Mr. MacKenzie, thank you for your presentation.
I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear. I come from a riding with a lot of hunters. I am a lawyer by training and I have often met women who were victims of conjugal violence and were in serious trouble. I don't think enough thought is given to what the Canadian Firearms Registry represents to women. For the women's groups I meet, it's security, and I can tell you that in daily practice, there's no getting around that.
I don't want to know if the firearms registry has been used 6,500 times, because I find that deceptive, misleading and even completely inappropriate. The usefulness of the registry does not depend on the number of times it is used, it depends on the relevance of those uses. When women are in danger, it's extremely important to know where the weapons are so that they can be recovered. People trivialize the fact that the registry provides security to women in Canada. I come from Quebec and I am here for other reasons, but I think that aspect is trivialized far too much.
I'd like to share some statistics with you. Since the registry came into being, the number of women murdered with a firearm has dropped by 31 per cent. I have to tell you that those are not trivial statistics. I don't know how many times politicians have consulted the registry, but it's nice to know that the number of homicides has dropped by 31 per cent.
I studied at the Université de Montréal. What happened at L'École Polytechnique made a profound impression on all of us. I don't think that can be trivialized and the registry scrapped. It may be full of flaws, but it still has some advantages.
I think people forget what firearms mean to women and I feel obliged to highlight those concerns again. The murder rate in the United States is three times higher than in Canada. The murder rate for women is five times higher than in Canada. The number of women murdered with a firearm in the United States is eight times higher than in Canada. These differences are largely attributable to the fact that firearms are better controlled in Canada than in the United States.
Since the inception of the Canadian Firearms Registry in 1995, the number of women murdered with a firearm dropped by 30 per cent, whereas the murder rate for women went up slightly by 2 per cent.
For all these reasons, the registry is extremely important to women. Women are particularly satisfied with section 111 of the Criminal Code, because it provides that if their husband is suffering from a major depression... We're talking about the lives of ordinary people in all of our ridings. One of the very few ways of taking the firearms away from these partners is under a provision like section 111. Section 111 applies to husbands who are becoming increasingly violent and enables women to go to the police and to the courts for an order.
For all of the reasons I have just given, I am going to support Mr. Ménard's motion. You really have to think of all those women and all those lives that have been saved. That's what I wanted to say, Mr. Chairman.