Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to Bill C-15B, which deals with cruelty to animals changes to the criminal code and various changes and amendments to the Firearms Act.
As a cattle rancher from Manitoba, I and the Canadian Alliance support very strongly that cruelty to animals be prohibited. We strongly support that persons being cruel to animals should be heavily fined. There should be heavier penalties than what is in the current legislation. Courts and crown prosecutors should be fully funded so they can take action against those who are cruel to animals.
There are other aspects around the cruelty to animals amendments which have nothing to do with cruelty to animals. It has to do with the philosophy being put forward by animal rights groups, humane societies and others in society. They would like us ultimately to get to the same point as some sects in India that sweep away a bug in front of them in order not to step on it and harm an animal.
The legislation is very bad. Why did we end up with these aspects in the cruelty to animals part of the bill? The reason is that animal rights groups have circulated letters stating that in fact they take full credit for getting the current Minister of Health elected in Edmonton. They can take credit for it and I am sure they had a big impact, but that is not the way government works. A minister is to govern for all Canadians, not just a little pressure group, a group of animal rights promoters.
Who has the minister turned against in Canada? Let me quote a pretty significant individual in our country. This has to do with medical research. For crying out loud, that is the first group the health minister has turned against, people in medicine and specifically medical research. I will quote Pierre Berton, the senior patron of Canadians for Medical Progress Inc. Remember, we are talking about the health minister. He said:
In my opinion this [C-15B] is an asinine, ludicrous approach toward solving the problem of animal abuse...if passed in its present form, creates a disturbing potential for the animal rights movement to begin a step by step process involving litigation and the incremental influencing of legislation, congruent with putting their spin on “public education”.
How precise this gentleman of letters is. This gentleman writes books that convey to Canadians the very essence of being Canadian. He describes so clearly what is wrong with the animal cruelty legislation.
What do we do about it? As I go through my speech, I want the backbench Liberals who have an opportunity to vote according to their constituents and according to what learned people like Mr. Burton have said, to stop the legislation. I want them to kill it and come back with legislation that increases the penalties for cruelty to animals to make sure we can prosecute those who are cruel to animals.
Who else besides the medical people are against the bill? The health minister comes from a big agriculture province, as do many of the other Liberal members. In fact, every province has agriculture.
Every livestock group in this country is against this cruelty to animal legislation. It puts farmers, ranchers and fur producers under the gun with the threat of being taken to court by a group of people that is pushing the issue. That group of people is the justice minister and the Liberal government.
The former justice minister, who is now the health minister, started all this business. I do not understand why the Liberals are so against agriculture, farmers and ranchers and the use of livestock for human food. I do not understand why they are against furs for warmth and the whole economic activity that those industries create.
The essence of the cruelty to animals bill has been stated. The status of animals is properly in the criminal code and should be maintained. The defences of legal justification, excuse and colour of right should be explicitly maintained for the legitimate use of animals. Of course, the definition of animal as is currently in the bill should be amended. Defining an animal as a vertebrate other than a human and having the capacity to feel pain is what will be used.
As Pierre Berton would say it is furthering the animal rights agenda. It is reaching to the point where under the law, animals are equated to human beings with the same rights and I was going to say obligations, but I do not think that could be there because animals are not human beings.
The other aspect of this bill is the firearms provisions. On the firearms provisions, the House passed special funding legislation this past winter in order to put another $114 million into the firearms registry budget. That brought the budget up to around $150 million for the past year. This coming year it could get even higher. Certainly it is not likely to be less. It is approaching $700 million or maybe more. We will have to see what the actual figures are. We have to question whether or not that is wise spending on the firearms registry.
On the animal cruelty changes, there are some good changes and some bad changes. In the firearms legislation that is presently being amended, there are no good changes.
The Canadian Alliance stands for firearms control in Canada. Canadians never were allowed to carry around registered handguns as a matter of course. There was legislation. I was a police officer for 30 years. If there was an indication that a person was going to harm somebody else with a firearm or by any other means, a police officer could get a court to take those firearms away. The police officer could get the court to prohibit the person from having firearms if the person was considered to be dangerous.
Let us look at how registration worked with handguns. I cannot remember any criminal case that was ever solved in my 30 years of police experience and I worked in drug dealing in Winnipeg which is a major centre. I worked in rural policing for 15 years. The registration system never worked for solving any crimes whatsoever. It simply ensured that the legislation did not allow handguns to be carried around.
I support that. I do not want handguns carried around in the streets. However, we do not want to make it so that firearms owners cannot shoot them at the local shooting range. Who was carrying around unregistered handgun? The drug dealers, those in organized crime, those who were running the prostitutes on our streets. They did it in spite of firearms registration. That is who we are talking about here, criminals who need to be taken care of in our legislation and judicial systems.
Honest law-abiding citizens are on the other side. It is absolutely ludicrous to pass laws and spend $700 million in order for these people to perform the purely administrative function of buying a licence. Why could that $700 million not go to Gimli, my hometown in Selkirk--Interlake, to the centre for abused women. Unpaid volunteers help out at that centre. They struggle and try to do the very job the government is not doing because it is blowing money away on a foolish registration system for rifles and shotguns that will do no good.
With my broad range of experience as a police officer for 30 years, I say that is not the case. Right away the minister will say that the police chiefs love this legislation and think it is the greatest thing in the world. I reckon if I were a police chief getting $100,000 a year from the federal government to run my association, I would probably be in favour of the legislation too.
That is a sad commentary. According to an animal rights group, the Minister of Health, who is the former Minister of Justice, owes her election to its activities. The payback is that she has said “Do you want this legislation? The farmers and ranchers are all against it but we are going to give it to you.”
That is what she is saying to those groups that say the only thing they will ever accept is if there is not one firearm in this country except those carried by the police and the military. They are trampling on the rights of every Canadian who legitimately owns that property. They are saying that the firearm registry will make it so miserable and tough for Canadians that they will eventually give up and say “I cannot have firearms because the government is going to charge me. It has made so many laws that it will lay charges for travelling around with a rifle or a shotgun, for not registering it, or for not filling out the right form to transfer it”.
I can guarantee that if the government stays in power, we will end up with the justice minister picking on every little iota of a description of an offence in that act in order to take away the guns of every Canadian.
The ministers cannot cater to one group. They are supposed to be governing for all Canadians. They are catering to these little groups.
I am 100% in favour of prevention of crime. I am 100% in favour of what we had prior to this legislation in regard to keeping handguns off the streets. Prohibited weapons such as sawed off shotguns and fully automatic firearms were prohibited before this legislation. It was good legislation. We had a safe country.
The other day the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice was speaking about statistics. The first statistic I would like to talk about is the court challenge that the provinces, seven of them in any event, including the Northwest Territories, had with the firearm registration. It went to court in Edmonton, Alberta.
I know some of the justice lawyers too. I was in charge of a proceeds of crime unit in Winnipeg and did some of the initial work on the legislation that the government brought forth in order to seize assets from organized crime and from drug dealers in particular.
At that court challenge the justice lawyers brought in statistics to show how great the legislation was and how bad things were, that there was not legislation in place. They quoted the RCMP. They said the RCMP had put out statistics substantiating the position of the government and its legislation.
It was challenged in court by the lawyers of the province. Lo and behold the statistics were drastically misused. In fact the RCMP subsequently publicly said that the justice department had misused its statistics and what the government lawyers had said in court was not true. It should have been a contempt of court.
Let us look now at the justification of the parliamentary secretary. He was trying to substantiate how great the legislation is. He said that in 1998, 63% of all female domestic homicide victims, as if there were no male victims of any kind of crime, were shot with ordinary rifles and shotguns. Holy samoly, that has to be a large number.
Let us look at the facts which are quite clear. It is 63% of what the total deaths, or homicides, of victims were and that number could very well be 10 or 15 of the total.Then the rifle, whether it was registered or not, would have been just as lethal. The problem was not with the rifle or the shotgun. The problem was the individuals who were under tremendous stress for whatever reason did not have social services or did not have the abuse centres or did not have a government funded organization that could help them with their mental problems. That $700 million would go a long way in Selkirk--Interlake to help people with those kinds of problems.
Registering these guns will not help stop this kind of abuse. That is the injustice of this firearm legislation, and a terrible waste of the moneys that we see being put into it.
I would like to see a comparison. If I spent $700 million across the country to prevent spousal abuse, instead of spending it on registering rifles and shotguns, I swear to God I would save a lot more lives. The money would be spent on social services and helping people with problems rather than on making criminals out of honest, decent citizens.
I think I have made my point that the government has misjudged this legislation. I ask that every Liberal backbencher look at the cruelty to animals legislation and the firearm legislation. I ask them to stand up and represent their constituents the way they know they should, send the bill back, kill it now, and come back with good legislation, the kind they know should be in there. That is what I would like to see.
I would like to move a subamendment to the amendment of the member for Provencher. I move:
That the amendment be amended by adding:
“and that the committee report back to the House no later than June 21, 2002.”