Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and Mr. Chair.
Once again I'm honoured to be here. More so, I'm honoured to speak on behalf of the people and the communities that the One By One Movement serves, ensuring that their voices are amplified.
I've had the privilege to speak as a subject matter expert on gang culture theory and violence prevention at a number of round tables and events on the impacts of violence, gun violence in particular.
Today I'm going to speak to you less formally than I normally would. Today I'm going to speak to you from the heart, simply as a human being, as a person with lived experience and as a proud Canadian.
Participating in these round tables, I consistently hear statistics and reports about people who live with and face a great deal of violence daily, yet in these settings I rarely hear from people who are experiencing first-hand the majority of gun violence. I feel this is one of the reasons that we are not seeing the progress we should in combatting this issue.
I see and hear people making a living and a name for themselves speaking on behalf of people and communities they don't really know or understand, for personal gain or political leverage. Some may think that's what I'm doing now, but there's a big difference between them and me. We're not the same.
As many of you know, I am a former gang member and organized crime figure in Canada and abroad, but before I was ever involved in a life of crime, I was a victim and a survivor of gun violence on a number of occasions.
I'd like to start by sharing with you a short story of the first encounter I had involving a firearm. I was about 11 years old, playing outside with a group of friends in the southwest end of Toronto, in a public housing complex called Swansea Mews. There was a group of older guys from my neighbourhood who were involved in bad things. Some of them relentlessly bullied us kids and terrorized the community. Though we were children, we had to learn to navigate and cope the best we could with this.
On this day, a known gunman who hung out in our area decided he was going to fire shots at us kids above our heads just to see us run. I remember hearing the zing of bullets passing us. This was entertaining to him, because when I looked back as I was running for my life, I remembered seeing him laugh. I'll never forget this day.
Now, as an adult, I can look back and isolate and identify. This is one of the many root-cause risk factors that helped to lead me down a path of self-destruction. I tell you this story because when I think about this incident and this individual at the time, if Bill C-21 had existed, or a bill like it, would it have prevented this traumatizing experience from happening to me? I strongly say that it would not. It would not have changed anything, because I'm confident he did not use a legal firearm to shoot at us that day. This man was not a citizen of Canada. He was a hardened criminal, and most definitely could not have acquired a licence to legally own a gun here.
Also, I'd like to tell you about a best friend of mine, who was a highly respected gangster at one point in his life. His name was Deurgueune Cisse. After a life of crime and the many traumas he was left with due to the terrible things and the violent acts he committed and to the violence he himself endured, he sadly took his own life.
I remember speaking to him the day leading up to it. He was extremely down and didn't believe that he could, or was good enough to, get back up again. He had made his decision and he was motivated. I wish he had been able to get the help he needed before it got as bad as it did. He did not use a firearm to take his life.
The reason I told these stories is to really drive home the point that we are wasting precious time focusing on the wrong things. Through decades of data collection, we have all learned what most of the root-cause risk factors are that lead society on a path of extreme violence. Let us focus on the cheaper, most logical solution, and that is prevention. Let us get these illegal guns off our streets and treat our less fortunate better. Let us focus more on the demand and less on the supply.
I am tired, and we are tired.
Thank you for listening.