My father died when I was four years old, in answer to the question being asked about my father.
Perhaps I could get back to the topic at hand; it would be more appropriate. There were guns in my home. Guns were not registered 40 years ago. Motorcycle drivers did not wear helmets 40 years ago. Cars did not have seatbelts and there was no such thing as a freeway in Ottawa. The concept that may escape some members across the way is that we have evolved. Things have changed. Hopefully we are here to make life better for all our constituents. That is what the Minister of Justice is trying to do.
Perhaps not all initiatives proposed by everyone with regard to gun control have been perfect. Perfection is not here, but we have a good bill before us that will go to committee. It will be a better bill when it comes out of committee because there are members of the House who will do a job for Canadians by trying to make the bill better.
And what do we want? First, we want legislation that provides stricter punitive measures for those who use weapons illegally. Second, we want to put a stop to arms smuggling or limit it as much as possible.
Third, and there are perhaps other elements I could enumerate, we also want to register firearms so we know who has them and how many they have. Is this such a strange concept in civilized society? After all, I register my car.
I do not have a dog now but when I did I had to register it. Some people are telling me if we register our firearms that automatically means it is the first step toward confiscation. No one ever attempted to confiscate my dog. It was registered. To pretend, as some hon. members have, that this is the first step toward confiscation is not right.
Some of those people saying that will someday have to justify what they are doing before their constituents. An hon. member sent me what he called his test as to whether we should support gun control. In the hon. member's test was a questionnaire. In the questionnaire of the member from the Reform Party it said: "Do you think members should vote according to the majority of their constituents?"
If that were the only test applied to the bill-not that it should always be the strict and only test any member should be governed by-to the hon. members across, this debate would have been long over. That is not the only test. The members across should not pretend it is either, because they are wrong.
A few days ago, there was an attempt at a sort of ambush in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell.
A group calling itself-I use the term loosely-the responsible firearms owners of Stormont-Dundas and Glengarry sent a poster inviting people to a meeting. Do you know what the poster said, Mr. Speaker? I think you do for obvious reasons. The poster said: "Attention all firearms owners. This is the last chance to save your firearm", in reference to a meeting at which they asked me to be present along with an hon. member from the Reform Party.
They sent that kind of information out trying to excite people to make them as angry as possible so they would show up with anger in mind, not justice. People would go to that meeting thinking it was the last chance to save their firearms. Then they organized this debate with a neutral chairman who just happened to own the local gun shop. When I discovered the local gun shop owner was the chairman of the meeting I objected. I said it was wrong. They said they would change the chairman for a better one.
They changed the chairman for a local optometrist. When the name became familiar, my staff discovered in our file that he had sent me one of those little cards in which he bragged he owned 20 guns and if I or my party dared to propose any stricter gun control he would work to defeat me, work to defeat my party and that those who supported further gun control would never remember and that he would never forget. That was the neutral chairman they had appointed for the meeting. He was the second neutral chairman because the first was not neutral enough.
Having done that they decided on the format of the debate in which they had an educational presentation by the gun group which lasted 20 minutes. It was followed by a presentation by the provincial member for the riding who said he did not like the bill. That was followed by a member of the Reform Party who spoke 15 minutes against the bill. To even it up, on the other side they had me speaking for the bill for 15 minutes. That was a fair debate? It was an ambush. Mr. Speaker, you know what I am talking about.
Then they tried to get coverage for this event and those people would claim they represented the majority of my constituents.
No, Mr. Speaker. And I am ready to debate with anyone in my riding, with equal time for both sides. I am ready to do so. I am ready to prove that the hon. Minister of Justice has put a good bill before us, and that this bill will be improved by a parliamentary committee made up of members from both sides of the House, people who know what they are doing.
Whether they come from the Reform Party, the Bloc Quebecois or even from here in the minister's party, people will work and will work well on this committee, and we will have a better bill as the result. But we are not going to make any progress so long as people continue to try to dupe others in the way I have described. There is nothing to be gained by listening to those who claim that voting for the motion tabled in the House today by the hon. member for Yorkton-Melville means voting to split the bill into two distinct parts.
Nothing is further from the truth. A vote for the motion today is not a vote to split the bill. It is a vote to decline second reading to the bill. It is a vote to kill the bill. I will not vote to kill the bill. It is a good bill. I will work to improve it. We have a good piece of legislation and we will make better laws for the citizens of Canada.