I am sorry, Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Safety.
The Ontario attorney general stated, “Ontario supports the need for the registration of all firearms, including long guns. There are close to two million long guns registered to licensed owners in Ontario. If the long gun registry is dismantled, as you propose with Bill C-21, these guns will become wholly untracked. We have already identified a number of legal implications surrounding untracked firearms that will certainly lessen our ability to carry out searches for firearms, and to ensure effective enforcement of “no firearms” conditions on bail, or on prohibition orders. In practical terms, this has significant implications for public safety”.
Dr. David McKeown, a medical officer of health in Ontario, has stated, “Gun violence is a serious public health issue and unrestricted rifles and shotguns are most often used in domestic violence, suicide and police killings. Six separate public inquests have maintained the importance of renewable licences and registration of all firearms. Extending the amnesty is not the answer. What is needed is to secure and maintain a strong commitment to the licence renewal process and registration”.
Shortly after becoming the Minister of Public Safety, the minister changed the composition of the advisory committee on firearms. Now the members include people who are on record opposing the existing law, that is, the original 1995 law. They are now going forward and advocating an American-style arming for self-protection. Some have even worked closely with the American National Rifle Association and participated in its infomercials.
Since the firearms advisory committee was first formed by the Conservative justice minister Kim Campbell in 1990, the former Liberal government, as of 1993, made a concerted effort to include crime and injury prevention experts, along with gun enthusiasts, to ensure that there was a balance so we could come up with sound public policy.
For the government, the experts on gun laws are all gun enthusiasts. The committee's pro-gun tilt lends to the perception that the Prime Minister's government is out of step with urban concerns on firearms violence. We hear this repeatedly, especially in Toronto and other places, and Montreal I should add.
While the committee includes some serving and former police officers, their views are at odds with the official positions of the major police organizations in the country. There is no one with expertise in suicide prevention or domestic violence even though these are significant consequences of firearm problems.
Peter Cuthbert of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police said in an article published in Le Devoir last November that it was obvious that the Minister of Public Safety wanted a committee that did not support gun control.
The firearms advisory committee, appointed and operating in virtual secrecy, has a dozen members, including a man who argued that more guns in the hands of students would have helped in the recent Virginia Tech massacre in which 32 people were killed, and another shooting aficionado who described a weapon used in last September's Dawson College killings in Montreal as “fun”.
Dr. Mike Ackermann, a member of the committee, stated:
If even 1% of the students and staff at Virginia Tech had been allowed to exercise their right to self-defence, then this tragedy would have been stopped in its very beginning and dozens of lives would have been saved.
The public safety minister's office recruited the panel members but did not, as has been the practice in previous governments, issue any public announcement about the appointments. We only found out about it from a letter on the former speaker's website.
Recently, we have discovered that the cost of the gun registry has not decreased with the Conservative government taking power and despite less information being recorded with the two amnesties.
I know my time is up, but public safety is an investment. Last year we had a motion passed in committee saying that we need to keep this registry alive. We know that all types of gun deaths, homicides, suicides and accidents, have declined since the registry was brought into force. I think that we have to invest in this registry and continue, so that it will be one element of helping public safety in this country, but not the only element.