Good afternoon Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and members.
Thank you for inviting me to address you today. It's always a pleasure to appear before this committee. It's particularly a pleasure to be in person this time.
In fact, since 2011 I have testified over a dozen times before this committee and others on proposed firearms legislation and regulation. In that same time, reflective of Parliament's consistently inconsistent push-and-pull approach to firearms legislation, the Annotated Firearms Act & Related Legislation—the firearms law reference text that I co-authored—has appeared in no less than four editions.
Instead of applying an evidence-based, principled focus to law-making, governments have taken a piecemeal and haphazard approach, which has favoured symbolism over substance and rhetoric over rational decision-making. While this might be good news for legal authors, publishers and booksellers, it is decidedly bad news for law-abiding gun owners and Canadians generally. Bill C-21 is the latest extension of this trend.
Given the time constraints that have been placed upon this committee's work, I will focus my attention on Bill C-21's proposed prohibition on the transfer of restricted firearms—that is, handguns—to licensed private individuals. More accurately, it's the deferred confiscation of a million lawfully owned restricted firearms, which were purchased legally, used and stored safely, and have never posed a risk to public safety.
In my view, there are three fundamental problems with this provision. First, support for this measure comes from fundamentally bad data. Instead of addressing the core causes of handgun offences—namely the factors that drive individuals into gang activity, such as poverty, addiction and marginalization—or even focusing on the true source of the vast majority of handguns used in criminal offences—handguns smuggled into Canada from the United States—this bill targets the law-abiding, without making even the smallest dent in handgun crime.
In February, I appeared before this committee to give testimony for your study on gun control, illegal arms trafficking and street gangs. As I said then, good decision-making requires good data. I cited an example of bad data, which has been used to justify bad policy. That is the oft-heard assertion that 70% of traceable crime guns have a domestic origin. This statistic is a good example of a number that is true, false and misleading all at the same time. To start, this statistic counts only those firearms that are traceable. It is therefore, by definition, a number that will skew towards domestic firearms, as those are much easier to trace. It doesn't count firearms with obliterated serial numbers or foreign firearms that cannot be traced.
Next, the definition of a “crime gun” further self-selects and obscures our focus. Crime guns generally refer to firearms—including, by the way, pellet guns and replica firearms—seized by police in the course of their duties. This includes both offence-related and public safety-related seizures. That definition does not differentiate between a handgun used in a gang shooting and a hundred non-restricted, safely stored firearms seized from an elderly gun collector who was the subject of a police wellness check because his daughter had not heard from him in days.
You can see now why that 70% number may be true on its face but is really irrelevant to assessing what measures are necessary to address violent gun offences. In fact, in your report, this committee agreed with the accuracy of my critique.
Skewed and manipulated data can never be the basis for evidence-based policy. Canadians are entitled to legislation drafted on the basis of empirical data, not misinformation.
The second fundamental problem with the legislation is that it is a distraction and a gross misdirection of policing and other justice-sector resources. These resources are in short supply and are desperately needed to address the core causes of crime. While criminal legislation looks free on its face—it does not require an upfront expenditure—criminal defence lawyers know all too well the costs of increased criminalization and the ever-expanding Criminal Code. We as a group are not surprised as the justice system sags under the weight of well-intentioned amendments and justice is delayed and denied and charges are ultimately stayed by the courts.
Finally, this legislation suffers from the fundamental flaw that is endemic to much of this government's criminal law reform. It is a solution in search of a problem, like the hasty elimination of centuries-old procedural protections like peremptory challenges for juries, the preliminary inquiry, or case-specific responses to unpopular acquittals, which limit the rights of the accused to provide admissible evidence. These justice amendments bear the hallmarks of a government that legislates based on tweets and sound bites without taking into account the real consequences—unintended or otherwise—of their criminal law policy.
This is certainly true of the deferred confiscation provisions of Bill C-21. Legally obtained handguns in the possession of law-abiding citizens are not and have never been a public safety problem. In 2019, Vancouver police chief Adam Palmer, head of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, explicitly rejected the public safety benefits of any such handgun ban, calling it “naive to the realities of...organized crime and smuggling”.
When defence counsel agrees with the policy position advanced by Canada's police chiefs, it is one more indication that these provisions are not based in evidence or data but are political in nature. Once again, it has been the case for each subsequent amendment to our firearms law.
Law-abiding Canadians, citizens who have complied with the law time and again, will pay the price. Worse yet, public confidence in our legislators inevitably erodes even further—