Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for coming. I will have some technical questions for you, as I did yesterday.
Following up on the initial statement of my colleague Ms. Dancho, I really feel as though a red line has been crossed in this country with this amendment.
In this country, we don't have a Second Amendment—and I think that is appropriate—but we do have a social contract that has existed for decades and for generations. It is a social contract between the Government of Canada and society, and part of that society is law-abiding firearms owners. For generations, Canadians have accepted that regulation is an important part of cultivating a responsible firearms culture in this country and a very important firearms safety culture. Over generations, in response to exceptional instances and, in many cases, horrible tragedies, governments of all political persuasions have seen fit to put forward amendments and legislation to close gaps to try to prevent tragedies from happening.
However, whenever those laws were passed, there was always an understanding that there was no intention to target law-abiding firearms owners—hunters, farmers, sport shooters and gun collectors. There was always a great deal of deference put into legislative drafting, into having witnesses come and into creating legislation that ensured the social contract with firearms owners, with indigenous people and with hunters was preserved and protected.
I think one great example of that—and this is going to be a technical question I'll ask, so I'll put it on your radar—is section 117.15 of the Criminal Code. Section 117.15 of the Criminal Code gives the Governor in Council the ability to regulate firearms. A subsection of that was passed in 1995, nearly 30 years ago, so it isn't a recent law but an old law. It says:
(2) In making regulations, the Governor in Council may not prescribe any thing to be a prohibited firearm, a restricted firearm, a prohibited weapon, a restricted weapon, a prohibited device or prohibited ammunition if, in the opinion of the Governor in Council, the thing to be prescribed is reasonable for use in Canada for hunting or sporting purposes.
It is the law of the land in this country—and it hasn't been changed since 1995—that when the Governor in Council is in the process of changing the classification of a firearm to make it restricted or prohibited, they must consider whether that firearm could be reasonably used for a hunting or sporting purpose.
I am concerned and will ask this as a direct question to the witnesses: How does amendment G‑4 interact with that provision of the Criminal Code? I think that's a very important question we have to answer today because, as I said, a red line has been crossed. As much as I appreciate the opening statement from my Liberal colleague, who said that it was not the Liberals' intention to target hunters in any way, a number of shotguns and rifles have been explicitly named in amendment G‑46 that I think any reasonable person would see as hunting or sporting firearms. I think that's quite apparent.
For this government to put forward this amendment without giving any thought to the law of the land really draws a lot of concern for me. One of these hunting and sporting rifles is the Benelli M3. It has a wooden stock and doesn't have a detachable magazine. That's interesting because proposed paragraph (g) of this amendment, which we talked about on Tuesday as the evergreen definition, talks about any semi-automatic rifle or shotgun with a detachable magazine that has the capacity to carry more than five rounds.
It's been long accepted—this is part of the social contract that I talked about—that we do not want high-capacity magazines in Canada, so there has always been a limit on centrefire ammunition: You cannot have a magazine that exceeds five rounds. Well, in Canada, we also don't have a huge firearms industry, and most hunting and sporting rifles and shotguns are manufactured in other countries. Other countries don't have this five-round magazine rule, so even though in Canada you are not allowed to have a magazine that exceeds five rounds, all the firearms that are being banned were originally designed, for the most part, as far as I know, to potentially carry six, seven or even more rounds.
In Canada, we currently have a ban. It's a criminal offence to have a prohibited magazine. It's a prohibited magazine if it carries more than five rounds. That has been a largely effective policy, and it has been accepted in this country for many years. We can use these rifles that carry more rounds, but a law-abiding person would immediately cease to be law-abiding if.... No hunter would want to use any magazine that has a capacity higher than five rounds.
However, now the government is saying they're going to approach this from the other end. They're not just going to ban magazines that can carry more than five rounds. They're going to ban any gun that could carry a magazine that has more than five rounds. In the process of adding that amendment, they're capturing an immense number of firearms, many of which are used for hunting and sporting purposes. This is why I say a red line has been crossed.
Are they banning all hunting and sporting shotguns and rifles? Certainly they're not, but that's exactly how this starts. This Liberal government will take incremental steps forward. However, I would submit that this is not an incremental step; this is a massive step. It's a step that was not talked about in the last number of federal elections in specific terms.
The government has used very ambiguous terms, such as “military-style assault weapon” or “assault weapon”. I actually agree somewhat with my Bloc colleague, who said we all want a strong definition. However, at no time was there consultation with the public, nor was there an election platform stating that the definition of an assault weapon or a military-style assault weapon would include semi-automatic or centrefire shotguns and rifles. That was never contemplated. That was not something we talked about at this committee. It was also not in the original Bill C-21. It's not something we knew about, so we didn't know to ask witnesses about it and we didn't bring specific witnesses for it.
In a way, although this bill has a number of steps in the democratic process to go through before it potentially passes into law, the addition of this amendment at this stage impugns our democracy. It removed our ability at second reading, which took place and had a second reading debate and second reading vote, and at the committee stage in the House of Commons.... It has precluded our ability to bring in witnesses and experts to talk about this issue so we can debate it. It was just table-dropped as an amendment after we completed our vigorous study, a study that I would submit did not go very well for the government.
I think Bill C-21 was very poorly drafted. It was not well thought out. A number of the well-intentioned things the government put in it were later found to be extremely flawed. Witnesses from across the political spectrum noted that these things were flawed. I won't get into those specifics, but it became increasingly clear as we got to the end of the process that this bill would have to be amended significantly. When the government recognized that these significant amendments were likely coming, it chose to table-drop massive new amendments that, in the words of one lawyer, amount to the most significant revision to the Firearms Act since the Firearms Act was passed in 1995. This is the most significant revision to the Firearms Act in the history of the Firearms Act, and it's not even being debated as its own stand-alone motion. It's being debated as an amendment during the clause-by-clause stage at committee. This is not how our democracy is supposed to work.
If this bill makes it to the Senate, there will be an opportunity for senators to look into it. However, the Liberal government, because of this last-minute, Trojan-Horse manoeuvre, has precluded my right as a parliamentarian and my privilege as a member of the House of Commons to study this bill and to debate it on its merits.
I'm stuck here at the clause-by-clause stage, when the train is already leaving the station, trying to get answers about what this is going to do. I think that raises some very serious implications for the legitimacy and the credibility of this legislation, the credibility of this amendment. I understand that some colleagues will say that they want.... In other parties, they want to vote for this, but surely they can recognize that it is a very bad precedent to set to allow any party or any government to add an amendment that was not conceived of in the original legislation, that was not discussed at all in the witness testimony and that was not brought forward until this late stage in the process.
I'll move on from that and get back to the social contract. Canada is not the United States of America, and I think that is a great thing. My family left the United States—well, the 13 colonies—in 1783. We fled from upstate New York together with our brothers and sisters in the Six Nations, the Mohawk nations. We left the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York to move to the Belleville region of Ontario. We were United Empire Loyalists, and we came to this country because we rejected the political ideology of the American revolution. We're friends with the Americans. They're our allies. We share many common values, but Canada was founded.... One of the founding peoples of this nation were the Loyalists, who came from the 13 colonies as refugees to this country with the indigenous peoples of upstate New York and other places, and with the members of the francophone Quebec nation who also.... There were entreaties from the United States to ask the Quebec nation to join in the revolution, and it rejected the revolution.
This country was founded as a rejection of the revolution. I think that is a great thing because I am a Canadian patriot. I believe in this country. I believe in the reasons for which this country was founded. I believe that we are a distinct society. We are distinct from the United States. That's why it actually offended me.... I do respect my colleague, Mr. Chiang, and his service in the police service, but it did offend me as a Canadian—when he moved this amendment and cited a Californian law—that we need to be implementing Californian, American-style laws in this country. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but I can bet that the murder rate in the state of California by firearms is far greater than the murder rate in this country. That's something I'm very proud of in this country. We're a safer country. We're by no means a perfect country, but we are a country that has better firearms laws than any state in the United States. For this Liberal member to come forward and cite an American law in the American context as a reason to pass a new law in Canada.... I think that's wrong because we are Canadians. We have our own way. We are distinct. We do not need American-style laws in this country. We do not need American divisive political rhetoric in this country.
Do you know what? I think, frankly, it does.... I'm a big fan of George Grant and his work Lament for a Nation. We have seen in his book that one of the theses is that the Liberal Party of Canada has always found political power by importing American cultural debates into this country. They are breaking the social contract. This has eroded the social contract in this country, and I'm going to say why this is super dangerous for our country, and why the result of the social contract being broken is so dangerous.
However, first off, why is this Liberal government breaking the social contract with hunters and law-abiding gun owners? Is it because of public safety? No, because we've seen from the witnesses, from police and from people who are working in our inner cities, that these firearms—and we're talking about handguns and about fully automatic firearms that are heavily restricted or illegal in this country—are being smuggled in from the United States, a country with far different gun laws than we have, and they are being used to commit crimes on our streets. These are not law-abiding hunters and sport shooters.
They're not using many of the firearms that the government has listed in G-46, like a Benelli M3 shotgun. It wouldn't be used by people who are committing crimes on our streets. For the government to list that is a clear violation of our social contract.
Why are they doing that? It's because they have recognized that this is a divisive political issue that they can use to divide Canadians between rural and urban, and divide between Canadians who own firearms and Canadians who don't know much about firearms, who don't own firearms and who are afraid of firearms. They've recognized that this is a way to divide Canadians for their own political success. I think that's wrong, because we are eroding something that is very fundamental about our country.
What is very fundamental to our identity as Canadians is that we have a social contract. Firearms owners do not have explicit rights written into the Constitution of this country, but this country respects the rights of law-abiding firearms owners who follow the law, who go through the process, who get vetted by the Canadian firearms program and the RCMP, and who could have their guns taken at any time by the police, even without a warrant. If anyone calls into a police station with a claim that somebody is a threat to themselves or to others, the police have the power to act.
That's something that doesn't exist in the United States. It exists in Canada, and I think that's a positive thing. Speaking as someone who comes from a family of gun owners, we never had to be worried that our government was going to pass legislation that discriminated against us. We knew that, as long as we followed all these rules, these reasonable rules that have been accepted for generations and decades in this country, we would be respected by our government. It's only under this Liberal government that this social contract has been violated, and not for public safety reasons, which I think we could look into, but for purely political division reasons. It's purely for their own political gain.
I think that's shame on the Liberal Party of Canada. I know they have lots of members who live in rural areas who probably own firearms and probably are concerned about this legislation. I don't know how much consultation they did on this within their own caucus. I won't speculate on that. I don't know. It's just so shocking to me that they would cross this red line and that they would delve into the area of shotguns and rifles.
Moving on, I see that the government.... Actually, it was one of my questions. When I first saw this list of guns, the 310 pages or so, and G-46 came out, I was just really curious as to why the government was putting this list as an amendment to Bill C-21. In looking at the list of guns, it quickly became apparent that a lot of these guns had just been copied and pasted from the May 2020 order in council. We have since discovered, based on testimony yesterday, that somewhere between 300 and 400 additional firearms have been added to the May 2020 list. Why would this Liberal government need to pass this as an amendment? If these firearms are a threat to public safety, they could have the authority....
I guess I'll ask a quick question here: Does the government have the authority to add these firearms to the banned list using an OIC immediately?