Sue Barnes

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, just last week one of our journalists, Mr. Clark from The Globe and Mail, did some interviews with me and other critics about the costs, and I will quote:

The public accounts for the 2005-06 fiscal year—the last year of the Martin government—show that the Canada Firearms Centre spent $70.5-million. The Conservative government's spending estimates for this year say that the centre spent $71.6-million in 2006-07 and plans to spend $70.4-million in 2007-08, the current fiscal year.

The same estimates indicate that [the Minister of Public Safety]'s amnesty announcement cost the government $21.5-million in refunds in 2006-07 because the Tories also waived...fees. charged to gun owners.

There is only one gun registry and it is for long guns and smaller weapons. This registry is less effective now as we go through the two years of the amnesty. It is not getting complete information. On top of that, there have been refunds, rebates and waivers of fees. This is unusual. Other people pay for their licences out of their own pockets. However, in this one, we have had a considerable length of time now where the government has been forgoing registration and licensing fees and rebating those who had paid before the amnesties were put in place.

The member's question is very apt. One would think that if savings were the incentive here, the savings of the first $10 million, when it was moved to the RCMP, occurred under the previous government. Even though $3 million was said to have been saved, what we have found in going forward is more money is being spent.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, there were a lot of non sequiturs in that premise and I do not accept them. I quite honestly do accept that there is a divide on this issue. I think we should respect that there is a divide on it. In a minority situation, this is not a bill that this Parliament should be dealing with.

This is a situation where every gun starts out as a legal gun. Every person starts out as a non-criminal. The bottom line is that we do have evidence showing that there are now more than two million gun owners and 90% of those guns are now licensed. There are over seven million firearms and 90% are registered. That leaves some unlicensed and unregistered weapons, and we know that.

Amnesties by our former government were trying to encourage that. We did amnesties in a way that was respectful of the process. We did not use an amnesty to kill a registry.

We have an act of Parliament. In 1995, this body respectfully put through a piece of legislation and it was put into effect. We have to take out an act of Parliament with an act of Parliament. For a year now we have had this piece of legislation and this is the first time it has been debated in this chamber. That was because commentators in the media were going after the government.

We know that the statistics in all areas are down. The rate of firearm thefts is the lowest in 30 years. Five hundred fewer people are killed per year than in 1991. The firearm homicide rate is down by 29%, even though the homicide rate without guns is down only 23%. The rate of homicides with rifles and shotguns, and the rate of women murdered with guns has plummeted both in 1991 and 1995. We strengthened controls on rifles and shotguns.

I would like to advise the member that the Quebec provincial government is trying to strengthen its controls. Why are we sitting here doing the opposite?

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

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.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

I will, Mr. Speaker, and thank you for that.

Motivation for the 2006 amnesty appears to have been to satisfy political aims and remove “the teeth out of the registry and free rifle and shotgun owners from complying with the rules over the next year”, rather than building compliance with the law as stated when the order was filed.

The objective of the 2007 amnesty order appears to be political rather than as stated, “to build compliance with the existing law”. But if the objective of the amnesty was to address the confusion of gun owners, why did the government not plan a significant media announcement and public education campaign to accompany it?

This is what a previous government did when we wanted to have people comply. Instead, the announcement was published without publicity and only inadvertently discovered by an enterprising journalist. There is no evidence that the previous amnesty improved compliance with the law. There has been no evaluation of the impact of the last amnesty.

The government did not fulfill its responsibilities to undertake a review with an eye to improving the integrity and security of the data. Police have made clear their opposition to a year long amnesty arguing that it undermines respect for the law and that the amnesty penalizes the law abiding gun owners who regardless of their personal views complied with the legislation in a timely fashion. It also encourages groups and individuals who publicly flout the law. It also undermines the integrity of the data in the firearm registration system, a problem that was highlighted in the 2006 Auditor General's report.

There is the issue of the importance of the integrity of data, particularly the address of firearm owners. In the recent killing of a Laval police officer, Daniel Tessier, during a home raid, the media reported that the owner of the legal handgun had not reported the change of address. The Auditor General noted the need to improve the integrity of the data and recommended in the 2006 audit in the chapter entitled “Data quality needs to be addressed”, under paragraph 4.64:

The Canada Firearms Centre should ensure that its new information system will be able to provide management with the performance information it needs to run the Canadian Firearms Registry.

This could prevent police from removing firearms and charging potentially dangerous people. Last year's amnesty has prevented the prosecution of people with illegal guns. As far as we know there has been no assessment of how often the 2006 amnesty has hampered police investigations and prosecutions though I am aware of an instance that it has.

The attorney general of Ontario, Michael Bryant, wrote a letter to Minister Day on April 20, 2007, stating that--

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am not quite sure what you are talking about but I should not have used the Prime Minister's name.

All gun owners need to be carefully screened on a regular basis and all guns need to be registered. Of course these measures do not eliminate the possibility of tragedies. No one is saying that.

However, we know with certainty that countries without strong gun laws are more likely and frequently to be the site of these terrible events. We can look to the south. Every year more than 10,000 Americans are murdered with guns, compared to 200 in Canada. The rate of murders without guns is comparable but the rate of murder with guns is dramatically higher in the U.S. Our gun laws are an important investment in public safety.

Many experts have maintained that rifles and shotguns in the wrong hands represent a threat to safety. They include many powerful semi-automatics like the guns used at the Polytechnique and the “elephant gun” used to kill Constable Gignac in Laval. They are also frequently among the caches recovered from gangs and organized crime by our police.

All firearms are potentially dangerous and all guns should be strictly controlled. All guns start as legal guns. Six separate public inquests have maintained the importance of renewable licences and the registration of all firearms. The Supreme Court also emphasized the importance of both. It said:

The registration provisions cannot be severed from the rest of the Act. The licensing provisions require everyone who possesses a gun to be licensed; the registration provisions require all guns to be registered. These portions of the Firearms Act are both tightly linked to Parliament’s goal of promoting safety by reducing the misuse of any and all firearms. Both portions are integral and necessary to the operation of the scheme.

That is the Supreme Court, reference regarding the Firearms Act in June 2000.

Experts have also maintained that the 1995 Firearms Act has aided police in taking preventative action and reducing firearm death and injury in Canada. Supporters of the gun registry include the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, the Canadian Professional Police Association, the Canadian Public Health Association, the Canadian Paediatric Society, more than 40 women's associations, the Centre for Suicide Prevention and the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

I will give some statistics, even though the other side on this debate does not believe them. On average, more than 5,000 queries are made daily. Since 1998, approximately 19,600 firearms licences have been refused or revoked since the Firearms Act came into force. More than 5,000 affidavits, which is an even higher number now, have been provided by the Canadian Firearms Registry to support the prosecution of firearms related crime and court proceedings across the country. There have been 333 fewer Canadians who die annually of gunshots than in 1995. Homicides with rifles and shotguns are down, suicides with firearms have decreased and domestic violence with firearms has plummeted.

All these trends suggest that stronger controls on rifles and shotguns have had an effect on improving public safety. Physicians, crisis workers and police have also provided anecdotal evidence of specific cases where the registry was useful in removing firearms from potentially deadly situations.

During the long Easter weekend of this year, an “Order Amending the Order Declaring an Amnesty Period” appeared in the Canada Gazette, Volume 141, No. 14, on April 7, 2007. This order extends the one year amnesty, which expired on May 17, 2007, for another year for individuals who have failed to renew their licences or register their rifles or shotguns.

Because the government bill to abolish the registry would likely be defeated, the Conservative government is deteriorating the effectiveness of the gun registry by stealth. Police associations and powerful anti-gun groups have lobbied to keep the registry and the Conservatives are abusing the democratic process to save face and appease core voters. They are doing it through the back door because the facts do not support their position. The facts show that the gun registry is actually working and that police officers find it to be a very useful tool.

Shortly after announcing the first amnesty in May 2006, the government tabled this legislation to eliminate the requirement to register rifles and shotguns. This does not suggest that the government is committed to building compliance with the law. Indeed, in the public pronouncement around its plan, both the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Justice repeatedly stated that the registration of firearms was costly, wasteful and ineffective. We heard that again today.

There is little doubt that the legislation was launched in an effort to implement campaign promises and I heard that from a lead speaker of the government who said, “The long gun registry is by far and away the biggest issue in many ridings in western Canada”. That is a quote from the former justice minister Vic Toews.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-21, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act (non-registration of firearms that are neither prohibited nor restricted).

The bill received first reading in the House of Commons on June 19, 2006. Its primary objective is to repeal the requirement to obtain and hold a registration certificate for a non-restricted firearm, commonly called long guns, what we would know as a shotgun or a rifle.

It is only now that we are finally debating the bill at second reading, a full year later. The government is clearly dragging its feet, aware that it does not have the support for the legislation in the House.

Under Bill C-21, the registrar of firearms would no longer issue or keep records of registration certificates for non-restricted firearms. Provisions of the Firearms Act regarding these expiry and revocation of registration certificates are accordingly amended, as are provisions setting out the documentation that is involved when lending, importing or exporting non-restricted firearms.

Although registration certificates would no longer be involved when transferring, selling or giving away a firearm, a person transferring a non-restricted firearm to an individual would be required to seek an authorization from the chief firearms officer who will verify that the recipient is entitled to possess the firearm.

As a registration certificate would no longer be required to possess a non-restricted firearm, certain offences in the Firearms Act are amended or even repealed.

The Criminal Code is also amended so that the failure to hold a registration certificate for a non-restricted firearm does not give rise to any of the offences relating to the unauthorized possession of a firearm and does not allow police to seize a firearm. This is all part of the Conservatives' bill.

Although Bill C-21 would remove the need to hold a registration certificate for non-restricted firearms, it would not change the requirement for all individuals to hold a licence in order to possess a firearm and, therefore, to undergo a background check and pass any required safety course.

Additionally, Bill C-21 would allow for regulations to require firearm businesses to record transactions relating to non-restricted firearms.

Even before Bill C-21 was introduced, commentators expressed divergent views on the anticipated legislation. Many stated that abolition of the long gun registry would be contrary to the government's general anti-crime message and therefore opposed by the police, public health officials and groups against domestic violence.

Conversely, the firearms organizations welcomed the expected removal of criminal sanctions when normally law-abiding citizens inadvertently fail to possess required documentation for their firearms. We have two divides here.

During a news conference announcing Bill C-21, the Minister of Public Safety stated:

We have found out too painfully over the last number of years that the effort of trying to track down every single long gun in Canada has been ineffective, costly and wasteful and has not led to a reduction of crime with guns.

He goes on to say:

Duck hunters, farmers and law-abiding gun owners do not pose a threat to Canadians. Criminals do.

Commentators have pointed out that the gun registry did not prevent recent high profile shooting deaths, notably the four RCMP officers in Alberta in March 2005, a teenage girl in Toronto in December 2005, a police officer in Laval in December 2005 and two RCMP constables in Saskatchewan in July 2006.

At the same time, the proponents of gun control have referred to these tragedies, and they are tragedies, as a reason for strengthening, not weakening, the firearms registry.

Among others, the Coalition for Gun Control, the Attorney General for Ontario and Quebec's Minister of Public Safety are against any dismantling of the firearms registry. Police organizations, both the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and the Canadian Police Associations, are in favour of maintaining the firearms registry as police do query over 5,000 times a day.

I know the members opposite can quote individual policemen who have other opinions but the two organizations certainly are on side for keeping the registry complete.

With regard to the total cost of the gun registry, often cited, and I heard this many times, at $2 billion by the Conservative government members, we know that it has been placed at less than $1 billion over more than 10 years by the Auditor General's report.

Proponents of the firearms registry have blamed cost overruns on the opponents of the registry who have forced the government to deal with non-compliant gun owners, as well as to initiate or respond to expensive court challenges and proceedings. They also say that the computer glitches and administrative problems have now been resolved so that abolishing the registry would make no sense now.

There is no doubt that it was an expensive setup but changing it after the investment is made is not smart policy either.

It has further been argued that removing the requirement to register non-restricted firearms will save only $3 million a year and that $22.7 million in revenue a year will be lost by the government if it stops charging for the various fees involved or rebating them.

It has been argued also that because long guns are the ones most frequently found in homes, the long gun registry has successfully reduced domestic violence, suicides and accidents. According to a recent Swiss study, a decrease in gun injuries and gun deaths since 1995 shows that Canada may be saving up to $1.4 billion a year in violence related costs.

Gun laws are an important part of public safety in Canada. They are not the only solution but they are a part of the solution. In spite of the common use of the word “registry”, the 1995 legislation set up a comprehensive screening and licensing system for all gun owners, as well as the registration of firearms, which did include recording details of what guns individuals owned.

The bulk of the $1 billion over 10-plus years was spent on screening and licensing gun owners. Most of the annual costs of gun control in Canada and about $65 million at last count are spent on screening and licensing gun owners, as well as maintaining a system of continuous eligibility.

The RCMP recently stated that the dismantling of the registration of rifles and shotguns would, at most, save $3 million a year.

In May 2006, the Conservatives introduced an amnesty to effectively eliminate the need to renew firearm licences and to register rifles and shotguns. A rifle or a shotgun in the wrong hands is just as deadly as a handgun. The Ruger Mini-14 rifle used at the Polytechnique is still sold today as an unrestricted rifle, one that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has referred to in the past as a duck gun.

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, with answers like that, it is pretty clear that Canadians will not accuse that minister of being transparent. The minister wants to believe all of his problems walked out the door with the last commissioner, but what am I reading in the Edmonton Journal? It said that the minister believes that the best cure for the RCMP's “culture of secrecy” is “another hefty dose”.

When this issue is so crucial to the public interest and to the rank and file, how can the minister justify a closed door process to fix a problem where those closed doors themselves in part are part of the problem?

[Royal Canadian Mounted Police, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to the RCMP pension scandal the minister talks about “fresh breezes blowing”, but all Canadians get is the sour scent of Conservative incompetence.

“Closed door task force” says the Globe and Mail. Score one for the insiders. The public interest loses again.

Why did this Conservative minister choose a closed door task force to fix a scandal born behind closed doors, in secret, exactly the same situation as the minister's so-called solution?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, June 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is about breaking promises. The new government does not seem to have a problem breaking promises. It broke promises on the Kelowna accord. We have a bill in Parliament about the gun registry with which it has not even dealt.

The situation here, with the Atlantic accord, was a contract that was created. You have not lived up to what was signed by the Government of Canada. I hope the member, the foreign affairs minister, is looking at the current newspaper in his riding. If he were listening to his constituents in Atlantic Canada, they would be telling him that he should be living up to the accord and not changing the formula. There are changes and it has been outlined section by section by many members of the House, who have tried to advise and plea with the government.

I know another member from Atlantic Canada is considering how he will vote tonight. I hope that the members from Saskatchewan take a look at the budget with which they are trying to work.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2007, June 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in today's debate on Bill C-52. I believe very strongly that if the government had wished, it could have brought this bill forward earlier for debate. The record will show that during a three week period this bill could have been debated, but here we are today with time allocation on the bill.

To me, the message that this budget brings to mind, and I have been here since 1993, is that it divides so much. It has pitted province against province. It has pitted the wealthy against the poor in our society, those with children against those without children.

Governing is not just about writing cheques after a bill has been passed. Governing is about real leadership. It is about developing policies that find substance in a budget, a budget speech coming from a throne speech and that is implemented through an act of Parliament.

I do not think that Canadians want a country where people are just told to fend for themselves. There are things that a government provides, services through its programming to individuals in society. I believe and hope that all members in this House want a united and strong Canada, hopefully led by a government that will change in due course, and we can get a real commitment to meeting our country's challenges and making our lives better in this country.

I have been in my riding many times since the announcement of this budget. What do people recall about the budget? I have to say that in my constituency office, people have been coming to talk to me, and the things they talk about are issues with respect to some of the smaller museums in my riding, issues with respect to literacy cuts that happened during the course of this government.

I was at a chamber of commerce meeting once and it talked about the money that went out in this budget, the volume of dollars. I chaired the finance committee three times when we were the government and this is the highest spending budget we have had.

Yet, what do people really think that they got from this budget? It is like telling people that in the last budget they got a 1% GST cut. Who noticed it? What they really noticed is that they did not have a child care space for their child.

In this budget, there was money given to graduate students, but what about undergraduate students? Undergraduate students received nothing in this budget.

We need to be talking more about productivity. We need real productivity in all of our industries in this country because now those industries have the challenge of a rising dollar. I have heard the stories from people in the manufacturing sector to the auto sector. They have been coming in and talking about how this will affect not only them, but if they are not productive in their industries, they are going to lose their jobs in the communities. They are going to lose their lifeblood and that will change the communities that exist all across the nation. This is not a regionalized situation, but we have heard today and other days how this is upsetting people.

The finance minister talked in his budget bill about peace with the provinces. I do not think so. The headline yesterday in a national newspaper was talking about the potential of the Prime Minister suing provincial governments. I have never seen that before. That is not peace. It certainly is not equitable in transfers. Our Atlantic province members are saying that. We see the cries from the Saskatchewan province and premier as well.

I want to go back to child care because I was recently called to a meeting with my local board of education, the public board of education. There were members of all political stripes there, NDP, Conservative and Liberal. That is the makeup in the London region in southwestern Ontario. The board was trying to convince people of how necessary real child care spaces were, that people needed these in their lives. This is something that last year's budget was going to create: 125,000 new child care spaces. It is a year later and there is not one.

We used to do a budget consultation that actually listened to what people told us. I chaired that report, “People, Places and Priorities”. That financial report called on our government at the time to create the child care spaces because Canadians needed them. Families needed them. Single parents needed them.

We have a token amount again. The government is putting some money out there as an incentive for industry to create these child care spaces, but it is not in the business of child care provision. The industry is in the business of producing whatever it is it produces, but it is not child care spaces. It wants the experts and people deserve to have the experts in these organizations, people who know what they are doing.

When last year's budget hit this House, it really did hit this House. It terminated agreements that were made by ministers with all of the provinces and territories. It was a go forward because there was a real need here. That need is still there. This was an investment and there has been zero delivery.

Again, if people listened to the consultation, they would have heard that there is not going to be uptake again even though there are small amounts of money put out. It will just not work. We need children and families to be supported.

The $1,200 that last year's budget brought forward, I do not think a lot of people realized until this year's tax return time that it was taxable. So the average family had $400 out of the $1,200 taxed back. That is a new first for a child care tax. But what is lost in this shuffle is that there is now a universal benefit going out that we abolished in the past.

These were failed things where everybody got the money. We had child tax credits that went to the most deserving, the families that needed that money, not to the high income person who has money and it is not going to make the impact it would with a targeted approach.

I have been disappointed. One of the trustees sitting at that London meeting talked about how a woman who had five young children and gets the money said that it really did not go to the education and care of her children, it went to whatever the household expenses were. Even if we gave more money to the provinces in a social transfer tax, there is no agreement saying what the money is specified for like we had with the child care agreements.

There is no control over those moneys and there is a real need here. The government has to understand that there is a real need for child care and we lost it. It took a lot of work and we have lost it now.

I want to talk about how I saw this budget spend billions and billions of dollars. I believe the real reason that this was not put on the order paper immediately is because the Conservatives thought that this was a budget they would go into an election campaign and maybe there would be an election called back in March when everybody was saying there would be one. They would then not have to put through all of these high spending things that we see here because I have never seen such a calculated buying of votes that I see in this budget plan, if it can be called a real plan because a plan would be something integrated with policy.

In my riding of London West there is a billboard against the current government on the breaking of its promise on income trusts. I hope that billboard stays there a long time. It must be costly for the people, but not as costly as it was for the people who lost their money because they believed the promise of no change in the income trusts. We know that is not happening.

We have the situation of the GST promise of the last budget. People do not even notice it. Who notices that one point loss? Now we hear that the government did not even put it in this budget. Remember when the Conservatives came to power, they said they were going to do another reduction? I can remember those commercials talking about lowering the GST, well that is scheduled for 2012, a promise long in the future.

My Sister's Place is an organization that caters to the homeless and women in need. It received a couple of dollars to take it another couple of months. It seems like the Conservatives will give funding, but there is no homeless initiative or housing in this budget plan. It is just funding until the next election.

Organizations cannot run that way. They need sustainable funding whether it is child care--