Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise and speak in support of the Reform Party's motion to split Bill C-68 into two bills.
The Minister of Justice said this bill is about the kind of Canada we want. I and the Reform Party can certainly agree with that statement. He also said that the overwhelming majority of Canadians support his position. I take exception with this statement.
Certainly if the question was asked whether they were in favour of gun control, any reasonable, fair-minded, clear thinking Canadian would say yes. The fraud being perpetrated on Canadians is that pollsters have been paid to ask the wrong question, and ask they have over and over again. The minister must not get away with this misconception, pushing his agenda and serving the interests of the minority and the elitists.
Though the answer from the majority regarding firearms control is yes, it is not yes to more firearms control, but rather a firearms control that respects without question the rights and freedoms of law-abiding citizens. I must repeat that statement: a firearms control that respects the right of life, liberty and security of person and that respects the inherent right of every citizen to own and enjoy property and that respects the rule of common law.
Canada's required firearms law must be in a form that is simple, economically attainable, and derived from common sense. Canada's required laws dealing with criminals must also be simple, economically attainable and derived from common sense. I mention both firearms laws and laws dealing with criminals separately, because that is exactly what they should be, separate.
An owner of any object, be it a knife, a rock, a club, a gun or even a pillow is not a criminal until he or she violates the rights and freedoms of another person with that object. The object now becomes a weapon which then is bound to the criminal act and dealt with by criminal law.
Now that we have separated firearms and criminals, it would be easy to ask Canadians a fair question. They would undoubtedly say no to more firearms control and yes to more criminal control.
As we can see, the single politically correct question that should be asked of all Canadians regarding the Criminal Code is if citizens had a choice in methods used to curtail crime, which would they favour: control of law-abiding citizens or control of the criminal? I am sure that 100 per cent of the citizens would vote for the second choice.
A democratic government would act upon the will of the people unless, of course, that government lacked the will or the ability to deal effectively with criminals and crime and tried to create a false impression of dealing with the problem by further regulating law-abiding citizens. That is exactly the fraud which is being perpetrated on Canadians by the Minister of Justice.
The minister says this bill is about the type of society that Liberals want in our country. He says that Liberals believe only police officers and armed forces should have the right to possess arms. He apparently means but does not include criminals in the category of those allowed to possess firearms or this government would be taking some very specific action, which I will come back to later on.
If this bill is leading us to the kind of society the minister wants, that society must be one in which governments fear law-abiding citizens. It is one where governments seize privately owned property without compensation. It is a country where instead of dealing swiftly and decisively with criminal activity, the government and law enforcement authorities turn their heads and pretend they do not know what is going on.
I fully agree that a kinder, gentler society is a highly desirable goal. However, I see no evidence of success on the part of those promoting that concept. Instead, I see a constantly rising confrontational crime rate, the result of a criminal justice system repeatedly basing action on theories that turn out to be wrong. As the risk factor rises, the public is moving toward self-protection, whether it is legal or not.
Prohibition is not a method of control; it is a method of losing any control over the situation. It is a lawyer's theory that just does not work. Most lawyers regard it as an axiom that reducing the number of weapons in society will reduce weapons crime. In all of our research we have found nothing whatsoever to support that idea. The evidence strongly indicates that the successful disarming of the community simply turns control of the neighbourhood over to the biggest, meanest thugs in the neighbourhood.
I will leave members with the conclusion of Chief Inspector Colin Greenwood of the West Yorkshire Constabulary in Britain, a country long known for strict gun control. He has done a comprehensive study on firearms control methods and their actual as opposed to theoretical effects in many countries. I quote his findings:
At first glance, it may seem odd or even perverse to suggest that statutory control on private ownership of firearms is irrelevant to the problem of armed crime; yet that is precisely what the evidence shows. Armed crime and violent crime generally are products of ethnic and social factors unrelated to the availability of a type of weapon.
The number of firearms required to satisfy the crime market is small, and these are supplied no matter what controls are instituted. Controls had serious effects on legitimate users of firearms, but there is no case, either in the history of this country or in the experience of other countries in which controls can be shown to have restricted the flow of weapons to criminals, or in any way reduce crime.
He was right. The latest British Home Office statistics for England and Wales show violent crime has doubled every 10 years since 1946. Britain's recreational firearms industry has been destroyed.
Many honest shooters now keep their firearms in Belgium to avoid the next wave of confiscation. Has gun control worked? No, it has not worked. British firearm crime rates are at an all time high and continue to rise. What else could one expect?
Firearms are easy to smuggle, police are easy to avoid while committing a violent crime and their government guarantees that the victim will have no effective way to protect himself or his family. Any criminal who has a firearm can totally dominate any victim situation.
Our Minister of Justice said on several occasions that no Canadian has any need of firearms for self-protection. If that is so, why does he and the Prime Minister regularly dip into the public purse to cover the expense of armed bodyguards to protect their own sacred skins? Are their skins any more sacred than those of other Canadians?
I must expose one other area of fraudulent injustice arising from this legislation, the whole matter of how this legislation will apply to Canada's aboriginal peoples.
When I raised this question in a departmental briefing I was chastized for suggesting there was perhaps racial inequity in the application of the legislation. My constituency has a large aboriginal population and both aboriginal people and non-aboriginal people have a right to know how this law will be applied.
The minister stated in the House this law must apply to all Canadians but will be enforced with cultural sensitivity on Indian lands. Indian chiefs and even aboriginal MLAs tell me this law will not apply to the Indian people and would be a violation of treaty rights or that it would not apply because Canadian law does not apply on sovereign Indian lands.
I hope this is not the view of the Minister of Justice because every Canadian must be equal under the law. To do otherwise would promote racism and non-compliance with the law.
The minister under section 110 of the Firearms Act has the authority to decide which persons do or do not need firearms. I am told the minister agreed under section 112(1) to exempt aboriginal people by order in council and that the issue need never come before Parliament.
I hope this is incorrect because it would be a recipe for disaster. If this is not true, when will the government do something about the illegally stored arms on the reserves along the U.S. border and do something to stop the illegal smuggling that everyone knows exists?
How will the minister apply the law in the self-governing Indian lands in Yukon where legislation passed in the House recently removes jurisdiction for firearms from the federal government?
There is no reasonable justification for treating aboriginal people any different under this legislation than anyone else. Firearms are no more a part of aboriginal culture than non-aboriginal culture. Firearms, after all, arrived in this country with the Europeans.
If this law is bad for aboriginal people, this law is bad for all people. We are convinced the major predictable effect of enacting this legislation, so poorly researched, so badly designed, so basically silly, is an increase in the number of Canadian voters killed, injured and robbed in the years to come. We reject this legislation.