If a member wishes to heckle me, I will be happy to cede some time to them if they want to ask me a question.
This piece of legislation creates a registrar. The only purpose for creating a registrar is to manage a registry. I used to work for a professional association, and I was named its registrar. I managed a registry of professional members. A mayor will run a city. A reeve will run a county. The president of a company will run a business. We cannot pretend for one minute that a registrar will not run a new long-gun firearms registry. In this piece of legislation is embedded a method to do so; every single sale will be tracked. It is a return through the back door to the national firearms registry that a previous government got rid of because it was so massively unpopular across Canada. It was ineffective and a boondoggle. Billions of dollars were wasted on a registry that achieved very little.
In this piece of legislation are also provisions on a background check, and that will go on for lifetime. At a time when people have become extra sensitive about their privacy, it is interesting that they will go through a whole lifetime of an individual to judge whether they should be able to have a PAL or an RPAL to own and use a firearm.
What about second chances? What about persons changing? I thought that was one of the things we were advocating for. That is a concern of mine. I have met a lot of great constituents, great individuals, who in their past had criminal activity, and they changed. They have successful professional pursuits. They have married. They have family lives. Are these the people we want to target? Do we want to tell them that there are no second chances?
I completely agree that there should not be second chances for certain types of criminal activity. It is hard to tell in the provisions in Bill C-71 what those are and where the line will be drawn. Why not go out into our communities and ask Canadians where the line should be drawn? Where should the difference be between people who perhaps have made mistakes early in their lives and have reformed, and decades later are seeking to have the privilege in Canada to own a firearm so they can go hunting with fellow family members?
As I have mentioned many times in the House before, there are provisions in this bill that would give the right to reclassify a firearm from unclassified, non-restricted, or restricted, to prohibited, solely to the RCMP, with no oversight from the House of Commons or the minister. I have a serious problem with that. To me, it is a deep issue of parliamentary supremacy and responsibility with respect to who is responsible at the end of the day for decisions made on the administrative side. It should be this House that keeps the Minister of Public Safety accountable for the decisions he or she makes in the conduct of duties. It should be members in the House making these decisions, and not the RCMP. The RCMP is there to advise. We can say that it has a body of evidence and it can provide a certain expertise, but it should not be solely up to the RCMP to make decisions on how certain firearms are reclassified.
There are two important ideas why it should not be allowed to do this. First is this idea of parliamentary supremacy that I talked about. We should not be giving agencies of government the power to deprive people of their private property without having Parliament make a judgment call. That would be by making a direct decision, or by demanding the Minister of Public Safety to be held accountable in the House through the different procedures we have, either through committee, question period, or through debate in the House. I do not think that should be allowed.
Second, this is private property as well, and a lawful firearms owner can have his firearm reclassified. Sometimes we are talking about just one firearm that an owner has to dispose of, but we could be talking about thousands of dollars in firearms that an owner no longer has access to.
What can be done? I have a few suggestions that have been suggested to me by constituents. Minimum sentencing laws are a proven way to keep gangsters and criminals who use guns off the streets. I do not mean for administrative penalties; I mean for violent crimes committed with firearms. As long as minimum sentencing is not excessive, it serves the purpose of taking violent criminals off the street for the minimum amount of time necessary, and it keeps our streets safe. Repeat criminals would also be deterred by this. We should punish criminals. People should be sent to jail for using a firearm in criminal activity. It cannot be that a person gets to go just to provincial court, or that a person gets a fine.
I also think we should do more to help our major urban centres, because crime does not stay there. One of the things the Calgary Police Service told me repeatedly is that rural crime is driven by what happens inside the cities. There are criminals inside the cities who go into rural communities to commit crimes. I know it has happened in the member for Foothills' riding just south of mine. There are repeated stories all across Alberta of criminals from big cities moving into our smaller communities and taking advantage of the fact that there are not enough police officers to police every single township road there. It is not physically possible. Cities need to do more to take control of the gang problems they have.
Lastly, prison time should be used for rehabilitation. It is something I fervently believe in as a result of the time I spent learning about the prison system in the United States while I studied there. I believe that prison time should be used for rehabilitation. A component of prison time is punishment and paying one's dues back to society for the crime one has committed, but rehabilitation should definitely be part of it.
These are just a few things. The problem is repeat criminals, the gangsters.
To go back to the Yiddish proverb I mentioned that no one hides, let us not hide the committee here in Ottawa. Let us not allow the wicked his wickedness, nor the fool his folly. We have an opportunity here to instruct the committee to travel across Canada and collect more information and more evidence from Canadians. I see no harm in this, and therefore I am supportive of it. I hope all members of the House will support it as well.