Thank you for answering all those questions really thoroughly.
Mr. Chair, on this, and I'm going to ask the committee.... All of us as members have an opportunity to vote on this clause. I look at these offences, and we are talking about recidivists with these offences. No one is arguing that we shouldn't do everything, our level best, at the federal level, with our provincial counterparts and at the municipal level. No one is arguing that we shouldn't do everything we can to help people and help them reintegrate into the community.
We have to recognize that at some point people are going to be back in the community and we should do our best to reintegrate them, but when I look at this list of offences, it's like they're pulled from the headlines of what we're dealing with right now in this country. Police chiefs.... We had witnesses at the committee who spoke about their own jurisdictions. Some of them were major municipalities. Some of them were the most rural places imaginable, and some of them were urban, suburban or first nations policing.
We heard from a variety of witnesses in policing. The evidence they gave us is that the types of firearms they're seeing, in both urban and rural settings, are not those of John Q. Duck Hunter, farmers and sport shooters. They're weapons and firearms that have come in largely from the U.S. They've been trafficked in. I see weapons trafficking as one of these offences. They are largely prohibited weapons or restricted weapons. The people using them are not licensed. They're unlicensed.
What we have in these offences—and I'm speaking specifically of the offences in this clause—is that we're dealing with people who at no point have tried to comply with Canada's laws. All of us have people in our ridings who have complied. They're law-abiding firearms owners. First, they have a licence. They're licensed owners. Second, they've gone through proper channels. They didn't necessarily buy a handgun out of the trunk of someone's car. They went to a dealership and purchased a firearm legally.
The testimony we've heard over and over again at committee is that those are not the individuals who are creating the problem. Even while we were in committee, we heard—again, ripped from the headlines—stories of people using drones to take a bag of handguns from the U.S. and bring it across into Canada, presumably to be picked up by the criminal element here and distributed and sold and, at some point, very possibly used in a crime against an innocent Canadian.
We can have a debate about the role for mandatory prison sentences, and we've done that. We've gone around and we've heard from a lot of different witnesses, and we've heard from members of the committee, but I want us to look really carefully at this particular clause, because to me it's dealing with scenarios right now where Canadians are calling out for action. We're seeing it in New Brunswick, in Ontario and in Quebec. We're seeing it in every province. They're saying, “We need help.” Rural crime is an issue, and urban crime is an issue.
We just saw that Mitch Marner, for Pete's sake, of the Maple Leafs, was robbed. I don't know all the details, but from what I read about the armed assailants, I will guarantee you that the people who robbed him didn't drive away in a pickup truck wearing fluorescent orange, with the shotgun they use for duck hunting. This is a criminal element.
I will also guarantee you that it probably wasn't their first offence. These are individuals who knew exactly what they were doing, and they carjacked Mitch Marner the same way that they've probably carjacked other people, and, yes, eventually someone's going to get killed in the process.
It's that kind of recidivism. It's that kind of wanton disregard for other Canadians, for innocent individuals. That's the reason these laws are in here.
We have to start from the premise that we have a Criminal Code in which we, as Parliament, have said that these are things that are bad. These are things that we don't want to happen in society, and there's a reason why some offences are dealt with summarily. Some offences are seen as less serious. For some offences in Canada you receive a monetary penalty, a fine. If you're speeding in New Brunswick, the fine might be $168.
But if you have possession for the purpose of weapons trafficking, if you have importing and exporting, knowing it's unauthorized, if you're involved in weapons trafficking or using a firearm in the commission of an offence, these are the offences Canadians want us to deal with.
I'll leave it at that, Mr. Chair. I just want us to really take a sober look at these offences before we vote on them.
I do thank you again, Mr. Taylor, for very thorough responses to all those questions.