I'm very grateful to the government for the two bills that it has passed, but the concern remains. Bill C-21 is still, of course, in implementation. At a meeting I attended with public safety, I saw that their emphasis right now with that bill is to try to work on all the pieces of the bill concurrently. My point to them was that we had a terrible killing in Sault Ste. Marie last October and that we just had one in Harrow that involved a legal shotgun again. I asked them at that meeting whether, of all the priorities they're working on simultaneously, they could make a greater priority out of the safety of women and children.
I personally am perceiving right now an increase in the number of children whose lives are also being taken with their mother's lives. I'm very concerned about it. It's a myth that legal gun owners don't kill. For example, in terms of femicide, Lépine, of course, at École Polytechnique is the most famous one of all, but there are also Jones, Desmond, Finn, Pearson, Walsh, Soederhuysen and Quesnel. Legal gun owners who committed other crimes include Bissonnette, Lapa, Mercier, Brittain, Schmegelsky and McLeod, Raymond, Fabrikant, Gill, Bourque, and I could go on.
Those bills are very necessary because it's not only criminals who kill. However, in speaking with the RCMP and the national firearms centre, I'm not confident that those bills have been well implemented or that we have any data to show that they have. I don't have a lot of confidence yet that they're actually applying the law as it relates to Bill C-71 for sure.