Mr. Speaker, certainly I listened with some interest to the member who presented the motion, the hon. member for Yorkton--Melville. I think it is worth reading to the House the intent of the proposed legislation:
That the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights fully examine the effectiveness of property rights protection for Canadian citizens as provided in the Canadian Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and report back to the House whether or not the federal laws protecting property rights need to be amended in order to comply with international agreements Canada has entered into, including Article 17 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that states: “1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. 2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”.
As well, I listened to the other members who spoke to the motion, which is non-votable, and particularly to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice. To give credit to the member for Yorkton--Melville, he has raised other issues in the House on and about gun control and has admitted that this motion distinctly was brought in to deal with gun control. I noted that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice never once mentioned the words firearms or gun control in his reply. I thought it was quite an interesting discussion. I do not know quite how he managed to avoid it.
Certainly I would agree with the member for Yorkton--Melville that this is worthy of taking to the committee, worthy of looking at, worthy of debate, and worthy of a vote in the House. Whether or not that vote would be passed, whether or not given more information the majority of members in the House would support it is yet to be seen. Certainly a couple of things came to mind as I was listening to the debate.
The first thing that leaped out at me in the discussion of firearms registration was that the member stated he had presented bills to the House before that had been well researched and well drafted and he thought this was another good motion to bring to the House. I am not as certain, after listening to the debate, that this is as well researched and as well drafted as some of the other motions and private members' bills.
Certainly I listened with some concern when I heard reference to the American constitution and the fifth amendment. We can debate, and probably should, and that would be the point of taking this to committee, the provision of the fifth amendment and the American constitution, but the first thing that comes to my mind is the Enron scandal in the United States. The perpetrators of that crime, and it is a crime, are appearing at the inquiry, which is dealing with $100 billion of private investors' money in the United States, and they have all claimed the fifth amendment. It certainly looks as if they will walk, scot-free. It is absolutely scandalous that we would allow such a provision in the charter of rights in Canada, a provision that would allow perpetrators of a crime to claim something similar to the fifth amendment and walk away scot-free.
Also mentioned were the social limits on the ownership and use of property. The member from the Bloc raised a very good point about the fact that many people would claim that child pornography is property and therefore they should be allowed to own it, distribute it and use it as they see fit. I would disagree with that. The Bloc member has made a very good point.
On the issue I take this to be about, the issue of firearms control and some misguided, poorly used and poorly implemented legislation brought in by the Liberal government, certainly I would agree that we need to find an avenue to change it. The only avenue I see before the people of Canada to change that particularly spurious piece of legislation, Bill C-68, at this stage in the process would be to change the government and bring in legislation that effectively gets rid of long gun registration. Until that happens, I do not expect any other changes to be made. We can continue to raise the issue. We can continue to explain to Canadians why it continues to be an important issue, but at the end of the day there is only one thing that will change Bill C-68 unless suddenly there is a great amount of calcium found in the spines of the Liberal backbench members which would actually force the government to bring in some meaningful legislation to deal with firearms registration.
I will just take a few minutes for this because we are talking about property and in this case I am talking about firearms and not about other types of property. With regard to Bill C-68, which was implemented and passed in 1995, I think it never hurts to just spell out one more time the cost of this poorly crafted piece of legislation. The government promised, as we all remember, that it would cost $85 million, and $50 million to $60 million per year to run the registry. That operating budget has soared from a projection of $60 million to $100 million a year. As of November 21, 2001, the cost of the program was confirmed as of that date at $689 million.
I suspect that the legislation may have been brought in with some good intentions. Unfortunately those good intentions have never done what they were supposed to do. The only thing that has occurred from the onset of that legislation is that the government has refused to give out information, has refused to give out statistics and has refused to engage in realistic debate in the House of Commons on the issue, and it has steadfastly refused to amend it. As a matter of fact, the few times it has been amended have probably made it worse.
There are new provisions in the safety act, Bill C-42, which raise real questions about whether or not black powder advocates in Canada, people who either enjoy black powder hunting or belong to re-enactment groups like the King's Orange Rangers, will be able to have access to black powder to use in their muskets. Black powder is an explosive. In Bill C-42, under the section dealing with natural resources and the Explosives Act, there would be some question of whether or not these people would qualify to actually purchase that explosive.
It just goes on and on. We all know about the constitutional challenge to the gun registry. We all know that it was denied at the supreme court. I think we have to go back to the basics. We have to try to understand why the government would bring in such a poorly crafted piece of legislation and why millions of Canadians have still refused to register. The registration date has been changed, first from 1998, then to 2001 and now it is in 2003 that we will have the last opportunity to register on the last minute of the last day. Again the government has come out with a bunch of magical numbers, saying that of 2.2 million firearms owners 90% of them have complied, so that is 1.8 million or something like that. These are ridiculous numbers.
We know there are 7 million to 8 million firearms in the country, mostly long guns, used by people like myself for hunting, or trapping or for varmint control. It is time that we absolutely stopped setting penalties against legitimate firearm owners. We have to do something about it and reverse the legislation.