Mr. Speaker, it is rather sad that we are still debating horrible legislation which was passed in 1995. It is a debate that never ends.
Even though we are in grave economic difficulties and the country is fighting an undeclared war, whenever I go back to my constituency and visit the coffee shop or walk down the street people still ask what we will do about the idiotic registration law. It never dies.
I diverge a little from my colleague who has proposed the bill, although I support it. The time the studies should have been made was before the bill was passed, not after the fact. We had a bill that was based on prejudice, public hysteria and deliberately falsified data. It was all brought together under a closure motion. That was one of the blackest days in the House. It is something for which democracy is paying dearly.
The hon. member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve said that he did not see anything in the bill that would affect the civil rights of Canadians. I wonder if the right to entry and search without a warrant and the right to seize lawfully owned private property without compensation constitute no threat to the general public.
I said some studies should have been done before the legislation was passed. I took the initiative to do something in this regard. I did a very detailed study of the crime statistics over a 20 year period for the northern tier states of the northwestern U.S. as opposed to the Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
I thought, as a resident of southern Saskatchewan, I would find that the rates of homicide in those two rather different jurisdictions would be more or less equal. I discovered to my surprise that the homicide rates in those northern tier states were actually lower than in our three western Canadian provinces where we have had gun control of a sort since 1976.
In those northern tier states they call it gun control because they have a law on the books in Montana that says you cannot take your machine gun away from your own property. It is wide open and yet their homicide rate is lower than ours and has been for the last 20 years, if one takes the average of those northern states and of our western provinces.
Interestingly, when I was doing this study, I discovered that North Dakota has historically had a homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 people. Maine, another state adjacent to Canada but not included in my study, also has that 1.2 per 100,000. That is roughly the same order of magnitude as the homicide rates in Japan where private ownership of firearms is virtually banned. One can make what one wants of that. It is a fact.
On the other hand, in that great land to the south the jurisdiction of the District of Columbia has what is probably the toughest regulations governing firearms of any jurisdiction in the western world, far tougher than we have in Bill C-68, and yet its homicide rate is astronomical. It is 80 per 100,000 per annum. That is like a war zone and yet they have these extremely rigorous control of firearms.
New York City is another example. Both state and city laws control firearms. Yet the homicide rate there is more than 10 times what it is in the wide open states of North Dakota, Montana and Idaho.
That is the type of study that should have been performed relative to the Canadian experience before we got involved in this hysterical pursuit of a magic fix to do away with crime in this country, but it was not done.
In recent years there have been several academic studies made of this particular question, most notably by Dr. Manzer at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Lott at the University of Chicago, and Dr. Kleck from the school of criminology at Florida State University. These academics have all agreed and determined that the existence of a law requiring the registration of firearms has no particular effect, either detrimental or beneficial, to the prevalence of murder in any society. These are eminent academics.
If the government does not want to consult academics, it would have been worthwhile had the government listened to rank and file police officers rather than to the national association of police chiefs when it went for police input. Some very good polling has been done by the Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers of its members. It was discovered that lo and behold 75% of them are opposed to the legislation in Bill C-68. Ninety-one per cent of serving RCMP officers in Saskatchewan are opposed to the legislation. These are the people who are out there on the front lines every day. These are not the political policemen.
I had a phone call not too long ago from an RCMP sergeant whom I know fairly well. He said, “There is a whole bunch of people milling around my office today. I have this big lineup at my door”. I asked what the problem was, what was going on. He said, “All the Hell's Angels in town have come around and they are trying to get their possession and acquisition certificates and they all want to get them on the same day”. Perhaps there was a little hyperbole in the man's statement, but I certainly got his message.
The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of the Environment quoted what she referred to as the positive impacts of this legislation. She should go back and take a look at this legislation and all previously existing legislation because background checks have been a fact of life in Canada for many years. It is not something that was brought in with Bill C-68 and she should know that. To say that there has been a positive effect from this new legislation is not true.
At the same time she set up quite a number of straw men. She said something about the people who are supporting this bill wanted to decontrol the private ownership of automatic weapons. I reread the bill immediately after she said that to see if I could find some reference of that nature and I am sorry, but it is not there.
All the hon. member for Yorkton—Melville is asking is that after five years from January 1 this legislation be revisited, that some proper studies be made of its effectiveness or lack thereof, and that the government then act upon those studies to determine whether or not the $50 million a year that this is going to cost us is a sensibly directed expenditure, if it is going to do any good.
The previous studies I have mentioned certainly suggest that it does no good at all.
I would like to read a brief comment from Professor Kleck who incidentally until 1976, according to his biography, was very skeptical to say the least about the right to gun ownership. He is a criminologist. He said that it was a sort of visceral reaction on his part to think that if there were fewer guns, there would be less crime. However, when he did his academic research, and he has been doing research like this for 20 years, here is what he said—