Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the standing committee. Thank you for allowing Canadian Shooting Sports to address this committee.
My name is Tony Bernardo. You've heard a lot about the good aspects that are alleged to come from the gun registry. I'd like to talk to you about a few of the bad ones.
First, I need to give you a little bit of a historical perspective. Based upon the Canada Firearms Centre's polling figures, in 1998 there were 3.3 million firearms owners in Canada. On January 1, 2001, 40% of Canadian gun owners--over 1 million people--became instant criminals.
Anticipating these statistics, the Canada Firearms Centre acted quickly to calculate consent for the legislation, with the results of a fall 2000 survey indicating that gun ownership in Canada had declined substantially since 1998, and that there were only 2.3 million firearm owners in only 17% of Canadian households. This was done by asking this question: does anyone in your household own a functioning firearm? This was done in a telephone survey. For those of you who are not familiar with the social stigma around firearms, you don't talk on the phone to anybody about your firearms, because you have no idea who is on the other end.
To accept the reduced number, you must also accept, without any evidence whatsoever, that firearm owners declined by one million people in two years. Previous surveys reported that the average firearm owner possessed 2.87 firearms, low by current CFC statistics, which now show an average of four guns per owner. A million people divesting themselves of 2.87 million firearms would have been noticed either by police or certainly by the gun stores in Canada, which would have gotten an awful lot of guns turned in. At the time, we did a little bit of mathematical calculation and we determined that was a sufficient number of guns to bury every single police station in Canada to a depth of 33 feet. That's a lot of guns.
In 1976, Liberal justice minister Ron Basford tabled a document in Parliament detailing the number of firearms in Canada, based on Canadian import and export documents and domestic production figures. Minister Basford told the House there were 11,186,148 firearms in Canada. By adding the number of imports since that time to the indigenous production, subtracting all exports and destroyed and stolen firearms, we can make a reasonable estimate for the number of firearms currently in Canada, allowing for a generous error rate of 15% for lost, destroyed, and misreported firearms--