Thanks very much for including me.
I apologize for not submitting a written brief, but time did not allow us to pull it together and get it translated, so we're happy to provide a written backup to arguments that I'm going to be presenting today.
I want to quickly touch on the issues of firearm gun death and injury in rural communities, why the Coalition for Gun Control thinks this is something that needs to be addressed, and touch on some of the data, some of the solutions.
As many of you around the committee table have heard, there is a lot of talk about problems of urban violence, and a lot of focus on issues related to gangs in the cities.
The irony, of course, as you have probably heard from previous witnesses, is that rates per 100,000 of violent crimes, particularly involving firearms, are actually higher in rural communities. In fact, if you look at victims of police-reported firearm-related violent crime by province and territory, broken down by urban and rural areas, you see that in spite of all the attention that's focused on places like Toronto, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and so on, they are much higher than the Canadian average. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have twice the rates of firearm-related violent crime as Ontario does.
We also know from reports that have come recently from StatsCan that while approximately 17% of Canadians are in rural communities and policed by police there, and while about 18% of property crime, i.e., theft of automobiles and so on, occurs in rural communities, it's roughly proportionate to the population and not significantly higher than in urban centres.
We see 25% of violent crime occurring in those very communities. For those of you who have looked at issues like domestic violence, you will know that rural communities have much higher rates per 100,000 of domestic violence incidents, including firearms in particular, than large cities. If you look at specific phenomena, like the murders of police officers, very few in fact are killed, particularly with guns, in large urban centres. The vast majority are killed in the line of duty in smaller communities, again, in part because of the prevalence of firearms.
The same thing is true if we look at suicide. Why would we talk about suicide in a discussion focused on rural crime? We would talk about suicide in this context, because if you take a public health perspective on violence, violence against the self is considered a form of violence. If you look at the factors that influence suicide rates, if you look at the root causes and so on, the risk of suicide and the risk of homicide, particularly among young men, are very similar.
The same kinds of factors, such as inequality, exclusion, mental health issues, substance abuse and critical events in the life cycle, can precipitate suicide or homicide. Many of you are familiar with suicide by cop and other phenomena that show this to be the case, or domestic violence incidents, which, when firearms are involved, end in suicide half the time. The links between suicide and homicide are particularly interwoven when we look at rural communities.
That's why when we think about how to prevent violence framed in a public health model, we look first at the root causes. We look at what the precipitating factors are that lead people to engage in criminal or violent acts. We know that gender is a factor. We know, as I said, inequality, lack of opportunity, mental health issues, substance abuse, addictions and so on are certainly things that have to be addressed at a community level.
We also know, from both public health and criminology literature, that access to means plays a big role. That can mean access to the keys of an automobile, for instance. If people do not lock their cars, they're more likely to be stolen than if they had locked their cars or there are anti-theft devices in place or there are video surveillance tools.
It also means that access to firearms increases the lethality of violent encounters. Guns don't cause violence or crime, but they make it more likely that it will end with dead people.
Finally, the third dimension we look at is the response after the fact, which can affect the severity of the consequences. We know that in rural communities, access to emergency response services, whether it's firefighters, police or ambulances, is reduced and the time to respond is longer.
We know that in rural communities there is less access to things like shelters and other kinds of supports that have been shown to reduce the likelihood, for example, that women will be killed.
We know that mental health supports are much less readily available in rural communities. There are huge lineups, even in large centres, but it gets worse and worse the further and more removed you are. Support for victims, to prevent revictimization, is also lessened.
It's important to look at all of those issues when we are trying to come up with a solution.
The final point, which is a bit self-interested but I think needs to be said, is that we also know that increasingly a large proportion of firearms recovered in crime are sourced from domestic firearms owners. This is not just true in Toronto, or from the recent study that was conducted in British Columbia, but also in smaller communities. We've seen the reports from police. The availability of firearms in smaller communities cannot only increase lethal violence in those communities, particularly when appropriate controls are not in place, but it can also fuel violence in other places.
I am not sure if MP Dabrusin is there or not, but certainly when it came to the Danforth shooting, it appears that the gun was stolen from somewhere in Saskatchewan.
From our perspective, in the context of a crime prevention strategy, whether we're looking at urban or rural communities, we need to consider reducing access to firearms for dangerous people. Certainly we have many cases of small communities where this has been reinforced. For example, we have Judge Marlene Graham, who ruled that in the investigation associated with the death of Corey Lewis in Okotoks, a big problem was the lack of screening around firearms. We have lots of evidence to show that controls on firearms reduce lethality.
We know that firearms have a gender dimension. A study that was done in New Brunswick, for example, showed that of the one-quarter of women living with firearms in that community, 66% said that knowing firearms were present made them more fearful for their safety and well-being. They said it affected their decision on whether to tell others or to seek help for abuse that they received. We have to recognize that there is a need in rural communities, as in urban centres, to break the code of silence around domestic violence.
I want to end by saying that we know firearms serve legitimate purposes, particularly in rural communities. We have to respect hunting, pest controls, and indigenous rights, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have rigorous controls. It certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't be considering a ban on handguns and assault weapons, which don't serve a useful purpose in rural communities anymore than in urban communities.
We really have to fight the highly gendered notion that having more guns makes us safer, because, in fact, having more guns in people's homes often makes them more at risk.
I want to quote Barbara Frey, the UN special rapporteur on human rights, who said:
Male-dominated societies often justify arms possession through the alleged need to protect vulnerable women, though women actually face greater danger of violence when their families and communities are armed.
Thank you very much.
