Bill C-10 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code (minimum penalties for offences involving firearms) and to make a consequential amendment to another Act

This enactment amends the Criminal Code to provide for escalating minimum penalties according to the number, if any, of previous convictions for serious offences involving the use of a firearm if the firearm is either a restricted or prohibited firearm or if the offence was committed in connection with a criminal organization, to provide for escalating minimum penalties according to the number, if any, of previous convictions for other firearm-related offences and to create two new offences: breaking and entering to steal a firearm and robbery to steal a firearm.

Criminal Code

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the thrust of Bill C-10 has to do with the subject matter of mandatory minimums. It has been suggested by some members on the government side that the Liberals are opposed to mandatory minimums. I do not believe that is the case. Could the hon. member inform the members of our history?

[Marlene Jennings, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it was a Liberal government that brought in mandatory minimum sentencing for firearm related crimes. There is a whole category of them where currently it is a minimum of one year. There is second category of designated offences where currently it is four years. In committee, and again at report stage in the House, the Liberal members attempted to increase the one year to two years and the four years to five years.

What we oppose is escalating mandatory minimum penalties. That is where if a person reoffends, the judge will have no discretion. The studies have shown and the experts have stated that it does not work.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, the debate I have heard today is an interesting one. We are involved in a very serious and complex discussion.

The New Democratic Party is supporting the bill, with the amendments that our justice critic, the member for Windsor—Tecumseh, brought forward.

I realize the Liberals and the Bloc are not supporting it. I heard an earlier comment by the member of the government that it must mean the people approve of criminals. In fairness, I do not think anyone who sits in the House approves of criminals, whether they support the legislation or not. It is not a matter of supporting criminals. However, I do think it is a matter of how we approach it.

First, I have asked myself some questions. How do I, as the member for Surrey North and as a member of the House of Commons, ensure that the public can have faith in our justice system? I can assure the House that much of the public with whom I speak do not have faith in the justice system. These people have not necessarily found that because someone comes before a judge on a firearms offence, that they are not released on bail. We would have many examples where this was not the case.

Second, we have to look at what is the appropriate use of this legislation on crimes committed with a gun. In all the debate this morning, if people were sitting at home listening, they would fail to recognize that we are not talking about a general discussion on mandatory minimums. It is a discussion about crimes committed with a firearm. By the way, firearms today are much more technical, much more deadly and much more powerful than the image people might have of firearms that may come from a different place.

Third, I have to ask myself is what are we doing, other than the sentencing, to reduce gun crime. I have heard many people say either one is tough on crime or soft on crime, depending on where one stands on the bill. I do not think that is the case at all. We talk very much about being smart on crime. It is not hard or soft on crime. It is being smart in the way we approach crime.

Think about this. When someone picks up a gun to commit a crime, they automatically know there is a risk of someone being killed or critically injured. There is not a question in anyone's mind that this is what a gun will do, unless we are talking about a child picking up a gun. Anyone who is going to commit a criminal act with a gun knows there is an extreme risk to the person who will be the victim of that crime, not that any crime is acceptable.

I come from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, from Surrey. Many of the things I have experienced around gun crime do not fit some of the things that I have heard about in the House. I hear people talking a lot about gun crime in inner cities. The gun crime I have seen, some of it certainly is inner city, but much of it has nothing to do with youth raised in inner cities. Some of it has to do with youth raised in affluence.

We must be careful not to stereotype this by saying that it is only inner city people who are vulnerable to being involved in a gun crime.

Over the last 10 or 11 years, 100 young men in the lower mainland and some in Surrey have been killed in a gun crime, which is not an insubstantial number. Is anyone behind bars? No. Was it the person's first offence? I do not know for sure, but I know with some it certainly was not their first offence.

We must remember that what we are doing is being smart on crime.

Although I am in support of the bill, with the NDP amendments, and having talked to the parents whose daughters and sons have been killed in a gun crime or critically injured, I do not feel that I have turned into a neo-Conservative. I do not know if anybody has ever called me a neo-Conservative before.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

You would remember.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

My colleague said that I would remember. I am absolutely certain that I would remember and perhaps many things that were the opposite of that.

However, as I talked to the parents of a young teenager who was shot, is in hospital critically injured and no one knows what the outcome will be, they do not think this is a draconian measure.

There are some things I would say about it that I find interesting, some things we should do and some things we should acknowledge about the public. What does the public see and feel? There is a difference between what the public sees and what it feels. There is a difference between being safe in our community and feeling safe in our community. They are two quite different things.

I have read the statistics that homicides may not be up. Well, homicides actually are up in some of the groupings of people I am talking about, but the incidents of gun crimes are certainly up. People read about gun crimes in the newspaper about where, in a perfectly ordinary kind of community, a bullet suddenly comes through the living room window and lodges in the living room wall or a bullet comes through a bedroom window and lodges just above the crib of a child. That is random. This is not gang violence. The people in those houses were not even the intended victims. Those were random shootings at the wrong houses, and that is not all that unusual. Those people actually are unsafe.

However, people also need to feel safe and therefore they need to see their governments, municipal, provincial and federal, doing something so they will feel safe in their communities. The member who just spoke actually talked about this.

In the last 13 years, 40 to 45 mandatory minimum sentences were created by the Liberal government so I do not think this is somehow a great step off the path the Liberals followed, which was, as I say, 45 more mandatory minimum sentences in the length of time the Liberals were in government.

I also heard earlier today from a number of parties about sloganeering, about people changing their minds because they were influenced by politics and not by what they believe.

Since I entered politics, I have been very clear on what I believe about crime. I talked about mandatory minimums in the last campaign, as did our leader, because we understand the devastating effect it has on our communities. This is not sloganeering and it is not pandering, and to suggest that we are sloganeering to a parent who is crying because of the loss of a family member is actually quite shameful.

We hear a lot about the conclusions that have been drawn in the United States about whether mandatory minimums work. As I said, some of the amendments we put forward at committee were accepted and now some of those mandatory minimums are not what they were when they were first proposed. Our justice critic worked very hard to get these amendments through and agreed to.

However, I think in the United States, it is missing a piece that I actually think the Conservative Party opposite is missing as well in some ways, because in any of the literature I have read which has concluded that it does not work, it has used the single-pronged approach, which is simply raising the mandatory minimums, sending people off to jail and then going back and saying that our prisons are about to explode and that they are hot spots.

I can understand how many prisons in the United States would be hot spots because many of them are quite appalling, but we cannot solve a problem with one single prong. Work still needs to be done in that area and I look forward to the government bringing forward what I would hope would be the second part of what needs to happen here.

People often say that mandatory minimums do not work and that there is no history of them working at all but that is not true. I want to take people back to when drunk driving became a much more top of mind issue in our country and to the early work by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The flaw in the United States' studies and what the Conservative government still needs to do is to look into other things that we need to do to ensure this becomes successful.

I will use the drunk driving issue as an example. Yes, after a certain number of offences there is a mandatory minimum jail time, and people knew that, but that was not all they did. They increased the police resources to deal with drunk driving. In my province we called them BAT mobiles. I do not know what they were called in other places, but police set up to stop cars to see if the drivers had been drinking alcohol while driving. Many of those have been discontinued because the police do not have the additional resources to keep doing that.

It takes intensives awareness and education, not just doing it once in grade six or grade 10, but continuous awareness all though school about the seriousness of it and the consequences of it.

Often when I talk to 16, 17 or 18 year olds they know people in gangs who are using guns. Many of them have heard of a mom, a dad or a grandma and sometimes it is themselves who have been left quadriplegic and in a wheelchair as a result of either a deliberate or a random shooting, and when they tell their stories I can see people starting to think differently about the consequences.

We need to continue to inform and educate people but somehow we think that if we inform one group of people our work is done. Well, it is not. It does not matter whether we are talking about racism or something else, we must do it continuously. It is like putting a pamphlet on the dangers of alcohol in a doctor's office. If we do not keep putting them there for more people to read then we are not finished doing our jobs.

The job we have in front of us today is a continuous job. This is not just about passing the legislation. This is a continuous piece of work that involves additional police resources, intensive education and, yes, jail time when necessary. However, I would say, as others have, that this is not a blanket answer, which is why I talked about the other things that were not done in most of the U.S. jurisdictions, where they came to the conclusion that it did not work, and that have yet to come forward from the government.

I wait with baited breath to see those initiatives come forward because this is not a blanket answer. It is something that should be used sparingly, appropriately and in a focused fashion.

I will now move on to the part that is critical to all of this. We often wait until somebody gets involved with a gang before we begin worrying and trying to figure out how to get them out of the gang, which, by the way, is using guns. Our leader has talked about things like safe houses because it is very hard for a gang member to get out of the gang safely and to ensure his or her family is safe.

Let us look at the new baby that comes home wrapped in a blue or pink blanket. I unwrapped the blanket when I brought mine home and there were no instructions. By simply bringing the baby home did not automatically mean that I knew how to parent. It did not mean that I knew how to do all of those things to ensure that my youngster, in the zero to five years, would have the kind of support, education, choices, boundaries and all of those things that we do so that when children start school at five or six they are ready in all of the five areas that they are supposed to be ready in.

From the longitudinal research on this, we know that those children are far less likely to ever be involved in the criminal system. That is the work that is not here. That is the work that is missing. If that work does not come into place then we will have a problem having this be successful. We need to put into place good child care programs, which we had but which the government slashed, to teach parents how to parent.

I do not assume that just giving birth makes one a good parent. Those programs have been cut by the provincial government in my province. The provincial government's child care was cut so it just downloaded it and cut the programs that support parents, those parents who are either in the workforce or parents who are parenting at home, who have no place to go for expert advice and resources on just about all those challenges that any of us face as a mom or dad in raising children. Without that, and without those kinds of additional multi-prong initiatives, this has far less chance of being successful.

However, I can support the bill because: first, I understand that our amendments are there; second, I know what people in my community have been telling me for a long time; and third, because I do have hope that the government will bring forward other initiatives to support this.

There is no such thing as a single piece of legislation that is narrow and does not have other issues to support it--

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

Order, please. I gave the hon. member a full 20 minutes. I gave her a two minute signal and a one minute signal. Her time is up.

Questions and comments, the hon. member for Elgin—Middlesex—London

[Joe Preston, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard from all sides of the House today and I would like to thank the member for Surrey North for bringing her views to this debate today and approaching this more from the victim's point of view and from the view of the faith people need to have in their justice system. I was happy to hear her say that at the beginning and move this debate that way.

I think that too often we look at this as a crime and punishment issue. I keep having to explain that I am not here to punish anyone. It is not that I want mandatory minimums to punish anyone, but as the member stated in her speech, anyone who picks up a gun knows what it can do and what danger it can inflict.

This is not about punishing the people who do this. It is about protecting those whom these people may victimize or have victimized. If these people are away for a minimum period of time, perhaps they will victimize no one else while they are away.

I would like to hear more from the member about the victims she has reached out to, just as I have had to speak to victims in my own riding. They are the victims that this type of legislation will actually help, rather than having them just hearing talk about how hard this will be on the criminals of this country.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, as probably many members in this House do, I see a variety of people who have been affected by gun crime. I must admit that I also talk to parents who, for a variety of reasons, have not even recognized that their sons or daughters are moving into that area. It is not a matter of blame. That is not a lack of caring or love or appreciation of their children. Sometimes it is simply circumstances. They cannot be with their children or their teenagers on a continual basis, as none of us can, of course, in order to always be aware of what is happening.

I have talked with those parents who blame themselves. They wonder where they have gone wrong. They wonder what they can do to help other parents so that other young people do not find themselves in the position of actually being the perpetrator.

For the most part, the people I see who are victims of gun crimes are younger people. I have talked with the parents of a young person who is in a wheelchair. He is quadriplegic and therefore will require full-day assistance, for the most part, for probably the remainder of his life. It was a random shooting. He was not even involved in what was going on. He just happened to be present somewhere.

As well, I have talked with those people whose family members have been, very deliberately, victims of gun crime. They have been murdered. Those parents and those families as well look to what could be done differently. They want to know that there is an appropriate sentencing mechanism that appropriately reflects the severity of the crime.

Nobody has said to me, “Put somebody away forever”. But people do want to know and the parents I talk with want to know that this life that was lost or the critical injury sustained is not simply something to be brushed aside, with no mark or legacy left other than in the hearts and minds of that family. They worry very much about that.

Those are some of the victims that I have talked to. By the way, I do not have a chance to do this very often, and I am very glad I do not, but as well I talk with the victims who are police officers. Every day in our communities, RCMP or local police go out. They respond to a call and we know that certain calls are more likely to be dangerous. They actually have been victims of a shooting. Sometimes it is because there was not enough staff. Sometimes they did not know that there was a gun there. There is a variety of reasons.

However, I have talked to law enforcement people. We are telling people to please enter law enforcement because we need more people and we need them to be more diverse, including women, so that our police forces reflect our community. These police need to feel that they are backed up by the community, by the public and by the system.

These are some of the victims who have done me the honour of sharing with me or disclosing their experiences to me.

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I know that the member is quite familiar with FASD, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. She also knows that there is a prevalence of criminal activity among those who suffer from that mental disability and, indeed, mental disabilities in general.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on the fact that rehabilitation would not be applicable in terms of these particular persons who may be convicted of crimes. Exactly how do we help them if they are automatically subject to a mandatory minimum sentence to an institution, where rehabilitation is the activity that goes on during that period? Obviously there are cases where incarceration in the general prison population is not applicable. She may want to comment.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would be pleased to do that. There are many pieces to this, but it goes back in part to the fact that appropriate supports need to be in place much earlier. I know that the member is very familiar with this and he knows this. Those kinds of appropriate supports for people with FASD, FASE and autism need to be in place much earlier.

I am still waiting for the autism strategy from the government and I am still waiting for a FASD strategy from the government, but surely we do not wait until those folks find themselves in a position of having picked up a gun. That is where those prevention programs are so critical.

That is why without those prevention programs this will not be a successful initiative. We must have those in place.

It does not mean that I will not support this bill, but I am very vocal in saying that we need those supports in place early on. We should never even find ourselves in the position of having someone with a severe mental disability, or with FASD or any of the other disabilities we could name, in front of a judge, with the judge having to think about sentencing for somebody who indeed may not be able to reason that out.

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The hon. member for Jeanne-Le Ber has the floor. There is one minute left in the time allocated to the hon. member for Surrey North, so he has 30 seconds for his question.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Speaker, my question is a very simple one. The bill supported by the NDP calls for lesser minimum penalties, and in some case none at all, for crimes committed with firearms.

Can my colleague tell me why the NDP believes that a murder committed with a hunting rifle, a long gun, is less serious than one committed with a hand gun?

[The Acting Speaker, Royal Galipeau]

The hon. member for Surrey North has half a minute to respond.

[Penny Priddy, NDP, Surrey North, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if I totally understand the question. I think that a murder committed with a handgun or any firearm is a heinous crime. I think it is somewhat less likely that people are carrying long guns as they are going about the kind of criminal activity that I see in my community, but obviously any murder is serious and any murder committed with a gun is serious.

[Thierry St-Cyr, Bloc, Jeanne-Le Ber, QC]

Mr. Speaker, continuing on the subject of my question, the Bloc Québécois has opposed Bill C-10. In my previous question, I said that one of the aberrations of this bill is that the proposed increase does not apply to hunting rifles. This bill creates two classes of firearms. There are long guns, as they are called in English—hunting rifles—and then there are hand guns. Some clauses in the bill even refer to prohibited weapons.

This seems rather odd at the stage of defining offences in the Criminal Code. As legislators, normally it is our responsibility to establish the relative severity of each of these sentences.

In this bill, however, there are instances where minimal sentences will not be not the same, depending on whether the crime is committed with a long gun or a prohibited or restricted firearm.

Let us take the example of section 239 of the Criminal Code, which deals with discharging a firearm with intent, sexual assault with a weapon, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, hostage-taking, extortion and robbery. Bill C-10 proposes to impose a minimum five-year sentence for a first offence, seven years for a second, and to leave it at four years if another type of firearm is used, namely, a long gun.

If this bill is passed, the message it sends is that it is considered more serious to commit an offence such as attempted murder or sexual assault with a hand gun than with a long gun. This is, in my opinion, completely ridiculous and totally baseless.

That was what lay behind my question to my NDP colleague as to why the NDP were, as legislators, backing a bill in which committing a murder with a hunting rifle is less serious than committing a murder with a hand gun.

I think this illustrates the approach taken by the Conservative government and its view of how to fight crime, to which the NDP has subscribed for the last few months. Under this approach, they take care of repression after the crime has already been committed but do nothing about prevention. This is not the first time under this government that we have seen this dichotomy between how hand guns and long guns are treated.

We saw it as well with the firearms registry. It was the same thing. To look good, the government says it wants to keep the firearms registry, but just for handguns and restricted weapons. They want to abolish it for long guns. What does that mean? Where did the Conservatives get the idea that long guns were less dangerous than other guns?

Give me a couple of seconds here to find a very interesting statistic showing that a good proportion of crimes are committed with long guns. Unfortunately, I do not remember the exact figure, but it was not negligible.

The differing treatments depending on the type of firearm highlight the inconsistency in the message conveyed by the government and the NDP, which supports it. This inconsistency can be seen again in the supposed intent of the bill, where they say they want to be tough on crime and fight criminality.

As the minister himself admitted when he came to testify before the committee, there are no Canadian studies showing that minimum sentences are effective at fighting crime.

We could obviously debate it from the standpoint of vengeance or punishing people for having committed a crime. If that is the purpose of the government’s bill, it should clearly say so and not try to make people think that the purpose is to make Canadians safer, when that is clearly not the case. Minimum sentences only apply after the crime has been committed. All the studies show, though, that minimum sentences do not have any impact on the commission of crimes. Some other studies have been done in Canada. One very large study showed that the recidivism rate hardly changed on the basis of the length of incarceration or whether the offender was given a prison term or a community-based sentence.

This is very interesting because it shows once again that the sentences criminals receive has no influence on the recidivism rate. Another study followed up on offenders. These authors even concluded that quite the opposite was the case and that increased prison terms led to a slight increase in the recidivism rate. I will provide a reference for this study so that my Conservative colleagues can read it.

I am referring to a study done by Paula Smith, Claire Goggin and Paul Gendreau of the Psychology Department and the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies of the University of New Brunswick entitled The Effects of Prison Sentences and Intermediate Sanctions on Recidivism: General Effects and Individual Differences. The study was delivered in Ottawa in 2002, and was written for the Solicitor General of Canada. The government will have ready access to it. The conclusion that I quoted is on page ii of the introduction.

I wanted to talk about this to show, once again, that there is no connection with the length of time a prisoner is incarcerated and serving a community-based sentence or a prison sentence. As well, there are certainly no automatic deterrent effects.

There are other useful statistics in this regard and the Conservatives would do well to consider them: there are three times more homicides in the United States than in Canada and four times more homicides in the Untied States than in Quebec. In Quebec, in fact, an approach based much more on rehabilitation than punishment has been adopted, and this is the part of Canada where there are the fewest violent crimes and the least crime.

Apart from a particular kind of popular morality or the simplistic discourse that amounts to saying that we must punish criminals severely, that we must be hard on them and impose longer sentences, ultimately reality will catch up to us. Everywhere in the world where a jurisdiction has tried to fight crime with punishment, we see higher crime rates than in jurisdictions that place greater emphasis on rehabilitation.

Obviously a balance has to be struck, and in the Bloc Québécois we believe that punishment is necessary in many case. We must keep that balance, however, so that we do not have to invest extremely large amounts of money in keeping people in prison. I gave the example of the United States, where the homicide rate is much higher, and the prisons are bursting at the seams because the incarceration rate is much higher than ours. The United States is using that money to put all those people in prison for longer times, rather than investing in fighting crime.

Some of our government colleagues rose in the House earlier to give some examples. They asked me what sentence I would like to see given to the guilty person if I were the parent of a person who was killed.

Personally, I would prefer that that individual not have committed a crime. It seems to me that it is essential, and more important, to prevent crimes than to console ourselves by saying that the person who committed the crime will go to prison for a long time and will suffer, because he or she will not like it there. That does not cancel out the crime. That does not mean that the families who have had members killed, families in which women have been raped, families of people who have been terrorized by home invasions or the like, are going to be able to turn back the clock.

Minimum sentences raise another problem, and I think that this should prompt us to use them very sparingly.

Minimum sentences have perverse effects. This is documented, and is a known fact. I would like to talk about two of those effects.

First of all, there will be instances in which judges will be forced to impose a minimum sentence that they find unwarranted. In such cases, they might acquit an individual entirely, rather than be forced to sentence that individual to a penalty they consider excessive under the circumstances, for cases in which a more appropriate penalty would be a conditional sentence, community service or a few weeks in jail.

This has happened in the past, and this should be a real concern to those people who wish to get tough on criminals. By trying to force the hand of judges, we would be creating situations in which judges could not sentence certain individuals to a minimum sentence that would be inappropriate. They would therefore acquit the individual instead.

Another problem is likely to arise, André Normandeau, a criminologist at the Université de Montréal, reminded us. With minimum sentences, lawyers often negotiate plea bargains for their clients in exchange for charges that do not require minimum sentencing. This involves some negotiation and ultimately does not lead to an appropriate outcome.

This measure leaves judges with no flexibility and, in certain cases, could lead to situations that are questionable, to say the least, because, when passing legislation, we could not possibly take into consideration all parameters and every case that could make its way to court. Judges are appointed specifically to consider these cases.

I would like to highlight the example of Robert Latimer, the father who killed his 12-year-old daughter, who was severely disabled, in an act of compassionate homicide. This is a subject that concerns us considerably and that many people are talking about. Mr. Latimer was convicted of second degree murder, which automatically forced the judge to sentence him to 25 years in prison, even though the jury that convicted him asked for a much more lenient sentence, given that it was an act of compassionate homicide.

The judge did not even have this option, because, quite simply, the law did not allow it.

In a future case, a jury could be faced with the same dilemma and could go to the other extreme by saying that it makes no sense to send someone to prison for 25 years for a murder committed out of compassion and that, in that situation, it would acquit him completely. In the end, that is what happens when we meddle in the judicial process.

I was astonished, because so often we hear the Conservatives complaining of judicial activism, which is when the judges—those who are close by, at the Supreme Court—use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, to amend or to strike down laws and influence our judicial and legal system.

The Conservatives repeatedly complained about this state of affairs, whether in the case of same sex marriages, or abortion or other issues. After having said that it is not right for judges to get involved in politics, the Conservatives table a bill that does the opposite and where members of Parliament want to do the work of the judges. I am sorry but it seems to me that as legislators we should be concerned with the issue of the gravity of crimes, establish maximum penalties in the Criminal Code to put into perspective the relative gravity of crimes, compared one to another, and leave to the judges the task of evaluating each situation in detail and determining what sentence is the most appropriate.

Another important point should be emphasized, which is that there is a major issue of perception in this whole debate, with the explosion of the all-present media—especially a certain class of media—which puts out the news as performance. In fact, there really is a perception among the population that crime is increasing and that we are living in a society that is becoming more and more violent. It is unfortunate to see that government members, instead of doing the work of explaining the real facts to the population, will manipulate and use people’s fears to advance their right-wing cause.

In general, I would emphasize that between 1991 and 2000, the rate of crime went down by almost 26% in Canada. That is true in almost every area: the rate of crime is in constant and general decline. To claim that crime is a growing problem and that, therefore, we need tougher penalties does not in any way correspond to reality. The proof is that the place where the fewest violent crimes per 100,000 population are committed in Canada—I referred to this earlier—is Quebec. The government, therefore, should focus on getting results, take inspiration from the Quebec model of combating crime rather than that of the United States, which I spoke about previously and which has met with a resounding failure.

I would like to conclude by saying that there is a little hypocrisy in what the government is proposing. In order to fight crime it should fully reinstate the gun registry and free up all the grants for programs to combat crime in all of our ridings that the minister has blocked and that are languishing on his desk. That would be a real campaign against crime rather than the appearance of a campaign.