Thank you, Chair.
I'm speaking to the amendment to clause 1, which is an amendment to change the short title of the act. The current short title of the act specifically calls it the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act. My proposal is to change the title to reflect the consequences of the act. That is to change the title to the Risking Public Safety Act. Anticipating that there may be a ruling coming at some point, I will talk about the amendment and the title.
I don't know whether it's in order or not to change the title in this manner. I hope it is. Whether it is or not, I think the point has to be made here that we've just been through a process of trying to improve this legislation. In fact, the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act title indicates what the government's plan was, but you know, I think the fact of the matter is that our party didn't like the registry the way it was either. We had in fact put forward a whole series of balanced proposals throughout this debate, including here today, to try to remove the problems people had experienced with this act, the concerns that people had.
We offered a suggestion to decriminalize first-time failure to register guns. We wanted to protect the privacy of identifying information that the government in fact released to some people to do studies and polls. We wanted to enshrine Auditor General oversight. We wanted free registration in legislation. We wanted grace periods to register inherited guns. We wanted to provide a legal guarantee for aboriginal treaty rights. We wanted to ensure that important information would be shared among the police, military, and the Canadian firearms program to identify dangerous individuals. We wanted to make sure that only long guns for hunting or sports could be classified as non-restricted and the bad scary guns we talked about wouldn't get into that category. We wanted to close the important business importation loophole, which brings all kinds of guns into Canada without proper border controls. And we wanted to ensure that status cards for aboriginal people were accepted as official IDs.
There were a lot of problems. A lot of problems have been identified over the past number of years, and we haven't had this government do anything to fix those problems in the five years that it's been in government. Instead, it brought in this legislation, which effectively ends the long-gun registry and does nothing else.
What it does when it's ending the long-gun registry exposes the public to risk. That's why we would suggest a more appropriate name for this act. I'm glad the order has been changed by the chair or the experts, to say that a logical order is to have this debate last, because if I had said this at the beginning we may have made amendments that would have made this Risking Public Safety Act title a little bit harder to be convincing. But having attempted to enhance public safety by amendments to this act, as we've had here debated this morning, and failed, it's pretty clear to me that this bill really should be called the Risking Public Safety Act, not the Ending the Long-gun Registry Act.
We think it's irresponsible for this government to bring in this legislation without any amendments. We've brought in amendments to ensure that business records are kept by sellers of guns, by people who are in the business of selling guns. This has been the law since 1977 or 1978, I believe, that a gun shop or someone who is selling guns keeps a record of the gun and who they sell it to, and the registration number and the serial number and the model number, so that there's a starting-point record of guns that are available in our communities.
Who gave this government a mandate to say that guns can proliferate in our community without anybody who sells them, buys them, imports them, or manufactures them keeping a record of who sells them?
This is something brand new. This is not a part of the irritation of the long-gun registry, where people were trying to register their guns and register transfers. That was brought in, yes, in the nineties. Long before that, individual guns were considered of such importance and potential danger that for public safety reasons, for police enforcement reasons, and for criminal investigation reasons....
I talked to the chief of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary recently. He said this is an important investigative tool, knowing where guns are. It helps to investigate crimes. If people are subject to a gun prohibition, at least we have some record that they had guns at one time. It's not the complete record. It helps us identify them.
By the way, no police officer should knock on the door of someone in a domestic dispute or a dispute of some kind where that person has a firearms prohibition and assume, because of the firearms prohibition, that there are no guns there. That was the case that was brought before us a couple of days ago, in which it was said it was a case where the firearms registry killed a police officer. Now, I'm extremely hurt by this tragedy that occurred to a police officer who was shot by someone who was a prohibited firearms owner and she lost her life. To shamelessly try to use that for political purposes in a hearing we had last week and to suggest this person was killed by the registry I find appalling. I find that appalling. It's a tragedy when anybody loses their life as a result of a gun, whether it's a police officer or an individual or the victims of the massacres we've heard about.
Let's not play politics with this. Let's look at the fact that we had a system in this country where manufacturers sold guns to businesses. When they sold them to individuals, there was a record kept. It was useful for all sorts of purposes: for protection of public safety for police investigation, for attempts to find the people who, if you're trying to trace a gun.... We have international obligations in terms of tracing records of firearms for the purposes of public safety. They're going to be gone. We tried to fix that by putting back the business records here.
We tried to tighten up transfer requirements to the ones they were before. If you're going to sell a gun, you have to verify who owns it. Even Mrs. Hoeppner's bill in the last Parliament ensured that was there. That's gone. We've put in a provision that suggests that before you start doing all of this and putting in these loosey-goosey regulations, have a reclassification review. No, no. We suggested that provinces, territories, and aboriginal groups may want to have some ability to control firearms and guns in their communities. No. We've had the Minister of Public Safety for Quebec come before this committee pleading for cooperation and assistance from the Government of Canada. No.
We have all of these things that have happened--