Bill C-71 (Historical)

An Act to amend certain Acts and Regulations in relation to firearms

Part 1 of this Act amends the Firearms Act to, among other things,
(a) remove the reference to the five-year period, set out in subsection 5(2) of that Act, that applies to the mandatory consideration of certain eligibility criteria for holding a licence;
(b) require, when a non-restricted firearm is transferred, that the transferee’s firearms licence be verified by the Registrar of Firearms and that businesses keep certain information related to the transfer; and
(c) remove certain automatic authorizations to transport prohibited and restricted firearms.
Part 1 also amends the Criminal Code to repeal the authority of the Governor in Council to prescribe by regulation that a prohibited or restricted firearm be a non-restricted firearm or that a prohibited firearm be a restricted firearm and, in consequence, the Part
(a) repeals certain provisions of regulations made under the Criminal Code; and
(b) amends the Firearms Act to grandfather certain individuals and firearms, including firearms previously prescribed as restricted or non-restricted firearms in those provisions.
Furthermore, Part 1 amends section 115 of the Criminal Code to clarify that firearms and other things seized and detained by, or surrendered to, a peace officer at the time a prohibition order referred to in that section is made are forfeited to the Crown.
Part 2, among other things,
(a) amends the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act, by repealing the amendments made by the Economic Action Plan 2015 Act, No. 1, to retroactively restore the application of the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act to the records related to the registration of non-restricted firearms until the day on which this enactment receives royal assent;
(b) provides that the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act continue to apply to proceedings that were initiated under those Acts before that day until the proceedings are finally disposed of, settled or abandoned; and
(c) directs the Commissioner of Firearms to provide the minister of the Government of Quebec responsible for public security with a copy of such records, at that minister’s request.

Firearms Act

[Bob Nault, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

Mr. Speaker, as I said before, it is pretty clear that the Conservatives have been using this issue as a wedge issue to raise funds, for example, to make money.

I want to read something for the members across the way. This was a unanimous amendment to the legislation at committee. I understand that it was a Tory amendment: “For greater certainty nothing in this Act shall be construed so as to permit or require the registration of non-restricted firearms.”

I do not know how many times we have to go down this road of saying that it is not a gun registry. As I said before, the mental health issue was brought forward by Conservative MP James Moore in a private member's bill. It was felt that it would be good for the chief firearms officer to be able to go beyond five years to look at the whole issue of mental health, because it is an issue in our society.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, my friend took painstaking lengths to talk about how there has been a rural and urban divide in debate on firearms. However, never did the debate get so unfair and so divisive than under Allan Rock, his cabinet colleague from the Chrétien government. They proposed the long-gun registry as a tool for public safety, and used images and language that demonized lawful owners, including owners in Kenora, northern Ontario, across this country. To have a PAL and have the right and responsibility that comes with firearms ownership, they have to be the most law-abiding citizens.

I hate when Liberal MPs take tragic events in the United States or a tragic gang shooting in Toronto, and suggest we need to do a long-gun registry, or the backdoor store registry as a means of public safety.

The Liberals are implying that sport shooters, hunters, and lawful owners are the problem. The problem is illegally smuggled weapons from the United States, and nothing in the bill touches that. Similar to Allan Rock, we see again the Liberals demonizing law-abiding people, and not standing up for the rights and responsibilities of people in their own ridings.

[Bob Nault, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think the member has been around long enough to have seen the divisive debate that took place in the Mulroney government. It was a sight to behold from the opposition, to the point where every day one of the members would come to me looking to find a way to deal with this as a rural member in a very urban caucus. That is what happens when we are in government. We have a very urban caucus because there are not as many rural members, so it is a divisive debate. We all agree with that, but that is not what we are debating tonight.

I was making the point that no matter who brings forward legislation, whether it is the Conservatives, the Liberals, or the NDP, it always will be divisive when it comes to firearms, because of the rural component versus the urban view of firearms.

My view is that this is a good piece of legislation. It has virtually no effect on law-abiding gun owners. This is intended to improve the ability to do background checks on people who should not own firearms because of mental issues.

In the United States, almost every week, we see massive killings, because people should not own firearms because they are not mentally competent to do so. That is what this legislation does. That is why the opposition members should vote for it. It makes a difference in—

[The Deputy Speaker, Bruce Stanton]

At the end of the five minutes, I will remind members that when the speech has been presented from one side of the House, the preference is given to the opposite side for questions and comments. If there is time, certainly I will come back to the party of the member who has just delivered their remarks. However, I have noticed members who are standing and will endeavour to make sure they get an opportunity to participate.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe.

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I was astounded that my colleague from Kenora would actually accuse someone like me of having mental health issues, because I am one of the law-abiding firearms owners he is talking about. On the fact that he is suggesting that changes to the law made in Bill C-71 would address the issues in the United States, I might suggest that he would be better off pursuing a Congress seat than representing the fine folks in Kenora. To imply that making the changes we need to make here in Canada is the result of U.S. legislative policies is simply misguided.

I wish I actually did not have to rise in the House today to talk about this. I wish that the public safety committee, when the current government first took office, had been tasked with actually going across Canada and talking to people. If we were going to have a serious conversation about creating a safer Canada and increasing public safety, we could have had a thoughtful discussion. We could have had a less partisan discussion on this issue. Instead, the bill just came out of the blue. Bill C-71 came late in the mandate of the government after several years of trying to get electoral reform through. The Liberals cannot pass their marijuana legislation without the Senate pushing it back. They are trying to rig the election system again through Bill C-76.

This is where we are at. We are three years into a four-year mandate, ramming legislation through with a handful of hours at second reading, one meeting with the minister and bureaucrats at committee, and three more meetings with a handful of witnesses, a mere fraction of the number of people and organizations that wanted to be represented and have their voices heard. Now we just had notice from the government House leader that the Liberals are going to move time allocation, not only at the report stage of this bill but also at third reading, making sure that the voices that are reasonable and need to be heard will not be so that they can push through what can only be described as an emotionally based agenda when it comes to firearms.

There is not a single member of Parliament in this place who would not do the right thing if given the right options and good advice and empirical evidence to suggest that the legislation was going to improve safety for Canadians. If that actually happened, if that was the approach the government had actually taken, we might have come up with some legislation that had unanimous support. In fact, my colleague from Kenora who just spoke suggested the mental health side of things. There is nothing in Bill C-71 that would actually address mental health issues. There is nothing in Bill C-71 that would address any co-operation between federal investigators, law enforcement agencies, or firearms officers and anything to with any of the provincial mental health acts.

Here is why this bill is so offensive to the law-abiding firearms community. The Liberals say that nothing about this is a firearms registry. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a previous life, before I came here, I was a tenured faculty member at Red Deer College teaching systems analysis and design. I was a database architect and a database administrator before I came here. I understand information technology. I understand how to cross-reference information. Whether it is a distributed computing system or the technology we have today, with clouds of information out there, it is very easy.

The bureaucrats, the minister, and the police officers who came before the committee made it painstakingly obvious to anyone who was paying attention that with Bill C-71, every time there was a transaction and a firearm changed hands, whether through a sale, an estate inheritance, a gift, or lending or borrowing, Canadians would have to get permission from the government. If they were at a gun show on the weekend, if they were going to Cabela's, if they were selling a firearm to their neighbour, or if they were lending their rifle to their hunting buddy to go on a trip and were not on that trip too, they would have to get permission from the government to do this first.

Here is how this would work. The Liberal government today says that it is going to have someone on staff, 24/7, 365 days a year, to pick up the phone when the buyer and seller want to have a transaction. The Liberals' original legislation actually said that for every firearm that was going to be transacted, they would need a separate reference number. This is a registry, because there would be the seller's licence and the buyer's licence.

Here is my buyer's licence. It is a document. It has my licence number, my name, my address, and the type of licence I have. Every one of those reference numbers is going to transact the serial number, make, and model of that firearm, to be cross-referenced with distributed store records. I specifically asked the bureaucrats how this would work, and they said it would be no trouble for the central transaction database, with all the reference numbers, to easily go back to a store and find out where a firearm was originally purchased.

If I buy a firearm from Cabela's or another store, and I choose to sell that firearm to a hunting buddy, who then sells that firearm to someone else, and that firearm is stolen and used in a crime, the police would have the ability to implicate me and everyone in that entire chain of sales in the act that was eventually done by a criminal, rather than focusing on that criminal.

If I sold 40, 50, or 100 firearms in one transaction as a single individual and not as a business, maybe that would trigger some kind of threshold and someone would ask what was going on. Was it an estate dispersal? Was I getting rid of all my firearms? That might have done something to increase public safety, but unfortunately, this bill would not do anything.

As a matter of fact, all it would do is create more red tape, more bureaucracy, and more expense. It would make gun shows on weekends that Canadians participate in more difficult. When I asked the bureaucrats what would happen for a large gun show in Canada, they said they would need a few weeks' notice. Now it would be up to every gun show organizer in this country to let the firearms centre know that on a weekend, it would have to staff up. Do members know how many gun shows there are in Canada? Virtually every weekend of the year there is one somewhere in Canada.

We did not talk to anyone. We did not talk to any gun show organizers. We did not hear from anyone from the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association, which is in the retail business. None of those organizations were brought in to testify before the committee so that the government would have an opportunity to understand what it was it was going to do.

Bill C-71 would create a registry of firearms transactions, to be maintained by the firearms centre, which would be cross-referenced with all the records that would now be mandatory for store owners to keep for a period of 20 years or more. The period would be 20 years or more, because the legislation does not say for just 20 years. It says that if Canada acceded to an international treaty that required Canadians to store the records for even longer, it would be automatic in law that those records would need to be kept longer. It would not even come back before Parliament.

We have discovered that Canada is already involved in negotiating one of those treaties, so it is very convenient that the legislation would be there so that we could keep the records even longer.

It is a $3-billion boondoggle. We have not had a single government official say how much more the government is going to spend on the firearms centre to ramp up the staff to keep track of the new gun registry.

Classification is another thing that frustrates firearms owners. Bill C-42, the Common Sense Firearms Licensing Act, actually put the decisions back in the hands of elected representatives so that at least there was some recourse for law-abiding firearms owners who, by the stroke of a pen, went from one day being law-abiding firearms owners to the next day being in possession of prohibited property.

The Liberals could have adopted a very simple fix. We simply suggested taking it out of the hands of one individual and creating a panel. I put a recommendation before the committee to have five technical experts, including police, military, and civilian experts, advise us, thereby depoliticizing the issue altogether. In this way, it would not be in the hands of one entity or in the hands of politicians. We could get a panel of actual experts to make those recommendations and fix the rules.

We know that there are three basic criteria for handguns: rimfire, centrefire, barrel length, and so on. These criteria tell us if a firearm is restricted or prohibited. There is nothing that prescriptive in the long-gun classification system. It is very subjective, and that is the problem with the rules. The minister says that it can hide behind the RCMP, because the RCMP simply has to follow the rules, but the rules are not clear. They are very subjective. It is very frustrating.

Last but not least is the notion of licensing. As my colleague from Kenora rightly pointed out, if we go back to the passage of legislation in 1977, there are firearms owners in Canada who have had licences for almost 40 years. They would now, when they went to renew their licences, have to answer for everything they did back when they 18 years old, some 20 years before 1977, for example, as if the mental health issues from 60 years ago were going to be the basis for denying them a licence. Mark my words, someone is going to go back and dredge this up, and a current law-abiding firearms owner who has had a licence for 30 or 40 years is going to be denied a licence. Do members know how to appeal that? A person has to make an application before a court. A person has to hire a lawyer, go before a court, and get a judge to overrule the decision of the chief firearms officer.

We provided an amendment at committee, which the Liberals shot down. As a matter of fact, it was an amendment proposed by a rural Liberal member from Ontario, who suggested that we create a system of appeal so that law-abiding firearms owners were not caught up in being denied their licences if they had had them for a number of years.

I could go on for another couple of hours about the failures of Bill C-71, but my time is up, so I will happily answer any of the misguided questions the Liberals have for me.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member mentioned, implied, in fact, that individuals should not be held accountable for the acts they carried out when they were 18 years old. He referenced a specific age. What if an individual happened to commit an act of violence, say domestic abuse against a wife or abuse against a child? Should that not be taken into account when assessing whether someone should have a gun licence?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it shows just how much my hon. colleague, who sits on the committee, does not understand about the continuous eligibility criteria that every firearms owner in Canada already has. Every day, every firearms-licenced owner in Canada is checked. If the police go to a domestic dispute or if any court issues an order against a person for committing any type of crime, it is automatically flagged in the firearms system. The next day, that individual will get a knock on the door, the police will show up, and if the person has firearms in the house, they will confiscate them until the issue is resolved. The fact that the member does not know that means that there are very serious problems with Bill C-71.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I found it very interesting to hear what the member across the way had to say, particularly what he construed as a registry when looking at the handling of business records. He also mentioned different amendments that were not accepted. What he did not mention was an amendment proposed by the Conservatives, if anyone wants to check the record, which was unanimously accepted. In fact, my friend across the way voted in favour of it. It specifically stated, as an addition to the Firearms Act, “For greater certainty, nothing in this Act shall be construed so as to permit or require the registration of non-restricted firearms.”

How does my friend suddenly construe from this legislation something that he himself voted for and say that it cannot be construed in that way?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague does not have her facts straight. The day that amendment went through at committee, I was at the Stittsville range for shooting day, where I won top marksman, so I could not have possibly been at the committee. She actually said I was. If she cannot even get her facts straight on where I was on a particular day, I am sure she has no credibility on the rest of the file.

[Gagan Sikand, Liberal, Mississauga—Streetsville, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I currently have a gun licence, both unrestricted and restricted, and I have friends who go to the range quite often.

What does the member have against the RCMP being entrusted with classifying what would be prohibited, restricted, or otherwise?

[Blaine Calkins, Conservative, Red Deer—Lacombe, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I do not have a problem with the RCMP being involved in this process at all. I have said this publicly many times. Should the RCMP be consulted, with their technical expertise, about the classification of firearms? Absolutely, it should. Should other police officers or agencies perhaps be involved? Yes, they should. Should someone from the military be involved? Some of the issues we heard at committee were that some people are confused about what a firearm is, what an assault firearm is, and what a military firearm is versus a civilian-use firearm. Even though they might look the same, they are not the same at all. Should we have a military expert involved? Yes. Should there be civilian experts on that panel? Should there be a panel of five? I put the amendment forward. The reason I wanted to do that was to protect the integrity of the RCMP, because I have a lot of respect for the RCMP. I actually wanted to join the RCMP at one point in my career.

I do not have a problem with this. If the Liberals do not want politicians to make the decisions, and the Conservatives do not think the people who enforce the law should be the ones making the law, let us find some common ground through having a panel of five technical experts to go through this process and make recommendations on not only what the classification rules should be but on what the ultimate classifications are. That would depoliticize this and would win the trust of most firearms owners in Canada. I do not know why that reasonable amendment was turned down by the member's colleagues.

[Robert-Falcon Ouellette, Liberal, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

[Member spoke in Cree]

[English]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak today.

The people of Winnipeg Centre believe in effective gun control measures that prioritize public safety and also ensure that law-abiding gun owners are treated fairly. During its last term, the Conservative government loosened gun laws through a series of legislative and regulatory amendments. Astonishingly, Canada has seen an increase in gun violence in the past three years.

The Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security proposed a number of significant amendments and accepted amendments from all recognized parties. A Conservative amendment even help reassure people that this was not a long-gun registry.

In 2016, there were 223 gun-related homicides in Canada, 44 more than in the previous year. This is an increase of 23%, the highest increase since 2005. In 2016, guns were the most common murder weapon used in this country. Between 2013 and 2016, the number of domestic violence cases involving a firearm increased from 447 to 586.

We proposed a suite of measures, each one directly related to strengthening public safety and security. These measures will keep firearms out of the hands of criminals and help police locate firearms that have been used to commit crimes. That means Bill C-71 is very important, because it will help save lives and solve crimes.

Bill C-71 will improve background checks for people applying to obtain or renew a firearms licence. It will also require firearms sellers to check whether the buyer is authorized to own a firearm, and it will tighten up the rules governing the transportation of restricted and prohibited firearms.

It is always fun to have the chance to speak some French in the House.

The 2015 Liberal Party platform made nine specific commitments related to firearms. Bill C-71 includes the platform commitments that require legislative changes. These include repealing changes made by Bill C-42 that allow restricted and prohibited weapons to be freely transported without a permit, and putting decision-making about weapons restrictions back in the hands of police and not politicians. It is time to have the experts actually doing the work, not politicians as it was under the Harper Conservatives. We are also looking to require enhanced background checks for anyone seeking to purchase a handgun or other restricted firearms. We are going to require purchasers of firearms to show a licence when they buy a gun, and require all sellers of firearms to confirm that the licence is valid before completing the sale. We are going to require firearms vendors to keep records of all firearms inventory and sales to assist police in investigating firearms trafficking and other gun crimes. We will not create a new national long-gun registry to replace the one that had been dismantled.

In my riding of Winnipeg Centre, gang crime is an important issue. It is something that goes hand in hand with this legislation. In fact, as part of our commitment to make it harder for criminals to get and use handguns and assault weapons, and to reduce gang and gun violence in Canada, our government has announced up to $327 million over five years and $100 million annually thereafter in new funding to help support a variety of initiatives to reduce gun crime and criminal gang activities.

The Government of Canada also brought together experts, practitioners, front-line personnel, and decision-makers for a summit on criminal guns and gangs in March 2018. The criminal guns and gangs summit is an unprecedented national summit on the challenges, solutions, and best practices in the fight against gun crime, and in combatting the deadly effects of gangs and illegal guns in communities across Canada, especially in communities like Winnipeg Centre. The government heard from key stakeholders, including law enforcement agencies, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, community and mental health organizations, indigenous groups, and government and non-governmental organizations.

I would like to quote my good friend, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness:

Too many young people have been killed and too many communities have been marred by gun crime and gun violence. It doesn't have to be this way. By working together, we can make our communities safer through greater enforcement, collaboration and prevention. The federal government is making major new investments to tackle this scourge and will bring all levels of government and our partners together to confront this problem at the Summit on Criminal Guns and Gangs.

I have already talked about some of the crime that has been going on with guns in this country, and the increase in the number of gun crimes that have been happening. However, we have also seen an increase in the number of incidents of organized crime. For instance, between 2012 and 2016, there was an increase in murders of 17%, in manslaughter of 12%, in extortion of 74%, and in human trafficking of 300%.

The meth crisis especially is expanding, facilitated by organized crime groups. The production, trafficking, and sale of illicit drugs, such as fentanyl, are often the main cause of gun and gang violence. We are taking action on that not only with this program of $327 million, but we are also ensuring that we have a bill, Bill C-71, which is trying to bring a balanced and equitable approach to what we can do and how we can work together.

I had the opportunity to read about some of the issues that are going on. We have enhanced background checks. We will ensure there is licence verification. We will ensure that record-keeping is done by vendors to be able to trace firearms used in crimes. I was looking online and I noticed that, for instance, pharmacies have to keep records for 10 years related to drug use and patients' records and who gets prescription drugs in our country. I think it is okay if we ensure that vendors actually keep some records so that if the police need them when a crime is committed we can ensure that they have the full story about what is going on.

I would also like to talk about weapons classifications. Firearms are classified as prohibited, restricted, or for anything that does not fall within those two categories, non-restricted. The Criminal Code apparently lays out the criteria for what technical aspects of a firearm make it either prohibited or non-restricted, and the associated regulations directly list several dozen models. The RCMP is tasked with analyzing new firearms and firearm variants to determine which classification they will have under the criteria passed by Parliament.

In the spring of 2015, Bill C-42 of the Stephen Harper Conservatives granted the Governor in Council, or cabinet, the ability to overrule the variant classifications made by the experts, the RCMP, and to downgrade the classifications of firearms. This was done for two groups of firearms, the CZ 858 and the Swiss Arms rifles. As a former member of the 22nd Regiment, that is very concerning to me, because when we look at a CZ 858, it is a submachine gun. It resembles an AK-47. This is a weapon that has been used in the Vietnam War, in the war in Afghanistan by the Czechoslovakian army, and in the Libyan civil war. I do not think this type of weapon should be involved in hunting, as we should have respect for animals. I know most hunters have a great respect for hunting because it is a good thing to go out onto the land to provide for one's family. However, I do not believe that a weapon that resembles an AK-47, and has been used in armed conflicts around the world, is perhaps an appropriate weapon to have in our country. Individuals who own these weapons as of June 30, 2018 will be grandfathered. The government will offer a three-year amnesty to provide owners of affected firearms with time to come into compliance with the grandfathering requirements. During the amnesty period, owners will be authorized to possess but not use their firearms until licensing and registration requirements are met.

There is an awful lot to cover, but I would like to talk about one final thing before the opposition can try to tear me apart. There were 1,200 Grant Park students who walked out of class on March 14, just around the time of the summit. They walked out of class because they wanted to raise the issue of gun violence in their community. They were upset with the propositions put forward by many politicians who refused to acknowledge that there is gun violence in our country, and who have not proposed adequate solutions. This is why I am very proud of what we are trying to do, which is to strike that balance not only with respect to legislative changes, which are simply reasonable changes, which is not a long-gun registry, and ensuring that we have good records in case a criminal investigation needs to be undertaken, and also having programs to ensure that we provide our youth and those who are most vulnerable an ability not to become involved in gangs and criminal activity.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, law-abiding firearms owners have to go through a rigorous screening and education process in order to obtain a licence to possess firearms in Canada.

I wonder if my colleague has obtained his possession and acquisition licence, and if he could give a technical description to the House of Commons on the two firearms that he listed in Canada, their usage in gang-related violence in Canada, and how many people who are law-abiding firearms owners use those, as opposed to people who own them for their farms or use them as tools in rural communities. Perhaps he could actually go through, step by step, the processes required for a law-abiding firearms owner to acquire the weapons that he mentioned in his comments.

[Robert-Falcon Ouellette, Liberal, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, in fact I have never owned a firearm personally. I have only used a firearm while I was in the Canadian Armed Forces. I know how to take apart a C7 or a C9. I can do all the things that are required of me not only in the exercise, but if required, even in the exercise of my duties as a member of the Canadian Armed Forces. I am very proud of that.

I would point out there are a number of leading organizations that are in favour of this, such as the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the Canadian Labour Congress, the women's shelters in Canada, the National Association of Women and the Law, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, and the PolySeSouvient. People must remember the 14 women who were killed in 1989. As well, the Canadian Coalition for Gun Control, which represents over 200 groups, and the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association are in favour of this legislation. It is an important consideration that there are many great groups that are actually in favour of this legislation.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the member's service in the Canadian Armed Forces. A number of veterans who are lawful users of firearms are probably wondering why the member does not have more of a background to answer the question from my colleague for Calgary Nose Hill.

I will make this a very simple question for my friend. He quoted extensively from the little PR stunt that the Minister of Public Safety had on his gangs and guns conference. He quoted the minister. He talked about that summit. Could the member point to one section of this bill that addresses gang-related violence or illegal firearms used by gangs?