Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to put some comments on record with respect to Bill C-245.
I am not at all surprised that the Minister of Justice does not favour the legislation. That stands to reason given the almost pathological pursuit of the gun registry which has now escalated into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
In speaking to police officers and those around the country who have the task of applying and enforcing the legislation, we are told time and again that it will have no impact on public safety. It is nevertheless a white elephant to which everyone in government seems to be clinging.
I commend the hon. member for Lakeland for bringing the issue forward to try to improve the ineffective, expensive and discriminatory registry scheme in Canada. It is a bit like trying to polish a rotten apple, if I could put it that way.
The law of the land is such that Canadians are, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, forced to enter into the registry and yet some elements of it are particularly unfair. The search and seizure aspect which the hon. member for Lakeland has seized on should be of great concern to Canadians.
The Conservative Party very much supports the premise of the hon. member's bill. It is necessary to protect gun owners who have never committed any offence, been suspected of a crime or used a firearm in an irresponsible fashion. Such individuals are subject to search and seizure without a warrant under the new provisions of the Firearms Act.
Accepting these amendments would prevent searches based on hearsay or rumour and avoid developing a system akin to the former Soviet Union where the KGB had neighbours watching neighbours. Heaven forbid we adopt that type of paranoid justice system. However that is what the current gun registry seems to be leading toward.
The bill would not hinder police forces in any way from protecting the public. If they have hard evidence they can simply get a warrant. I fully support the efforts of police in protecting the public. However I have no difficulty in making the standard higher when it comes to invading a person's home in search of an obsolete gun from the second world war, a family heirloom or a gun with sentimental value that someone has tucked away in a trunk and not registered. That is the type of legislation before the Canadian public today. It would be intrusive into the lives of Canadians.
The enactment would affect part III of the criminal code as enacted by section 139 of the Firearms Act. The purpose is to remove the power in subsection 117.04(2) to enter, search and seize without a warrant in cases where no offence has been committed or is suspected to have been committed. It is a very common sense, pragmatic provision that would do away with potential abuses under the regulatory firearms scheme.
Provision is made for restitution for loss or damage resulting from entry and search. The bill takes into account whether such loss or damage was reasonable and necessary in light of evidence collected and in light of the behaviour of the person on the premises.
The bill is drafted to allow police officers to exercise their duties responsibly and reasonably. Who in their right mind could take issue with that? Why in any stretch of the imagination would we not expect that reasonable standard to apply?
Subsection 117.04(2) of the act deals with search and seizure without a warrant. For all intents and purposes the bill would remove and repeal that subsection.
The bill would make other amendments. Subsection 117.04(4) of the act would be amended to ensure that a peace officer who executes a warrant returns to the judge who issued it and shows the date it was executed, a description of items and documents seized, the extent of the search and any property damage that might have resulted.
Again these safeguards are aimed quite rightly at ensuring police officers do not abuse their powers and simply stick to the letter of the law and follow the warrant to its natural conclusion.
The parliamentary secretary said civil courts are the proper route for pursuing matters of property damage. That is nothing short of ridiculous. The powers of the state and of the Department of Justice would be brought to bear upon any individual who made such a complaint.
Any time a person comes into conflict with a government the result is delay. An army of lawyers and litigators would go to great lengths to ensure the matter was not brought to court for months if not years. The average citizen simply does not have the resources for such a battle. The suggestion of the parliamentary secretary is therefore bunk.
The gun registry is doomed, although it may take another five or ten years to finally collapse under its own weight of costs and regulatory red tape. The public, in its wisdom, will eventually recognize that the scheme was cumbersome, costly, unworkable and unwieldy.
Provisions to improve the legislation such as the one before us are laudable. They are encouraging to members of the House who see the legislation for what it is. However the reality is that the government will not accept them. Its pathological pursuit of this particular registry scheme is becoming increasingly recognizable. This cumbersome, useless registry is going to be with us until the government changes. That message is becoming clear. Let us call it for what it is.
The registry is not about safety nor crime control. As has been stated time and time again, members of the Hell's Angels and those who engage in crimes using firearms are not going to participate.
What is this legislation all about? It is aimed at collectors, duck hunters, farmers and fishermen who use firearms as part of their trade or occupation to control pests or to destroy an animal which may have been injured in a humane fashion. Those are the individuals who will be affected.
There is a document in circulation entitled “Self-Defence in Canada”. The Department of Justice acknowledges in that document that firearms are used about 32,000 times a year for self-protection from criminal activity. A 1997 a study by Gary Mauser said, when animal attacks which had been prevented with guns were added in, the annual self-defence numbers actually doubled to 64,000 incidents where guns where used to save lives. If suicides were removed, which are sadly generally considered to be non-preventable, approximately 40 lives were saved for every life lost by a firearm. These figures were based on the government's own statistics.
In stating government statistics, it is important to recall that seven out of ten statistics are wrong. However 44% of rural households in Canada own firearms compared with 11% in Canadian cities. Yet the violent crime rate in cities is 40% higher than it is in rural Canada. We know that this legislation is aimed almost entirely, or will have its effect played out, in rural Canada.
In 1993 the RCMP commissioner at the time Philip Murray complained in a letter to the minister that her department had greatly overstated the number of gun crimes in Canada for that year. Department figures showed that 623 gun related crimes had occurred. Murray stated that the real number was actually 73.
These statistics have been used sadly to misinform Canadians about the use of guns in Canada.
I commend the hon. member for Lakeland for bringing this matter forward. It gives us another opportunity to put on the record just how inane this legislation really is.