Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, members of the committee, fellow panellists.
On behalf of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, with 100,000 members and 670 member clubs across Ontario, I appreciate this opportunity to appear before you today to comment on Ms. Hoeppner's bill, Bill C-391.
Going back a few years, Bill C-68 was born out of tragedy and was directly attributable to public concerns in the aftermath of the horrific shooting of 14 women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. No right-thinking person should ever underestimate the impact an event of that magnitude must have had on the families of the victims, nor can anyone state with confidence, unless they have walked in their shoes, the emotional costs to family members of other shooting victims, including our fellow panellists today, and what impact that has made on their lives.
OFAH supports effective firearms control, much like the former FAC system, that does not unfairly or unnecessarily target legal, law-abiding firearms owners. I must say that the establishment of public policy based strictly upon emotion, not fact, is flawed. In the aftermath of the Lépine shooting, the Coalition for Gun Control convinced the government that more gun control would make us safer. Unfortunately, over the years other instances, like the shootings at Dawson College, Mayerthorpe, and others, have demonstrated the folly of the original belief that the registry of long guns would prevent crime and enhance public safety.
Bill C-68 included a licensing component and a provision for mandatory sentences for the criminal use of a firearm, something that has been ignored, bargained away, traded, and generally abused during sentencing deals for offenders, including consideration of time served and two-for-one deals. It also established a new process for the licensing of firearms owners that uses a series of checks and balances, like a mandatory waiting period, criminal and mental health background checks, and spousal consultation, which, if done correctly, affords the public with a fair degree of certainty that the applicant is safe to own and use firearms. Unfortunately, these checks and balances are not always done.
From the start, many experts both inside and outside of government advised that the long-gun registry would be prohibitively expensive and turn out to be nothing more than hollow political symbolism. In fact, according to Dr. John Dixon, who at the time was senior advisor to the deputy minister of justice, the short answer arrived at by every study of the idea to create a universal registration of firearms by the Department of Justice was that it would be ruinously expensive and could actually yield a negative public security result. At that time, the president of the Coalition for Gun Control told the CBC that the argument for gun control had never been based on individual cases; it was always based on the general principle that if you have adequate control of all guns, you reduce the chances that dangerous people would gain access to them. You don't eliminate them. At best, that statement is disingenuous.
The entire debate over gun control in this country and the creation of a long-gun registry under Bill C-68 was a direct result of the misguided actions of one lone individual. Prior to that, gun control was not a major public policy issue, and the creation of a regime to regulate legal firearms--in this particular case, long guns--as a means of protecting the public from individuals with a grudge was flawed. Equally wrong are current suggestions that by simply tweaking the registry to make it work better, it will make us safer and justify its creation. Even a well-run registry won't prevent random violent crime. Believing this ignores the glaring fact that criminals don't register firearms and, worse still, that Bill C-68 did not include a provision under the Firearms Act for the tracking of prohibited offenders, those most likely to commit gun crime.
Over the years much has been made of the cost of the long-gun registry and the suggestion that the system has cost taxpayers over $1 billion. In fact, the Auditor General has commented extensively on this aspect of the system, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that today. However, alarming as these cost overruns have been, perhaps most damning in the Auditor General's reports of both 2002 and 2006 were her comments that the Canada Firearms Centre was unable or unwilling to provide her department with information to substantiate the need for the long-gun registry as a public safety tool. I quote:
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.
During recent debates and public statements on Bill C-391, defenders of the long-gun registry have suggested that while the costs over the years have been exorbitant, they are now in the area of $4 million to $8 million per year and this is “a tolerable amount”. As a taxpayer as well as a long-gun owner, I find that assumption is breathtaking in its arrogance. We can think of past examples where government misspending of lesser amounts has resulted in the calling of public inquiries. Yet in the case of the long-gun registry, which has experienced a budgetary excess on a monumental scale, some proponents of the system have ignored the financial mismanagement from the start by suggesting that the spending is now under control.
This myopic view also ignores the fundamental precept that if a system does not work, no amount of money spent on it is acceptable. It also ignores the fact that on two occasions a cost-benefit analysis of the registry was completed by the former government, one by former MP Shaughnessy Cohen and the other by current MP and then-minister Albina Guarnieri. Neither review has seen the light of day. Because of this, we are left to conclude that if those reviews had demonstrated the system was providing good return on investment, they would have been trotted out to great acclaim instead of being hidden behind a veil of cabinet confidentiality. In the case of Ms. Guarnieri's report, which was commissioned by former Prime Minister Martin after he admitted the system was flawed and placed the entire program under review, the recommendations in her report were rejected outright by her cabinet colleagues.
A fundamental flaw with the registry is that the number of firearms and firearms owners in Canada is in dispute, and no accurate assessment of how many guns are actually out there exists. Without knowing that a significant majority of firearms are registered, when so many may remain unaccounted for, how can anyone claim that it works? Since program spending estimates are determined based upon the potential number of firearms in the country, if the numbers are off, costs will fluctuate accordingly.
I think the most interesting comment comes from the former commissioner, Bill Baker, who told the House of Commons justice committee on October 23, 2003, “I don't think anybody in the country knows exactly how many guns are out there.”
For years, the long-gun registry has been a source of concern in terms of the protection of privacy. The former privacy commissioner expressed concerns over the lack of information security and protections in the system. Both the Auditor General and the RCMP have admitted that the speed of compilation and accuracy of the registry are questionable. The Coalition for Gun Control scoffed at the suggestion that the system is unsafe and suggested it's as safe as CPIC, the main law enforcement database used by police across this country. However, according to information provided by the RCMP in response to an access to information request in 2003, there had been at that time 1,495 breaches of the CPIC system, of which 427 were confirmed. Given this, assurances about the efficacy of the system run cold.
Over the last few years, public support for the registry has slipped. Canadians have grown increasingly agitated by the excessive cost of the system and skeptical about the ability of the system to prevent crime and protect the public safety.
In the interest of time and brevity today, I'll try to shorten my remarks, Mr. Chair. I'll speak to a couple of the recommendations we make in our report. We make eight in total, but I'm going to speak to only two of them today. I hope you'll take the opportunity to read the full submission.
The first recommendation is that we need to eliminate the registry for all non-restricted firearms, first and foremost. The passage of an unamended Bill C-391 and the subsequent repeal of the long-gun registry would reduce the burdens on the system. Passage of Bill C-391 will not affect the registration of restricted and prohibited firearms, which will continue. Licensing will continue, as will mandatory background checks. Safe storage, safe transportation, and mandatory firearms training will all continue. The passage of Bill C-391 will impact only on the long-gun registry, nothing more, nothing less.
The second recommendation is the creation of a prohibited offenders registry to track prohibited offenders previously convicted of gun crimes. We should not have a registry in this country of individuals who are allowed to own firearms. We should have a registry of those too dangerous to own firearms. This would be similar to the systems used by police in New York, Baltimore, and Virginia, which have proven to be extremely effective and have resulted in a reduction in the number of firearms-related crimes. Previous offenders are required to register with the government, much like a sex offender registry. As David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York put it, it's common sense to focus on a smaller number of dangerous people instead of chasing around after people for “low level nonsense”.
With that, I'll conclude my remarks and thank you again on behalf of the OFAH for the opportunity to appear before you today.