Chair, as I have said, this is an ineffective bill to do what we thought this was supposed to do which is to protect public safety. These motions now, in my opinion, are nothing more than the government trying to cover their backsides for passing useless legislation.
These things could have easily been covered off in this bill. As my colleague just said, it was the previous Conservative government that saw fit to deal with domestic partner violence, intimate partner violence and firearms, to make sure those individuals did not...either lost them, that had an order from the courts to be lost and never got them back. That didn't happen before, so to suggest that we, on this side, are ignoring that element, that victimization, is completely erroneous.
I am troubled that we had an incredible opportunity to work together on dealing with public safety issues in Bill C-71. What happened? Nothing happened. We targeted a group of individuals who the evidence has shown repeatedly is one-third less likely than the general population to even commit a crime, but we're targeting them exclusively in this bill. We don't do anything for anybody else. Now to throw out all these other motions and recommendations....
Since they were put on the floor on Tuesday, the comments I've got back from the public that interacts with me are that the bill is useless. I'm hearing, “Where were you guys when this was debated? Why didn't we get a chance to come and debate this? Why didn't we get a chance to come and testify? What was the rush to try to get this through? What was the big panic? If there's actually more than lip service to this, why didn't we get a chance to testify?”
I think it's evident. The fact that we are now going to start looking at these things—and we could have at the front end of this—tells me there's some admission on the other side that this bill is useless. It doesn't do what it's intended to do, and that's increase public safety and deal with the illegal firearms used by gangs and gang violence.