Bill C-21 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted)

This enactment amends the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act to repeal the requirement to obtain a registration certificate for firearms that are neither prohibited firearms nor restricted firearms.

Criminal Code

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for this opportunity to show my support for Bill C-21 concerning the repeal of the requirement to register non-restricted firearms. The Government of Canada strongly believes that it is vital to protect the safety and security of Canadians. In fact, it is our top priority.

I am often saddened and even shocked by what is happening in some of our communities. Blatant acts of violence committed by gun-toting criminals all too often make the headlines. There are too many perpetrators and there are too many victims. We hear of gang members gunning down their rivals on sidewalks or in parking lots, or even in local parks where children play. We see the reports of them waving handguns openly in neighbourhoods, frightening residents into complete silence about what is going on in their area.

These acts are committed by criminals, people who show no regard for our laws. Therefore, the government believes it is time to put in place effective gun control measures that work, while streamlining requirements for law abiding citizens. This will help to ensure the focus stays where it belongs, on those who would harm our families and our communities.

The government introduced Bill C-21 to eliminate the requirement to register non-restricted firearms, generally ordinary rifles and shotguns, by legitimate firearm owners, while maintaining important safeguards to help protect Canadians. It is important to focus on measures that keep guns out of the wrong hands and that the public safety is protected.

Let me first clarify an important issue, the difference between licensing and registration. Licensing focuses on the individual. It is a way of identifying who can own a firearm. Individuals who want licences must meet various criteria that help to ensure they do not pose a risk to public safety.

However, registration focuses on the firearm. It involves providing a complete description of a firearm to firearms program employees, who then add the information to a database. Authorities can then know which licenced owner owns the firearm.

If passed, Bill C-21 would repeal the requirement to register non-restricted firearms, that is to say, ordinary rifles and shotguns such as those used for hunting. There are two reasons behind this decision.

The first is, as I have previously mentioned, to ease some requirements for law abiding owners of non-restricted firearms who have been demanding that this requirement be eliminated for many years.

The second reason is of even greater importance. The government believes that registration does not prevent gun crime. We believe that we must invest resources where they can be most effective. Under the current firearms program, an individual must hold a licence to possess or obtain a firearm, or to obtain ammunition. This will continue.

Bill C-21 requires that everyone who purchases a non-restricted firearm will have to have his or her licence verified. This can be done through a simple phone call to the firearms centre.

The government is committed to strong, reinforced licensing. Budget 2007 invested $14.2 million over two years to enhance the screening of 20,000 new applicants for restricted licences every year. This is a real investment in public safety and it was an area totally neglected by the previous government which did not provide resources to fulfill this important task effectively.

As it now stands, to obtain a new licence for any class of firearm, including a non-restricted firearm, a person must pass the required Canadian firearms safety course exams. The course was developed in partnership with the provinces and territories, national organizations with an ongoing interest in firearms safety, and many firearm and hunter education course instructors from across Canada.

I have heard completely inaccurate comments from the Liberal benches that we are doing away with gun control. This is completely false and ridiculous. What we are determined to do is to make gun control focused and more effective. Indeed, firearms safety training is something that firearm owners and users support, and this government believes in.

We recognize that firearms safety starts with well trained, law abiding firearms owners. That is why we are maintaining the requirement for safety training as part of the firearms program. In this way we will help protect Canadians from possible tragic accidents. Teaching firearms owners how to store their firearms safely and securely helps prevent children from accessing those firearms and can reduce the chance that firearms could be stolen.

During the election campaign we made a commitment to keep Canadians safe. When it comes to firearms safety, an ounce of prevention is certainly worth a pound of cure.

There is another requirement individuals must meet before they can be issued a firearms licence. They must pass a background check. Background checks are performed by chief firearms officers or their representatives who employ law enforcement systems and resources to ensure the individual in question has not committed a serious criminal offence in the recent past, is not under a court sanctioned prohibition order for firearms, and does not pose a threat to public safety.

As I mentioned earlier, in budget 2007 we committed $14.2 million over two years to enhance the screening of new firearms licence applicants. For the first time, this investment means that each year 20,000 new restricted licence applicants and their two references will be interviewed by a firearms officer before determining whether that applicant should be issued his or her first restricted firearms licence.

These resources were not provided by the previous government. Instead, it funded a long gun registry that we know does not work, but our government is determined to invest in what really benefits public safety.

While a background check is run before every applicant is issued a licence, another type of verification is also carried out by authorities. The Canadian Firearms Information System, which houses all information on firearms licence holders and registered firearms, is connected to the Canadian Police Information Centre known as CPIC.

This means that every time information on a person of interest is uploaded in CPIC, for example, information on someone who has threatened to harm his or her neighbours or colleagues, the Canadian Firearms Information System runs an automatic check to see if that person is a licence holder.

If the person is a licence holder, the chief firearms officer of the province is warned and action can be taken to follow up on the case. If an investigation shows that the person is a threat to public safety and should not be allowed to own firearms, the individual's licence can be revoked. The police are then made aware of the situation and can take the appropriate action.

This process is called the continuous eligibility check. It is done automatically and allows for the proper identification of licence holders who should no longer be in possession of firearms.

Background checks and continuous eligibility checks are critical in helping to ensure that firearms are only held by responsible law abiding citizens. However, ordinary citizens also have a responsibility to the firearms program when it comes to protecting public safety.

The firearms program has a 1-800 public safety line that individuals can call if they believe someone could pose a threat or should not be allowed to have firearms. That number is indicated on the form the applicant must fill out for a licence and that the applicant's spouse signs. This means that the spouse as well as the references have access to this number, so they can call and inform the chief firearms officer of their concerns, even if they feel pressured to sign the form.

Through the steps that come before the licence is issued and the ongoing checks while a person holds a licence, authorities know who is entitled to own a firearm. This is the type of tool the Government of Canada believes is effective in protecting the public.

It is clearly evident that licensing is the most important dimension of a firearms control system. This is because licensing screens the individuals themselves regardless of the types of firearms they intend to acquire.

That said, as I mentioned before, we are maintaining the registration of restricted and prohibited firearms. These firearms include handguns, some semi-automatic long guns used for target shooting, and gun collecting and other automatic weapons.

Individuals can only possess restricted firearms and prohibited handguns for legitimate purposes such as target shooting or collecting. Target shooting has a long history in Canada and covers all types of firearms disciplines right up to competition at the Olympic level.

As hon. members can see, our work on gun control is part of a larger effort to strengthen the overall safety of Canadians. We believe in focusing our efforts on those who would harm our families and our communities, not on law abiding—

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I think it is fair to say that Bill C-21 would have the effect of basically scrapping the gun registry in that it would eliminate the requirement for registering non-restricted firearms, which are rifles and shotguns, about 5 million to 6 million firearms, which effectively guts the purpose of the registry totally.

If there were clear evidence that the lives of 100 police officers were saved as a consequence of having that registry would this bill be before us today? I believe the answer is that it would not. Members would not support this bill because of the importance of the registry.

Given that police officers have indicated that they use the registry some 5,000 times a day, which is the reported amount, I would then ask the member if the lives of 100 police officers would stop this bill. What is the member's number? How many police officers is he prepared to live with in terms of deaths?

[Dave MacKenzie, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Safety]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time tonight with the member for Northumberland—Quinte West.

It is an opportunity for me to discuss Bill C-21. This legislation addresses firearms control, an area of great concern to all Canadians. Everyone who watches the news knows how prevalent gun violence has become in some communities and this is extremely troubling.

Gang members carrying illegal handguns and brazenly settling scores in public areas have brought fear to cities across the country. In some neighbourhoods, people witness gun violence regularly but are intimidated into silence by criminals. This kind of criminal activity must be stopped. Canada has always had the reputation of being a peaceful country. We must do something now to help ensure this remains the case, and that means cracking down on violent crime.

The government made a commitment to protect Canadians and that is what we intend to do. Bill C-21 is part of the government's larger plan to strengthen the safety and security of Canadians. The government has taken steps over the last year to keep Canadians safe and to do so in a way that simplifies compliance for law-abiding citizens.

The first responsibility of any government should always be to protect its citizens from harm but governments should also be careful to do this in a way that law-abiding citizens can comply with easily. This government is working diligently to ensure that this balance is respected.

We have introduced Bill C-21 to reinstate a balance between protecting Canadians and easing requirements for responsible firearms owners. I would like to highlight some of the public safety measures our government has taken in the past year. The government has an overall plan for safer communities and Bill C-21 fits within our vision of a safe and prosperous Canada.

First, the government felt that policing and law enforcement needed to be bolstered in Canada. In budget 2006, we invested a significant amount of money to give the RCMP additional resources to focus on law enforcement priorities. These included the expansion of the RCMP's National Training Academy, known as Depot; increasing the DNA samples on file to include a greater range of offenders; support for a special contingent of first nations RCMP; and an additional 1,000 RCMP resources to focus on drugs, corruption and border security.

Now in Budget 2007, we have continued this support for our national police services to protect children from sexual exploitation and trafficking and supporting the Canadian Police Research Centre's work in science and technology in policing and public safety.

Furthermore, we are taking action to crack down on white collar crime by appointing a senior expert adviser to the RCMP to help develop and guide the implementation of a plan to improve the effectiveness of the integrated market enforcement teams. We are also investing $80 million over two years to make the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's operations more effective.

On another front, the government took steps to strengthen our borders in a way that keeps legitimate goods and people moving across the border and threats out of our country. We put in place a plan to start arming border guards. Through our plan, approximately 4,800 officers will be trained and armed. This includes 400 officers who will be hired so that no officer will be required to work alone. Some of these officers will be deployed as early as this summer and we expect that by March 2008, between 200 and 250 armed officers will be working at the border.

There is another issue that affects our communities directly and that is youth crime. Many communities in Canada have youth crime problems. It can sometimes mean vandalism, drug abuse or even gang involvement.

Our work is based on the principle that the surest way to reduce crime is to focus on the factors that put individuals at risk, factors like family violence, school problems and drug abuse. We aim to reduce crime by tackling crime before it happens. That is why my hon. colleague, the Minister of Public Safety, announced in January $16.1 million in funding for youth at risk. These projects are funded through the National Crime Prevention Centre and they help youth make good choices and stay or get back on the right track.

Firearms control should focus on criminals, not on law-abiding and responsible firearms owners.

I hope that the hon. members of this House can now better understand the broader public safety context within which our gun control measures operate. Gun control is but one of many ways we are working to protect Canadians.

The object of today's debate, Bill C-21, deals with an aspect of the firearms control program that has been at the centre of discussion ever since the introduction of the Firearms Act in 1995: the registration of non-restricted firearms. These are ordinary rifles and shotguns most often used for hunting.

Why do we wish to abolish the requirement to register these firearms? The answer is twofold. The first reason is that we are not convinced that the registration of non-restricted firearms prevents gun crime. The second reason comes back to what I said earlier. Governments have a responsibility to direct limited to resources where they will have the most effect. With respect to gun control, we believe this means investing in measures that focus on criminals rather than on law-abiding citizens.

The most recent example of this was the successful raid carried out in Toronto last week that resulted in over 60 arrests and the seizure of 30 illegal guns, dealing a significant blow to a notorious street gang that terrorized the neighbourhood. Protecting the most vulnerable is where our limited resources should be directed to, not inundating law-abiding citizens with cumbersome rules and regulations.

Therefore, the government has decided to remove the registration requirement for legitimate and responsible non-restricted firearms owners and focus on gun crime.

Indeed, to achieve this very goal, my colleague, the hon. Minister of Justice, tabled a bill on May 4, 2006 to strengthen the mandatory minimum sentences for violent gun crimes. The government has introduced a number of legislative initiatives that target gun crimes and we encourage opposition MPs to support these initiatives.

Bill C-10 passed third reading in the House on May 29 and is awaiting second reading in the other place. Bill C-10 proposes escalating minimum penalties for specific offences involving the actual use of firearms. These offences include attempted murder, sexual assault and kidnapping, among others. Minimum penalties are also proposed for certain serious non-offence uses, such as firearm trafficking and smuggling. The higher minimum penalties rest on specific aggravating factors such as repeat firearms offences, use of restricted or prohibited firearms or the commission of firearm offences in connection with a criminal organization which includes a gang.

Bill C-35 is another important piece of legislation on our agenda to tackle gun crimes. It deals with the burden of proof during bail hearings for firearm related offences.

These reforms will lower the risk that people charged with serious offences may reoffend while out on bail. It will also reduce the risk that they may take flight to avoid facing trial for the charges. This bill was also recently passed by the House of Commons and is awaiting second reading in the Senate.

These new measures send a clear message that the Government of Canada will not tolerate gun crime on our streets and in our communities. However, as the members of the House no doubt know, firearms control includes much more than handing tough sentences to those who commit crime. Firearms control includes measures that aim to prevent firearms from falling into the hands of ineligible individuals.

The registration of non-restricted firearms has not proven itself to be effective in accomplishing this goal. In fact, in our view the most effective system currently in place that accomplishing that goal is licensing. We have the support of many groups that agree that licensing is the critical information necessary.

As deputy commissioner of the RCMP, Peter Martin, stated to the public safety committee:

If we go to a residence on a call, we're not interested in articles in the house as much as the person in the house and what they have available to them.

The critical piece of information right now is who is licensed and who has the potential to have in his or her possession a firearm, regardless of whether it's a long gun or a restricted or prohibited weapon.

Through the steps that an individual must take to obtain a licence, authorities can determine if the individual in question poses a security risk. The steps include passing the exams for the Canadian firearm safety course, passing the background checks that are performed using police files and answering personal history questions to identify the possible safety concerns such as serious problems with substance abuse. The answers to these questions must be corroborated by two references who have personally known the individual for at least three years.

Screening individuals before they are issued a licence is paramount to an effective firearms control system. Even once a licence is issued to an individual, a continuous check is performed through an automated link between the Canadian firearms information system and the Canadian police information system or CPIC. If any new information is entered on the CPIC system by police, such as a report on threats made to another person, the firearms information system automatically checks to see if the person in question is a firearms licence holder. If so, steps can be taken to suspend or revoke the licence and law enforcement authorities are notified so they can take appropriate action to remove the firearms.

Bill C-21, is an important piece of legislation that would re-establish the proper balance in the area of firearms control. It would ease the requirements for firearm owners while ensuring that records of firearm purchases continue to be kept. Our government believes that resources should be invested to keep Canadians safe. However, we believe in investing those resources in effective initiatives and programs. That is why we have focused on areas such as law enforcement, border security, youth crime and, of course, gun control. In all cases we are taking a results based approach.

I therefore encourage all members of the House to support Bill C-21.

[Larry Miller, Conservative, Bruce—Grey—Owen Sound, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. minister for bringing forth Bill C-21. In my last householder I did a survey on this to reassure myself that thoughts had not changed in the riding. It came back and overwhelmingly 95% still felt that the long gun registry had to be, if not revamped, scrapped altogether.

The Liberals reacted to a very terrible incident in bringing in the long gun registry. Some people said that they lied about the cost of it. Grossly underestimated is certainly a fact, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt on that. However, the fact that really bothers me was when a member across the way from the GTA said a few minutes ago that the Liberals supported toughening up the sentencing for gun crimes, but they voted very recently against that. It is pretty hard to say that is literally not telling the truth. What are the reasons for that? Could the minister comment on that?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Wetaskiwin, AB]

Mr. Speaker, first, I thank the minister for tabling Bill C-21 in this House and keeping another Conservative platform commitment to eliminate the long gun registry.

I also thank the minister for implementing the amnesties. I know my constituents are very appreciative of that. I know a lot of them received some of the money they had used on their application forms back, and I have received some positive feedback on that.

I also thank the minister for the tremendous work he has done to ensure there are enough RCMP officers on the streets. I have met with my constituents in Breton and Hobbema and there is a lack of RCMP and resources on the ground to do the police work that needs to be done.

However, the question I have for the minister is on something he brought up during his speech. I would like to bring some clarification to the House.

In a former life I was a database administrator. I am fairly conversant in how databases work and how queries work between databases. One of the things I used to do, when I was a faculty member teaching databases, was talk about the importance of processes in place to ensure the information that went into a system was good. We used to call it garbage in equals garbage out.

Could the minister clarify and give us more information about whether the information in the database is good, whether the police officers can use, through CPIC, the licence database, as there is obviously a repository of information there, and whether that information is useful to police officers in lieu of the fact that the registry information is obviously flawed?

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Minister of Public Safety]

Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for that demonstration of collegiality from the members.

My friend who just completed speaking had talked about a lowering of the emotions and I think that is important. I think the debate tonight has been civil although people feel strongly about it. Previously there have been unfortunate references, which I have not heard tonight, to almost a questioning of whether one really loves one's loved ones if one is supporting getting rid of the long gun registry.

I am glad that has not entered into the debate. Most of us here have children. Some have grandchildren. We all have loved ones. We all want to see crime with firearms reduced. We all believe there is a way to do that. It is not a question of how much we love our loved ones. I am glad that has not entered into the debate.

As a matter of fact, in two cases I have talked to parents, each of whom lost a son who was tragically slain by a firearm. In each case, those parents said to me, “Don't fix the problem by trying to keep the long gun registry”. They said that it is a waste of money and a waste of police time and resources. Both sets of parents had sons who were police officers and who were slain by long guns.

I share that with members and will share just as emphatically that I have talked with parents who have lost loved ones because of a handgun and want to see the long gun registry maintained. I say this to show that even among parents whose children have been slain there is a difference of opinion on this.

I want to emphasize some things that we are not changing as we look at Bill C-21.

We are not changing the requirement to have a licence if a person wants to own or acquire a firearm of any type. A person still must have a licence. That does not change. A person still must have the training that is involved in the handling of a firearm. The storage laws remain in place. We are still maintaining those.

The handgun prohibitions still remain. We do not endorse a ban on handguns because effectively there is one now. A person can own a handgun only under very strict conditions. A person can transport it only under very strict conditions.

I notice with interest some new legislation being proposed by one of the provinces. I am glad to see provinces engage in this discussion. That province is saying that it should be illegal to carry a handgun on a bus or to take it to school, for instance, but it already is illegal to do that.

A point should be noted about virtually any country where we look at a handgun prohibition, where handguns were banned and ordered to be removed from the hands of all citizens, such as Ireland, the United Kingdom and Jamaica. We watched this debate play out in our newspapers about two weeks ago. In all countries, everybody was agreed that over the period of time in the last 10 years or so where these handgun eradications took place, firearm use, death by firearms and the use of firearms in crimes all went up and went up substantially. I agree with my colleague who just shared his comments. It is difficult to try to endorse what we are doing here with actual statistics.

There are some things that we are changing and that we have changed.

Last year, recognizing that thousands of people were out of compliance because of the fees that were involved in being registered themselves, we waived those fees to encourage people to come into compliance so we would know who is out there with a licence to own handguns. Literally thousands of people came back into compliance, back into the system that tells us who has a firearm licence. We changed that and it proved to be a positive thing.

We also are proposing, with an allotment from our budget this year, that $14.2 million go into screening people who want any type of firearm. It would be screening at a much higher level than before. A person is going to need to have an interview with a firearms officer or his or her designate. Also, the person's two references will have to be interviewed. It is going to be tougher from the screening point of view to get a firearm licence than it is to get a passport. We are going to be checking into that more thoroughly.

Again, I have heard colleagues on all sides of the House recommend other things that can be done to alert those in the health care professions, and in other ways, to the possibility that they are dealing with a person who possibly should not have any type of firearm. Those are things that we need to continue to look at.

We also have put the funding in place because we believe that we fight crime by having more police officers on our streets and in our communities. We have put in the funding for a thousand more RCMP officers from coast to coast. I am engaged right now in discussions with provincial ministers and territorial ministers for a cost sharing formula to have 2,500 more municipal officers on the street.

We are proceeding with arming our border officers so that no longer when there is a concern about someone who is armed and dangerous coming to the border do they vacate their posts and shut down the border. That is going to assist them and it sends a message to people south of the border who may be carrying firearms that they will be greeted by people who are equipped to handle that eventuality.

We are giving extra funding to the teams that work together across the border on the whole area of smuggling. Police officers and police associations talk about the huge percentage of firearms smuggled into the country. We are being very aggressive on increased resources to deal with that.

We are putting literally millions of dollars into the whole area of gang activity and it is especially directed toward youth who would be prone to being drawn into gang activity. We want to show them that there are other choices. Millions of dollars will be and are in the process of going to local jurisdictions and local organizations that can be effective in reaching out and providing prevention programs.

Everything I have just mentioned in terms of more police, going after smuggling and a more aggressive police presence on the street also has to be accompanied by legislation. As members know, we now have legislation dealing with the mandatory requirement for somebody to spend jail time if they commit a crime with a firearm. We think it is right that a multiple offender with a firearm should go to jail for at least seven years.

I was disappointed that most of the Liberals did not agree with that. They voted against that. I have never fully understood it. The Liberals want a long gun registry for farmers and duck hunters, but they do not want people who have committed more than one offence with a firearm to have to go to jail. I have not fully comprehended that and I will be listening to hear an explanation.

This type of aggressive action of going after the criminals and going after the problems is something that the city of Toronto police have done over the last year following the tragedies in that city. Crime with firearms has been drastically reduced, notwithstanding two very tragic incidents that have happened recently. The Toronto police are putting into practice what we endorse. We think that we will continue to see crime with firearms go down.

Bill C-21 talks about three basic things. It is mentioning and making it a matter of law that to acquire any type of firearm an individual is going to have to be licensed. For any type of firearm, that individual will have to be licensed.

The bill also lays out rules for how businesses are going to have to record and maintain the records of any firearm transactions.

Then, getting to the contentious point, the area of long guns themselves, we are proposing that the long gun registry of non-prohibited weapons be dismissed, be removed.

There are reasons for that. There are millions upon millions of long guns out there, primarily used by duck hunters and other types of hunters and sports shooters. There are literally millions of long guns. Rightly or not, and I will always assume good intentions on the part of members of Parliament, in the last decade the Liberals thought they could embark upon a journey to see every single one of those long guns all across the country registered, the long guns themselves, millions and millions of them.

It proved to be a disaster. I will quote the Auditor General herself. She said that the long gun registry was “significantly over budget” and that her office had evidence that they were looking for an accounting solution. She also said, “The quality of the information is doubtful”, in reference to the long gun registry, “and they don't have the mechanisms to verify it”.

She went on to say, “If a police officer is consulting it, he cannot be certain that the information is complete and exact”. That is quite an indictment, with $946 million spent up to that point to support a long gun registry that the Auditor General herself said simply did not give accurate data. It may have been well intended, but it was an impossible task.

That leads us to the question that often comes up about something called the CPIC system. It is a police information system. I consistently hear that it is used 5,000 times a day to check for firearm occupation or firearm possession. It is not.

That CPIC system is available to police officers all across the country. If they pull somebody over for speeding or they catch someone for jaywalking, whatever the serious or less serious nature of an event may be, they plug into the system. They have a person's car licence there. They want to see who it is they are dealing with.

Coincidental to that, there are also links, as those who are familiar with websites know, to a number of different sites from the CPIC system. One of those sites is linked to the firearms registry. If they want to hit the link button and go into that particular registry, they can, but this is predominantly used by police officers who want to check that system daily for any person they stop.

There are 5,000 police officers in Toronto alone and 6,500 in British Columbia. In a day, they use the CPIC system thousands of times, but in the vast majority of those times they are not checking whether or not a person has firearms. It is some other related activity on which they are checking.

I wish people would exercise caution when they use that number.

In terms of the facts of the matter related to the firearm registry, in 1998 there were 51 deaths as a result of long guns. In the year 2003, just before the long gun registry was fully implemented, finally, after the Liberals had tried for many years to do so, the number dropped. The number of long gun deaths dropped from 51 to 32 without the long gun registry. Two years after the long gun registry was in place, the numbers went up to 55.

I will not use a specious argument and say that the long gun registry caused more deaths, because I do not think it did, but it certainly did not reduce any. What it did do was take away millions upon millions of dollars of resources and time that police officers could have been more effectively using in all of their efforts to reduce crime with firearms.

There is no evidential coincidence at all that over the period it has been place the long gun registry has reduced crime with firearms in any way, shape or form. The only thing that reduces it is aggressive activity, with more police officers on the street and some of the other items I mentioned.

We often hear quotes from those who want to substantiate the reason why there should be a long gun registry of sports shooters, duck hunters and farmers. Often we hear that this is one group of elected people who endorsed this particular bill and this path that we are embarking on.

Let me quote some other people whom we never hear quoted. Samara McPhedran is the chairwoman of the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting and she says, “The ideologically driven registry has not reduced rates of violence crime”. That is a fact. She says that it “has not improved public safety”. That is a fact. She says that it “has not prevented criminals from illegally obtaining firearms”.

She goes on to say:

Massive ongoing expenditure of public funds upon an ineffective system achieves nothing more than the misdirection of resources away from where they are urgently needed--social services, education, health care and policing.

We endorse what she says there 100%.

This is something that is not partisan or politically driven. I remember that the member of Parliament for Yukon, the Liberal member, talked about being very passionately against the long gun registry. He said, “One thing that upset Canadians, even those that support the registry, was the administrative mismanagement”. He said, “That made people think it was a gross waste of money”.

The Liberal member for Kings—Hants, who was also a federal Liberal leadership candidate, said,“We should be getting rid of the long-gun registry”. He said, “A billion dollars would have been better spent on health care or education or, for instance, in strengthening the RCMP”. That is from a Liberal member who was running for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

The Liberal member for Newmarket—Aurora was previously a Conservative, and I respect that. She ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party and now is a Liberal and I understand she is stepping down. That is certainly her choice and I respect that, but she said something interesting. She said, “As a mother, I am scared by gun violence”.

She said, “I believe we must protect law-abiding citizens from criminals, which is why we should increase the minimum sentence for violent crimes involving guns”. She is one of the few Liberals who think repeat firearm offenders should actually go to jail. She went on to say, “I believe it is not a crime for law-abiding farmers, ranchers and hunters who use firearms a as tool”. She said, “It is wrong the federal government has penalized them”.

Those are good quotes.

The Liberal member for Huron—Bruce is on record as showing once again that the gun registry does not work and makes that point very clearly.

Many in the NDP share the government's view on this. The member for Winnipeg Centre said that he and likely half of the NDP caucus would back a Conservative bill to scrap the registry.

The MP for Skeena—Bulkley Valley has said that he will keep his promise to abolish the gun registry. He is a man of his word and I believe he will. He says that there is no uncertainty about that. Politically, this view is shared by many.

We often hear the term “the police” want the long gun registry maintained. A few senior officers in a few associations, for a variety of reasons not totally understood, have said that they want to see the long gun registry maintained, but people should be honest. When they say that the police want the long gun registry maintained, at the very least they should say a few police officers are on record as wanting the long gun registry maintained.

For instance, the president of the Winnipeg Police Association said, “the Winnipeg Police Association has never supported the long gun registry”.

The Manitoba Police Association passed a motion saying that Ottawa should scrap the long gun registry.

The executive officer of the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers, about the long gun registry, said:

We've been against it right from the beginning...That's been our position since 1994 and it hasn't changed—we've been in opposition to our brothers at the Canadian Professional Police Association (on the registry).

The president of the Calgary Police Association is also opposed to the long gun registry, but he is proposing mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes. That is what we are proposing.

An officer from the Fredericton police said that officers responding to a potentially dangerous situation always assumed there was a firearm involved. He said that they always took the corrective practices approaching a domicile that there could be a firearm involved. He went on to say, “We don't check with the registry during a gun-related incident”. They have been trained to always assume that possibility is there.

It is not just western police, if somebody is reflecting on that. I have talked about some in Fredericton. The deputy chief of the Toronto police said that the money spent on registering shotguns should be used instead on stricter law enforcement and social programs to keep kids out of gangs. He said, “The $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere. It really has done nothing to solve the crime problem. The gun registry registers legal guns. Gangsters do not register their guns”.

Brian Ford, former Ottawa police chief, supported the registry at one point but makes an interesting statement. He says he supported it because he did not know the Liberals were lying to him. He stated, “I was assured by government—it's on budget”. He said, “They were lying. It bothers me. I was telling people what I believed to be the truth”. That is a dramatic statement from the former police chief in Ottawa.

Former Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino, now head of the Ontario Police, supported scrapping the long gun registry. He recognized that forcing law-abiding Canadians to register their rifles did nothing to reduce gun crimes and the money would be better spent on front line police resources.

Chief Bill Blair has done much to reduce crime with firearms in Toronto. He is not taking the position precisely on the long gun registry, but says this:

—we know the gun problem in Toronto is overwhelmingly a problem of illegal handguns....Gangsters who carry guns in the city of Toronto do not register those guns so any changes in the gun registry are not going to have a significant impact on our efforts to control the operation and use of illegal handguns on our streets.

I have one more quote. I have quoted moms who have lost sons, parliamentarians and police. We should listen to the words of a former gang member. Former Toronto founder of Vice Lords and gang member said, “The gun registry has not had any impact on the availability of guns to gangs. If you want a gun, you can get one in a day, a couple of hours maybe”.

Across the board there is a consensus that we need to do all the things we are going to do to reduce crime with firearms, and I have gone through them. However, we also need to eliminate the long gun registry and let those precious resources get into the hands of our police officers.

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we were joking a little as I finished that I was just getting wound up, and I was getting wound up around being critical of the government.

I want to go back to how I started my comments this afternoon, which was about trying to reduce the passion around this issue. Although I am being critical of the government because I think it has gone down the wrong road on this, I want it to be seen as constructive criticism rather than a diatribe against it.

However, I am concerned and I actually was angry at the government because of the process it embarked upon with regard to Bill C-21.

We know that the Conservatives sought legal opinions shortly after they were elected. They were told by legal counsel at that time that they had to bring in a bill. They looked at various ways, through regulation or other methodologies, that would have avoided a vote in this House. Ultimately, they determined that they did not have a choice, that the democratic process had put the long gun registry in place and only the democratic process in the form of a bill and a vote in this House could do away with it.

As I had said earlier, the Conservatives introduced the bill into the House exactly a year ago today and have not done anything since then to bring it forward, which is anti-democratic. I am bothered that they took that approach. However, they compounded their inaction with regard to Bill C-21, in the sense of bringing it forward, having a debate and having a vote twice, by publishing and putting into place amnesties for individuals who had long guns who would no longer be required to register them. If they came up for re-registration, they would not need to do that.

There are a couple of things with that. The amnesty provisions within the Criminal Code, in my opinion, were never designed for that purpose and it is really abusive to use them in that way. Amnesty is to be used in very limited ways, mostly for individual crimes rather than in these circumstances where a whole group of people were exempted from the application of this legislation as it existed and as it continues to exist today.

They granted that amnesty and at the same time made the decision not to collect fees. That has cost the Canadian taxpayers now over $20 million per year. We are into the second year and we are approaching the $40 million mark that it has cost the Canadian taxpayers.

The obvious question is why the government would have taken this approach, given the Conservative Party's long antipathy toward the long gun registry. Why would it sit on this? The very simple answer is that it knows it does not have the votes in this House to support this piece of legislation, even at second reading and to send it to committee.

Instead of that, it has engaged in a campaign to avoid its democratic responsibility to bring this matter to this House in a timely fashion and to let this House decide, to let the elected officials in this country decide whether in fact we were going to have a long gun registry. It has avoided doing that and I am highly critical of it for doing that.

Even though we are having this debate tonight until 10 p.m., I do not see it going any further than that. We will not have a vote on it this week and the House is scheduled to end on the 22nd, this Friday. The House will return in the fall and I have no sense that this bill will be brought back in the fall. To some significant degree, the government is avoiding the issue.

The essential point I want to make is that we need to lower the passion around this issue in this country and this does not do it. In fact, it is just the opposite. It feeds it, both for those of us who are opposed to the gun registry and those of us who support it.

In the remaining time I would like to briefly address the bill. The bill is pretty straightforward. Although it is some 10 or 12 pages long, it is very basic. It would amend the Firearms Act. It is legislation that refers to long guns and in effect it would systematically dismantle the long gun registry in this country if this bill were to go ahead and become law at some point in the future.That is all it would do. I suppose I should not say that because it would do a bit more, but that is essentially what the bill would do, which why those of us who feel the long gun registry performs a function are opposed to it.

In that regard, there is no question that the debate around whether this has reduced violent crime in this country is a debate. There is not sufficient evidence on either side to absolutely control that question. There are strong arguments that I voice on a regular basis that have convinced me that the long gun registry has had a substantial impact in reducing violence in this country.

The evidence, I believe, is incontrovertible that the suicide rate has been reduced substantially since 1996 when the long gun registry began to have an impact. Certainly in the period of time from 2001 to 2003 when it really began to have an impact, the suicide rate went down.

The accidental death rate dropped dramatically, in the 20 percentile range, as a result of the controls that the long gun registry imposes upon the storage, transportation, et cetera, of long guns.

It is interesting as well to look at what happened. It was one of those unintended consequences. I certainly did not hear anyone during those debates on the long gun registry legislation speak to this. One of the unintended consequences of the legislation, because it costs money to register, or at least it did before the Conservative government got hold of it, was that it dissuaded people from keeping their long guns when they had to register them. It also had the effect of dissuading people from buying long guns knowing that they would have the ongoing cost of registration.

In that regard, there was a pretty extensive survey done at one point that showed that in the previous year of the survey being conducted slightly more than half of the people who owned long guns in this country did not use them. We have this image portrayed of us making it difficult for hunters to use their long guns for hunting and other recreational purposes, including target practice. The reality is, from what we have been able to ascertain, that continues to be the case. A large number of long guns, slightly more than 50%, in any given year, are not used at all by the owners of those guns,.

To go back to the point of that unintended consequence, when the legislation came into play, people who had to begin to pay fees gave up their long guns rather than pay the fees because they were not using them and had no use for them.

One of the fears, of course, if the long gun registry is done away with and the requirements for storage and the sequence that we follow in terms of enforcing and patrolling that legislation, is that we will see an increase in mishaps, at least in accidental deaths. Suicide is another issue but the fear is that accidental deaths will go up because casual owners, not the hunter who is devoted to a recreational pastime, but the casual owners, who on a whim in many cases buy long guns, will not be careful in how they store the guns and, in effect, protect their families, friends and the environment from the accidental use of the guns. We will see an increase in accidental deaths and for that reason alone it is well worthwhile to keep the registration in place.

One of the other statistics that is very clear, which my colleague from the Bloc mentioned in his address, is that the number of violent crimes within domestic settings between partners, almost all of it males serviced on females, has dropped dramatically as we got rid of that many guns. We got them out of the households where they should not have been. We restricted the use by other people who should not have been owning them.

Some of that will continue. I do not want to mislead the public in that regard. This legislation would continue to require people who own guns to be registered and screened.

What should we be doing to improve the registry of both handguns and long guns? I believe the government has gone wrong by spending so much energy, including the amnesty and including forgiving the fees. Rather than doing that, if it had been spending time and effort and doing analyses of what we should be doing, we probably would have had some significant impact.

I want to talk about the Dawson situation. The long gun that was used, which looked like an assault rifle, at one point could have been banned as an assault rifle because there are provisions within the legislation now that say this type of a gun, if it looks this way, which is the kind of wording and essence of the legislation and the regulations, is banned. That was during the Liberal government administration. There were a number of opportunities but because of the opposition that was coming from those people who opposed the long guns, the Liberals were not prepared to take those administrative decisions to get guns like that out of the hands of people who, as my colleague from the Bloc said, have this fascination with guns.

I do not want to taint all owners of guns that way but it was one of the places where we could have done better as a government. We did not do that because of the opposition to the long gun registry. We should be doing that. There are other assault rifles appearing in this country that should be on our prohibited list and no one should be allowed to own them, rifles similar to the one used in the Dawson killings.

We should be tightening up quite dramatically the screening of everyone, whether they own a handgun or a long gun. There are simply too many other possibilities. I want to point to one of the suggestions that has been made, which has come out of the province of Quebec, around screening people by getting the gun clubs more on side, requiring them to provide information and, in particular, concerns, if they have them, over individuals who have gone through the training process that they needed to go through in order to get themselves and their weapons registered in this country, requiring them to do more in that regard.

The financial reason that they should be required to do that is because they benefit from the use of guns in this country at the clubs they run, whether they are private or non-profit. They have an additional responsibility and I believe it is one that we should be imposing upon them and should be enforced. That would have some significant difference. Again, in the Dawson situation we should have done additional screening with regard to military records. It is quite clear in that case that it would have brought forward to the registrar that this individual had a problem and that may very well have prevented that.

We can go down the list. There are a number of other areas where we could be doing much better. The concentration that we have done on simply getting rid of the long gun registry is a major error. We should be doing much more work in these other areas of screening and getting other guns out of circulation that really have no purpose in a society such as Canada.

I urge all members of this House in the debate that will be taking place through the rest of this evening to try to limit the passion, look at the facts and to argue from whichever side, because there are facts on both sides of this, but to reduce the passion and hopefully that will spill out into the rest of the country.

[The Deputy Speaker, NDP, Bill Blaikie]

I believe the hon. member for Windsor--Tecumseh has 14 minutes left in his speech to Bill C-21.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have the opportunity to participate in this debate because I want to be on the record that I do support gun control in Canada. I see Bill C-21 as an attempt to weaken the gun control regime that we have in Canada.

I have two brief questions for the member for Marc-Aurèle-Fortin. I wonder if he could comment on why it took the Conservatives so long to bring the bill forward for debate in the House. They tabled the bill over a year ago. The member for Yorkton—Melville talked about how he waited for 12 years to debate this issue in the House of Commons. One full year of that was with his own government having legislation tabled before the House.

I am also glad that the member talked about the culture of responsibility that registration provides in Canada.

I also know that Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, talked about it in a slightly different way. She said:

Registration is essential to ensure that licensed gun owners are held accountable for their guns.

I think that is another way of looking at the responsibility issue talking about being accountable for specific weapons.

I wonder if the member might comment on those two things.

[Sue Barnes, Liberal, London West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted).

The bill received first reading in the House of Commons on June 19, 2006. Its primary objective is to repeal the requirement to obtain and hold a registration certificate for a non-restricted firearm, commonly called long guns, what we would know as a shotgun or a rifle.

It is only now that we are finally debating the bill at second reading, a full year later. The government is clearly dragging its feet, aware that it does not have the support for the legislation in the House.

Under Bill C-21, the registrar of firearms would no longer issue or keep records of registration certificates for non-restricted firearms. Provisions of the Firearms Act regarding these expiry and revocation of registration certificates are accordingly amended, as are provisions setting out the documentation that is involved when lending, importing or exporting non-restricted firearms.

Although registration certificates would no longer be involved when transferring, selling or giving away a firearm, a person transferring a non-restricted firearm to an individual would be required to seek an authorization from the chief firearms officer who will verify that the recipient is entitled to possess the firearm.

As a registration certificate would no longer be required to possess a non-restricted firearm, certain offences in the Firearms Act are amended or even repealed.

The Criminal Code is also amended so that the failure to hold a registration certificate for a non-restricted firearm does not give rise to any of the offences relating to the unauthorized possession of a firearm and does not allow police to seize a firearm. This is all part of the Conservatives' bill.

Although Bill C-21 would remove the need to hold a registration certificate for non-restricted firearms, it would not change the requirement for all individuals to hold a licence in order to possess a firearm and, therefore, to undergo a background check and pass any required safety course.

Additionally, Bill C-21 would allow for regulations to require firearm businesses to record transactions relating to non-restricted firearms.

Even before Bill C-21 was introduced, commentators expressed divergent views on the anticipated legislation. Many stated that abolition of the long gun registry would be contrary to the government's general anti-crime message and therefore opposed by the police, public health officials and groups against domestic violence.

Conversely, the firearms organizations welcomed the expected removal of criminal sanctions when normally law-abiding citizens inadvertently fail to possess required documentation for their firearms. We have two divides here.

During a news conference announcing Bill C-21, the Minister of Public Safety stated:

We have found out too painfully over the last number of years that the effort of trying to track down every single long gun in Canada has been ineffective, costly and wasteful and has not led to a reduction of crime with guns.

He goes on to say:

Duck hunters, farmers and law-abiding gun owners do not pose a threat to Canadians. Criminals do.

Commentators have pointed out that the gun registry did not prevent recent high profile shooting deaths, notably the four RCMP officers in Alberta in March 2005, a teenage girl in Toronto in December 2005, a police officer in Laval in December 2005 and two RCMP constables in Saskatchewan in July 2006.

At the same time, the proponents of gun control have referred to these tragedies, and they are tragedies, as a reason for strengthening, not weakening, the firearms registry.

Among others, the Coalition for Gun Control, the Attorney General for Ontario and Quebec's Minister of Public Safety are against any dismantling of the firearms registry. Police organizations, both the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Canadian Police Associations, are in favour of maintaining the firearms registry as police do query over 5,000 times a day.

I know the members opposite can quote individual policemen who have other opinions but the two organizations certainly are on side for keeping the registry complete.

With regard to the total cost of the gun registry, often cited, and I heard this many times, at $2 billion by the Conservative government members, we know that it has been placed at less than $1 billion over more than 10 years by the Auditor General's report.

Proponents of the firearms registry have blamed cost overruns on the opponents of the registry who have forced the government to deal with non-compliant gun owners, as well as to initiate or respond to expensive court challenges and proceedings. They also say that the computer glitches and administrative problems have now been resolved so that abolishing the registry would make no sense now.

There is no doubt that it was an expensive setup but changing it after the investment is made is not smart policy either.

It has further been argued that removing the requirement to register non-restricted firearms will save only $3 million a year and that $22.7 million in revenue a year will be lost by the government if it stops charging for the various fees involved or rebating them.

It has been argued also that because long guns are the ones most frequently found in homes, the long gun registry has successfully reduced domestic violence, suicides and accidents. According to a recent Swiss study, a decrease in gun injuries and gun deaths since 1995 shows that Canada may be saving up to $1.4 billion a year in violence related costs.

Gun laws are an important part of public safety in Canada. They are not the only solution but they are a part of the solution. In spite of the common use of the word “registry”, the 1995 legislation set up a comprehensive screening and licensing system for all gun owners, as well as the registration of firearms, which did include recording details of what guns individuals owned.

The bulk of the $1 billion over 10-plus years was spent on screening and licensing gun owners. Most of the annual costs of gun control in Canada and about $65 million at last count are spent on screening and licensing gun owners, as well as maintaining a system of continuous eligibility.

The RCMP recently stated that the dismantling of the registration of rifles and shotguns would, at most, save $3 million a year.

In May 2006, the Conservatives introduced an amnesty to effectively eliminate the need to renew firearm licences and to register rifles and shotguns. A rifle or a shotgun in the wrong hands is just as deadly as a handgun. The Ruger Mini-14 rifle used at the Polytechnique is still sold today as an unrestricted rifle, one that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has referred to in the past as a duck gun.

[Garry Breitkreuz, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be able to lead off the debate on Bill C-21. I have been waiting 12 years for this day. That is when we started putting an end to the Liberals' infamous $2 billion boondoggle on the firearms program. This is the day we start to dismantle Bill C-68 and return our gun laws to the way they were in 1995.

There was no evidence that those gun control laws were effective, but at least they were only costing taxpayers $12.8 million a year, not $100 million. This is the day we start putting an end to the Liberal gun control laws that do not work, do not save lives, do not reduce violent crime, do not improve public safety and do not keep guns out of the hands of criminals.

Finally, this is the day we start putting in place weapons control laws that have been proven statistically to save lives, to reduce violent crime, to improve public safety and to help to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of criminals.

I want to warn Canadians of the blather they are going to hear from the other parties on this issue, likely today. Their gun control proposals sound too good to be true and they are. They may sound good, but they are not sound policies. Policies that are driven strictly by emotions may actually do more harm than good. They may divert resources away from more useful endeavours. Emotions may encourage us to act to solve a problem, but they can be harmful if they make us act irrationally. Because Bill C-68 was not based on factual evidence, it has done more harm than good.

I intend today to expose that flaw in our response to crime in Canada. Canadians need gun control policies that are effective as well as cost effective, but Liberals have not let logic, facts and truth get in the way of a good sound bite or a scary political advertisement at election time. The truth is they want votes more than they want effective gun laws and this is hurting our nation.

This is not a right versus left issue on the political spectrum. It is a right versus wrong issue to crime control.

Let us start with the colossal overspending by the Liberals on implementing the Firearms Act. On April 24, 1995 then justice minister Allan Rock appeared before the Standing Committee on Justice and promised Parliament and the Canadian taxpayers that implementing the Firearms Act would cost $2.2 million over five years.

On May 17, 2006 the Auditor General of Canada reported that the Liberals had spent more than a billion tax dollars over 12 years to implement that program, and guess what? It is still not completely implemented.

In a letter to me dated June 15, 2006, the Auditor General confirmed that her audit of the firearms program costs did not include enforcement costs, compliance costs, economic costs, and unreported indirect costs to other departments. She also confirmed that the Liberal government's cost benefit analysis of the firearms program and the Liberals' 115 page economic impact study are still cabinet secrets as they have been since 2003 and 1999 respectively. So we still do not know the real costs.

In his 1993 report, the previous auditor general, Denis Desautels, criticized the government for moving forward with new gun control regulations without “important data, needed to assess the potential benefits and future effectiveness of the regulations”, and recommended, “it is essential that the Department of Justice evaluate the effectiveness of the program again”. But it never did.

Political posturing overrode common sense. Mr. Desautels' findings 12 years ago seem very similar to Auditor General Sheila Fraser's report in May 2006. Paragraph 4.36 of her report states:

In particular, the Centre has not set any performance targets and has provided few examples of its outcomes. Instead of reporting the key results achieved, the Centre describes its activities and services.

Paragraph 4.38 added:

The Centre does not show how these activities help minimize risks to public safety with evidence-based outcomes such as reduced deaths, injuries, and threats from firearms.

That quotation is the most important part of my speech because it exposes the tactics used by those that defend the gun registry. This appalling lack of evidence of effectiveness was also confirmed by the Liberal government's response to order paper question No. 19 on November 29, 2004. Statistics Canada's statement was in bold text and underlined that the specific impact of the firearms program or the firearms registry cannot be isolated from other factors.

In fact, their own statistical evidence proves that the Liberal gun control policies and programs have been a dismal failure. Last December the Library of Parliament obtained a special set of tables for me from Statistics Canada showing firearms related statistics for the total number of homicides committed in Canada between 1997 and 2005.

Consider these Statistics Canada findings: Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 118, or 2.27%, were committed with a registered gun. Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 63, or 1.21%, were committed with a firearm registered to the accused murderer. Of the 5,194 homicides committed between 1997 and 2005, only 111, or 2.14%, were committed by a person who held a valid firearms licence. Of the two million licensed gun owners in Canada, only 111, that is 0.00555%, used their firearm to murder somebody.

This analysis shows what almost everyone in Canada knows, with the exception of the opposition parties in this House, that criminals do not register their guns and cannot be bothered to qualify for a firearms licence. Sadly, these statistics prove the main point I have been making for the last 12 years, that laying a piece of paper beside a gun does not prevent it from being used to murder someone. These statistics represent a failure of gun registration and gun owner licensing as cost effective measures to save lives, improve public safety or keep firearms out of the hands of people who should not have them.

On November 8, 2006 Statistics Canada released its 2005 homicide report. Here are some of the highlights which show that criminals are the real problem, not the type of weapons they use against their victims. There are two things to keep in mind as I read the highlights from the StatsCan report. Number one, the RCMP have been registering handguns since 1934 and fully automatic firearms, sawed off rifles and shotguns have been banned for decades. Number two, in 1995 when the Liberals passed Bill C-68 they banned some 555,000 handguns and required the licensing of all gun owners and the registration of all rifles and shotguns.

Two billion dollars later, this is the result according to Statistics Canada in 2005: We have the highest homicide rate in nearly a decade. The firearm homicide rate is the same as it was 20 years ago. Sixty-six per cent of murders in 2005 were committed without a firearm; 58% of the firearms homicides were committed with handguns; 9% were committed with banned fully automatic firearms, sawed off rifles and shotguns; and only 30% of recovered firearms were registered.

Here are the more relevant homicide statistics that parliamentarians should be focused on: Sixty-four per cent of the accused murderers had a criminal record, 6% for homicide. I have to ask what were these people doing back on the street? Seventy-three per cent of the accused murderers had been drinking or on drugs. Thirteen per cent of the accused murderers were mentally ill; 45% of the murders occurred while the accused were committing another crime; and 22% of murder victims were involved in illegal activities.

Let us turn to an example of the opposition parties using false statistics in an attempt to keep our government from replacing useless gun control laws with truly effective ones. That is why we are here today.

In June 2006 the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security debated a Bloc motion calling for the retention of the long gun registry. A number of opposition MPs repeatedly quoted a statistic to justify their defence of the gun registry. The researchers in the Library of Parliament later proved there was no evidence to support their claims. They claimed “71% of the firearms assaults perpetrated against women involved long guns”. That is a false statistic. The Library of Parliament researcher could not find the source for that statistic but she did find two different sets of statistics to contradict it. The researcher reported:

With regard to your request concerning statistics presented during the 8th meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, specifically the statement that 71% of firearms assaults perpetrated against women involve long guns (rifle and shotgun), compared to 29% of the assaults perpetrated against men, I have not been able to find the source of these statistics.

I do not have time to read the whole Library of Parliament quotation, but it clearly notes that the number was not 71%. It was 17.1%. Those were misleading statistics by the opposition. While we deplore domestic violence regardless of the type of weapons used, there are far more effective measures the federal government could take up to help spouses living in violent households.

While doing research on domestic violence, we keep finding news stories about women's shelters not being able to accommodate abused women showing up at their doorsteps. The Library of Parliament sent me the most recent statistics Canada reports on shelters for abused women that showed the tragic truth ignored by the Liberals for years: “On the snapshot day, about one-fifth of all shelters referred about 221 women and 112 children elsewhere. Two-thirds of those referrals were made because shelters were full. Eight in ten abused women in shelters were there to escape a current or former spouse common law partner”.

While the Liberals were wasting over a billion tax dollars on the gun registry over the last 10 years, hundreds of women and children were being turned away from women's shelters every day. I do not need to remind the House of the massive cuts to social transfer payments to the provinces that were made by the previous Liberal government during the 1990s.

Another analysis of domestic violence just completed by the Library's parliamentary research branch showed spousal homicides committed each year have remained virtually unchanged over the last 10 years. The futility of it all is driven home by the fact that 70% of the women murdered by a family member over the last 10 years were murdered with something other than a firearm. These domestic violence reports expose 10 years of Liberal deception on the firearms file.

Women should be outraged that they were treated so shoddily when one of the solutions to combat family violence was obvious and blatantly ignored for so many years.

If we were telling people the truth, they would be telling us that helping abused women is more important than simply laying a piece of paper beside our guns, but then the opposition parties will claim that the police use the system thousands of times a day. Members have likely heard that claim.

Here is what the Auditor General, Sheila Fraser, said on May 31, 2006, when she appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security:

I believe that the indicator of the 5,000 hits a day is more of what we call an activity indicator than an indicator of effectiveness. So those law enforcement people who use the registry would have to give an assessment as to whether or not it was useful to them.

There could be 5,000 hits, and they could say, yes, it was very helpful and helped me in this way; or they could say, no, it wasn't helpful because the information wasn't correct. It takes an additional degree of interpretation or information to assess effectiveness.

Members will understand why I say we should have the Auditor General audit firearms law to see if it is cost effective. That is what we should be doing.

Here is what the RCMP commissioner said on June 7, 2006, when he appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security:

They're automatic CPIC checks that they automatically go over. I don't have the number of how many are direct checks.

Guess what? The Liberals have known this deceptive statistic for a very long time and yet chose not to be upfront and honest with Parliament or the Canadian people.

On December 3, 2004, the then registrar of firearms emailed the then director of public policy with the Canada Firearms Centre and said, “In sum, CFRO”, the gun registry, “is indeed automatically queried in many cases when police officers query CPIC”, meaning the police computer system.

This email from the firearms interest police coordinator to the registrar of firearms states:

Note that the CFRO auto query of addresses is based on any valid address query response returned through their Intergraph System query. This means that if a parking ticket had a valid address and was returned...the Intergraph System, it would generate a CFRO address query.

This quote is from a young RCMP officer in my riding who was told by his superiors to stop sending requests to the gun registry before attending domestic disputes because he was “putting his life in danger”. The reason, he was told, was that “the usual 'no guns' response to his query 'creates a false sense of security'”.

It may surprise many MPs on the other side that the majority of front line police officers do not support the gun registry nor do they use it. Why should they, when it is so full of errors?

In December 2005, I released Liberal government documents showing that the number of unverified firearms in the gun registry had increased from 5.1 million to 5.6 million over the last two and a half years, and there are only seven million firearms in the registry. The more millions wasted, the further they fell behind. So much for the Canadian Police Association's resolutions in 1999 and 2004 demanding that data entered in the gun registry be “verified as accurate”.

Other Canadian Police Association demands from 1999 that have not been met are as follows: that the Auditor General of Canada conduct a thorough review of the firearms registration system and release a public report on the findings to the people of Canada; that the CPA receive confirmation that the registration system has the capacity to meet the legislative timeframes established for firearms registration; that the CPA receive confirmation that the cost recovery plan for registration can be achieved; that meaningful consultations with the user group take place to ensure that the concerns of stakeholders are addressed in the review process; and that the CPA receive confirmation that the implementation and operation of the system is not taking officers off the street.

It is unfortunate that we are playing politics with public safety.

Now let us get to the meat of Bill C-21, our government's first step toward implementing our party's firearms and property rights policies passed by our delegates in Montreal in March of 2005.

Our firearms policy states:

A Conservative government will repeal Canada's costly gun registry legislation and work with the provinces and territories on cost-effective gun control programs designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while respecting the rights of law-abiding Canadians to own and use firearms responsibly. Measures will include: mandatory minimum sentences for the criminal use of firearms; strict monitoring of high-risk individuals; crackdown on the smuggling; safe storage provisions; firearms safety training; a certification screening system for all those wishing to acquire firearms legally; and putting more law enforcement officers on our streets.

I support Bill C-21 because it is the first step toward fixing all that is wrong with Canada's gun control laws. Getting this bill through second reading will get it into committee where the truth can finally be uncovered and we can start building evidence based and truly cost effective measures to control the criminal use of all weapons, not just guns.

Legislation is seldom perfect. Many people support the gun registry because they think it is gun control. I challenge everyone to look below the surface on this issue and not form an opinion based on a superficial impression that some may have created. The long gun registry does not enhance public safety and that is why it should be repealed.

I appreciate the opportunity—

[Stockwell Day, Conservative, Minister of Public Safety]

moved that Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Public Safety

[Serge Ménard, Bloc, Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC]

Mr. Speaker, it does not work, any more than the seven-year minimum sentence for importing marijuana did in the past.

The only logical choice for the government is to withdraw its Bill C-21, something being called for not only by victims' parents, but also by police, who still consider the registry to be an effective tool for prevention.

Will the Minister of Public Safety finally get out of his ideological bubble and withdraw the bill?

[Joe Comartin, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Do I have the floor? Thank you.

Bill C-21 is coming up for debate in the House this afternoon. I assume several of us will want to be there to debate that, and I can't be here tomorrow afternoon after question period. I'm in Montreal as soon after question period as I can leave. So why don't we just do it on Thursday when we are already scheduled?