the United States, labs working together can connect these findings.

The new ballistics lab is housed temporarily at the Saskatoon Police Service headquarters. A new, dedicated facility is under construction.

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In the meantime, the Saskatoon police firing range is set up for testing and remote firing — collecting data on how far and fast the bullets travel, marks the gun leaves on spent cartridges, and even confirming that the weapon is functional.

“Whether (a firearm) is restricted, non-restricted or illegal can depend on the make, the model, the length and what it shoots,” Andrew Marek of the Saskatoon police explained during a demonstration of the remote firing setup. “(Because) a lot of the guns we test have been modified in some way, we don’t necessarily know if they’re safe, but we still need to fire them.”

The lab is also set up to do serial number restorations and close-up examinations of spent cartridges to look for important and identifying marks.

Interim Saskatoon Police Chief Dave Haye said the new lab is “already reducing our timelines,” which comes as a relief to police services throughout the province.

“The time it was taking for these results to come back was worrying,” he said.

Prince Albert Police Chief Patrick Nogier said his officers have been seizing more and more guns over the last five to seven years, and the systems and tools needed to figure out where these guns were coming from, how they were used and who was using them just couldn’t keep up.

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“We realized there were big problems,” he said. “We see the type and capacity of firearms that are being seized off the streets, likely connected to other crimes in other parts of the country, and we had to pick up our bootstraps and make sure that we were following up.”

Just this year, Nogier said there has been an explosion of high-capacity handguns showing up at crime scenes in Prince Albert. Some of his units are seizing these weapons “on a weekly basis,” he said.

“You would think that, living in Saskatchewan — where a lot of firearms are here for legitimate purposes — that you would start to see more sawed-off shotguns and sawed-off rifles being used. And while those are being seen in the community, and we are taking them off the street, the more alarming fact is we’re seeing high-capacity handguns like Glocks.

“(In Prince Albert), the likelihood of pulling a Glock off the street … has never been more prevalent than it has been in the past seven to eight months.”

Nogier said he hopes the new lab will help his officers address this wave of handgun-related crime.

“We know we have to really start cracking down, with respect to how we respond to and investigate firearms offenses.”

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Construction of the ballistics lab’s permanent facility in Saskatoon is expected to be completed in 2025.

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