Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Tony Bernardo. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Shooting Sports Association. We are 62 years young and in our entire time have never had a single fatal accident on a shooting range, which is not bad.
In keeping with the five minutes allotted for me to speak and for the purpose of brevity, I will refer you to my curriculum vitae for more details.
The people who are using guns now aren't the lawful owners who have registered guns and done the background checks and been trained and safely store them. Those are not the people committing the violent crimes. It's people who are using smuggled guns from the United States. That's the vast majority of guns used in crimes, handguns.
There are all kinds of laws in effect now that those people are disobeying, so adding more laws for the lawful owners isn't going to impact the criminals, who don't care about laws. They commit them all, including murder.
According to Chris Lewis, the former OPP commissioner, banning lawfully owned handguns is just not going to solve the problem.
The National Police Federation president, Brian Sauvé, testified, “Resources should prioritize the criminal use of firearms, with a coordinated strategy that effectively combines prevention, law enforcement and social programs.”
Deputy RCMP commissioner Stephen White testified, “The reality is that of the number of firearms that were seized last year across the country—well over 30,000—the national tracing centre under the Canadian firearms program traced just a very small percentage of those handguns and other firearms.”
Speaking before this very committee in February 2022, Mark Weber, the national president of the Customs and Immigration Union, testified, “Perhaps the most glaring of all are the rail mode operations, where, according to the union's own data, as of 2019, only one one-millionth of all rail cargo was effectively being examined.”
Let me just repeat that: “one one-millionth of all rail cargo was...being examined.” The reality is that our current operational abilities in the rail field are virtually non-existent.
As of last month, media outlets have reported that 661 repeat offenders, all arrested for committing other serious crimes, were also charged with 1,514 counts of breaching firearms prohibition orders, yet our public safety minister refuses to lift a finger to fix Canada's broken firearms prohibition order system to address this serious public safety issue.
CSSA, our organization, even went so far as to present a system to remedy the firearms prohibition order problem, but no response was received from the current government, nothing at all.
These experts have all told you the problem. They have told you the so-called science to reduce gun crime. It's right in front of you. They've told you. Why is this government not listening to them? Why are you directing the efforts of this Government of Canada against the law-abiding, as opposed to directing them against the criminal misuse of these objects? It seems clear that the government is engaged in a witch hunt against millions of lawful Canadian citizens, and it raises the question, “Why?”
I would like to also address the devaluation and confiscation of handguns. This bill clearly does not simply freeze handguns or their transfers; it mandates fiscal destruction and finally confiscation without compensation. Worse, it doesn't confiscate them from me; it takes the cowardly route of confiscating billions of dollars of property from grieving spouses left behind when their loved ones perish. It literally robs large sums of money—large sums of money—from the purses of widows and widowers at their worse moments of vulnerability. It leaves this obscenely immoral issue to another government to deal with.
England didn't do it that way. Australia didn't either. Even New Zealand had the courage to pay compensation to its citizens. However, this government chooses to ignore the experience of our Commonwealth partners and British common law.
Even this government recognized how wrong this was when they enacted the May 2020 order in council confiscation of modern sporting and hunting firearms. They pledged fair market compensation for the theft of these firearms. What's the difference? The May 2020 guns you want to take away from me—the handguns—are going to come from my grieving widow.