Garry Breitkreuz

[Gun Control, March 20th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, before the Liberals used closure to ram Bill C-68 through the House in 1995 the majority of aboriginal and non-aboriginal firearms owners were somewhat satisfied with our gun control laws, laws that required safety testing and police background checks before a person could acquire a firearm.

Since then it has been nothing but chaos for all law abiding gun owners and for the government. Open defiance of the gun registry and lack of enforcement by police is so commonplace that it is undermining the Criminal Code of Canada. The territory of Nunavut and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations are challenging the useless gun registry in court. Vice-Chief Greg Ahenakew says:

The treaties say we're supposed to get free bullets. So, we want the bullets.

The Assembly of First Nations is so frustrated with the justice minister's false promises it is ready to join the court challenges.

It is time for the Liberals to steal yet another Canadian Alliance policy. It should repeal Bill C-68 and replace it with a law that makes economic sense and common sense.

[Supply, March 19th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, Canadian Alliance members will vote yes to this motion.

[Gun Registry, March 19th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, documents from the justice minister's own department reveal that he has already lost track of over 38,000 licensed firearms owners, despite the fact that firearms owners can get a two year prison term if they do not report their change of address.

The same problems that plagued the old handgun registry since 1934 are clearly evident in the new one, namely huge errors in the system.

How can the police rely on a gun registry that is missing hundreds of thousands of guns and missing tens of thousands of gun owners?

[Privilege, March 18th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I will speak to the issue as well. I support my colleague's contention that he is being hampered in his ability to do his job as a member of parliament. I will not speak to the specific matter that has been drawn as part of his bill. Rather, I will speak to the general problem that needs to be addressed. It is a serious problem. It is of major concern to members of the House so we cannot sweep it under the rug.

Mr. Speaker, I will point out a few statistics for your enlightenment. Some 235 bills introduced by members of all political parties have not made it past third reading. Of all the bills that have been introduced only two private member's bills or motions have made it to a vote at second reading. That is less than 1%. We have had 376 motions introduced. Only four have been adopted. That is just over 1%. The two bills that made it to committee stage from the 36th parliament were killed in committee by the Liberal majorities on the committees.

We have had over 150 hours of debate in the House during this parliament for consideration of private members' business. If we were to take the House budget and divide it by the approximate 1,000 hours we spend here every year it would show we had spent $45 million on private members' business. That is a fair assessment. I do not know if the figure is precise but we know we are spending millions of dollars. The money is being wasted because bills and motions are not deemed votable.

Mr. Speaker, perhaps you can give us some advice. The House passed a motion last June advising the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs to bring back a recommendation to make all private members' business votable. In December 2001 when we were ready to dot the i's and cross the t's the government decided all of a sudden it could not do it. That was way back in December. It was supposed to be done this April. The recommendation was supposed to come to the House and it did not.

Mr. Speaker, we did a survey in which you probably participated. Most MPs want all items drawn on private members' business to be made votable. The procedure can be worked out. As we have seen today, member after member has been rising in the House because they are extremely frustrated with the system. It obviously does not work. We need to fix it.

Mr. Speaker, I do not know if it is obvious to you, but the Liberals across the way are trying to avoid controversial issues like the one raised by the hon. member by not deeming them votable. That is not right. We should not allow it to continue.

In conclusion, many MPs in the House have excellent ideas. They should be allowed to bring them forward. This strikes at the heart of what my hon. colleague has raised. By not allowing issues to be votable the government limits the ability of MPs to be effective because we cannot bring issues to the House and have them resolved.

Canadians want issues brought to the House for proper debate. They want to do this through their members. The way the system is set up they cannot. The hon. member has explained this quite well. The system must change. Canadians' perception of what we do in parliament could be enhanced if we began allowing all private members' business to be votable.

Mr. Speaker, I know you cannot direct the committee to do this, that or the other thing. However I appeal to you to intervene in some way to make sure the issue is resolved.

[Property Rights, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is regrettable that on a topic which is so fundamental and so important to our society that we cannot even speak an extra few minutes. We cannot vote on it. We cannot refer it to committee. We cannot even talk about it at length here. That is really unfortunate.

I would like to thank all those members who spoke in support of my motion. I would like to quickly counter some of the arguments that the government put forward as to why we should not refer this to committee.

First, it argued that it is a waste of time of the committee. It argued that it was a waste of time of the House. Many people in the country are very concerned that Bill C-5, a bill that is presently before the House, could clearly be a violation of their rights. We need to discuss these things.

We have provinces in Canada that of course have property rights protection. However we need protection in federal legislation against the violation of the rights of private citizens by the federal government. It is not engrained in our laws, as the federal government has tried to intimate. Nor are they in our charter. Some speakers have said that it is in our charter. If they were to read the charter, it is not in there. Even judges have said in their rulings that we do not have property rights protection in our charter. Provincial and environmental laws could clearly violate this and in fact would have serious implications.

Also, I really want to pick up on something else the government said. It said that it would disrupt the current democratic rights. The only thing it would disrupt is the power of the Prime Minister's Office to legislate at will, violating our fundamental rights. We have built these up over 800 years and they are being seriously violated.

The UN declaration of human rights says “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property”. The voters in this country have to know that the federal government, by its own legislation, the legislation government members have supported, condones the arbitrary taking of property in direct contravention of article 17 of the UN declaration of rights. It is hard for Canadians to go to other countries in the world claiming to be defenders of fundamental human rights, when our own country does not defend one of these most fundamental human rights and does not have any constitutional legislative protection for property rights in federal law.

In 1903, Pope Pius X wrote to his bishops. He said:

The right of property, the fruit of labour or industry, or of concession or donation by others, is an incontrovertible natural right; and everybody can dispose reasonably of such property as he thinks fit.

Today we have all heard the proof that our fundamental property rights are under attack and we should not ignore that. Just because a bill is passed in parliament does not make the use and abuse of government force to violate the fundamental property rights and freedom of contract of its citizens a good thing.

I would like to quote one more item here. This is from a book by Ayn Rand entitled Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal . It states:

The concept of a right pertains only to action—specifically to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by others. The right to life is the source of all rights—and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has not right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave.

Czech President Vaclav Havel also hit the nail on the head when he said “Human rights rank above state rights because people are the creation of God”.

My colleagues, property rights are our most important human right because they allow each of us to provide the necessities of life for our families and ourselves.

Therefore, I respectfully request, with the unanimous consent of the House, to refer my motion to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for further consideration. That is the whole intent of this. We need to discuss this further. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the committee examining this. I am sure everyone here would agree. Therefore, I would like to seek that consent.

[Property Rights, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I hope you will extend my time because that was simply an abuse of privilege.

Mr. Bryan, with the help of the National Citizens' Coalition, appealed his conviction on the grounds that it violated his property rights as guaranteed in the Canadian Bill of Rights passed by this parliament in 1960. On February 4, 1999, the Manitoba Court of Appeal ruled against David Bryan's right to sell his own grain that he grew on his land.

The Manitoba Court of Appeal stated on page 14 of its ruling and this is a key part of my argument to refer this to committee:

Section 1(a) of the Canadian Bill of Rights, which protects property rights through a “due process” clause, was not replicated in the Charter, and the right to “enjoyment of property“ is not a constitutionally protected, fundamental part of Canadian society.

Can anyone who is listening to this debate or who reads the record of this debate believe these words came out of a Canadian court of law? I repeat “the right to 'enjoyment of property' is not a constitutionally protected, fundamental part of Canadian society.” It is about time we listened to what this judge had to say. He is not the only one to state it.

This ruling was confirmed by constitutional expert Peter Hogg in 1992 in his book Constitutional Law of Canada , Third Edition. Citation 44.9 on page 1030 states:

The omission of property rights from section 7 [of the Charter] greatly reduces its scope. It means that section 7 affords no guarantee of compensation or even a fair procedure for the taking of property by the government. It means that section 7 affords no guarantee of fair treatment by courts, tribunals or officials with power over purely economic interests of individuals or corporations.

Professor Hogg also wrote:

The product is a section 7 in which liberty must be interpreted as not including property, as not including freedom of contract, and, in short, as not including economic liberty.

Therefore, without protection of property rights and freedom of contract in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and with the court's recent ruling that the Canadian Bill of Rights does not provide any protection whatsoever from the federal government's arbitrary taking of property or infringing on our fundamental economic liberties, I decided it was time for parliament to do something about it.

Amending the charter is a hugely complicated task because it requires a resolution to be passed in the House of Commons and in seven provincial legislatures comprising more than 50% of the population. In past debates the government has argued rather poorly that there is no need to strengthen property rights in federal law, that the Canadian Bill of Rights provides adequate protection of property rights. The Bryan case proves that to be totally wrong on this count.

The bill of rights provides absolutely no protection of property rights and even if the government ignores the David Bryan judgment these rights can be overridden by just saying so in any piece of legislation passed by the House. Canada's foremost constitutional expert and the Manitoba Court of Appeal both agree there is no protection of property rights in federal law.

What is parliament to do? Does it just ignore it as we have been doing for the past decade? I do not think so. That is not an option and that is why I have introduced Motion No. 426.

In December,1948 member states of the United Nations general assembly, including Canada, adopted and proclaimed the universal declaration of human rights. As stated in my motion, among the rights proclaimed in the UN declaration and ratified by Canada was the “right to own property alone as well as in association with others” and not to be arbitrarily deprived thereof.

In 1992 Gudmunder Alfredsson had this to say about Article 17 in his book The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Commentary :

It applies to both the individual and collective forms of property ownership. The absence of the limitations proposed in the legislative debate [leading up to the final draft] is noteworthy; there are no references in the article to conformity with State laws, personal property or decent living. The right is not an absolute one, however, it is foreseen that persons can be deprived of their property under circumstances...The term “arbitrarily” would seem to prohibit unreasonable interferences by States and taking of property without compensation.

The evidence is clear. This is an issue that needs to be fully examined by the committee. I would like at this point, for those who have listened carefully to my arguments, to request that the House consent unanimously to make my motion votable.

I have clearly indicated why this is a violation of my rights. I have had four opportunities to bring this to the House. I think it is about time we had an opportunity to fully debate this issue and vote on the it. I am asking simply to refer it to committee.

[Property Rights, March 1st, 2002]

moved:

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 the 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.”.

Mr. Speaker, this is the fourth time since 1997 that I have brought forth legislative proposals in an attempt to strengthen property rights in Canadian law.

On each of the four occasions my private member's bill and now my private member's motion have been declared non-votable. This is a regrettable situation. It is a serious infringement of our democratic rights and a violation of my rights as a member of parliament.

On three previous occasions I introduced well-researched, expertly drafted private member's bills to strengthen property rights in federal law. It is somewhat understandable for the government to be reluctant about passing legislation. Today's motion is simply asking the justice committee to fully examine the issue. Where is the risk in that?

I refer members to my motion again. It states:

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 the 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.”.

I am asking that we refer this to the committee to see whether this needs further strengthening in Canadian law.

I start today's debate by reading a Southam editorial by Murdock Davis that was published in many papers on January 10, 2001. I believe this puts the whole discussion into perspective. It states:

The right to acquire, use, enjoy and transfer property--land, buildings, vehicles, intellectual property and more--is fundamental to liberty. And Canadians are naive to rely on governments to respect ownership rights without a constitutional guarantee, considering the patchy record of those governments.

Aboriginal Canadians on reserves live with the corruption and economic desperation that accompanies insecure rights to property. Citizens of Japanese descent saw their property confiscated and sold during the Second World War. Prairie farmers have been jailed for exporting grain grown on their own land, rather than using the Canadian Wheat Board.

Proposed federal endangered species legislation could mean vast tracts of land are made off-limits to ranchers, farmers, other landowners and resource users, with compensation at the discretion of politicians. It could allow the federal government to intrude into property rights, generally a provincial jurisdiction.

Legislation passed to combat international terrorism authorizes police to seize certain property without normal judicial review.

The Firearms Act compels law-abiding owners to surrender certain firearms, without compensation. (Those who support this because they disapprove of guns should consider: If you favour government authority over property that you don't like, it is harder to fend government off when it comes after yours.)

Private property rights serve two purposes. They have economic utility, and they help guarantee political liberty.

Private property keeps power diffuse. It strengthens individual autonomy from government. Property rights and the protection of contracts form the legal foundation of the free-enterprise system. They create incentives by rewarding owners for wise stewardship and maximizing the productive use of resources.

Nations with the strongest protections for private property have the highest levels of prosperity. Canada is considered to have strong property protections, but it will take vigilance to maintain them.

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads in part: “(No persons shall) be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of the law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

Canada's Bill of Rights says Canadians have the right to “enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law“. But parliament can override that bill at will, just as it can subvert through statute centuries of common law on property rights. Neither is part of the Constitution.

Entrenching similar language in the Charter would place the right at a higher level. It would give Canadians recourse, through the judiciary. It would place an onus on any government seeking to impinge on such rights to prove it meets the constitutional test of reasonableness.

The provinces were vocal opponents of a property-rights provision when the Charter was drafted: Saskatchewan, to protect its expropriated mineral resources and Crown corporations; P.E.I., to preserve laws limiting non-resident land ownership; Quebec, to safeguard its unique income-security programs. As co-conspirators with the federal government, provincial premiers are hardly reliable guardians of your property.

These limits and some of the examples cited previously might well qualify under the “reasonable limits” provision of our Charter. They are not reasons to oppose Charter protection.

James Madison, a drafter of the U.S. Constitution, recognized that a charter could not totally protect citizens from legislative intrusions. In Canada this would be even truer, because of the “reasonable limits” clause.

But Madison's argument for enshrining such rights was “to establish public opinion in their favour, and arouse the attention of the whole community”.

The attention of Canadians most certainly needs arousing.

To enhance our democracy, Canadian governments should establish a constitutional remedy to the expropriation or undue restriction of property.

Today we are not debating that property rights be entrenched in the charter. I want to make that clear. We are only debating whether there is enough evidence to show that the issue needs to be fully examined by the justice committee.

I have researched this issue for years and I have followed recent court cases over the years. I have a pretty good idea what the conclusion of such a study might be.

The committee would likely conclude that the only property rights protection Canadian citizens have in federal law is the totally ineffective protection provided by the Canadian Bill of Rights, as Saskatchewan farmer David Bryan found out in 1999. Here is his sad story.

David Bryan grew a crop of wheat on his own land. He got into trouble when he tried to sell his wheat for a better price than what the Canadian Wheat Board would pay him. The federal government charged Mr. Bryan with exporting his own grain to the United States without getting an export licence from the monopolistic, dictatorial wheat board.

For violating this Soviet style decree Mr. Bryan spent a week in jail, was fined $9,000 and received a two year suspended sentence.

Mr. Bryan--

[Canadian Wheat Board, March 1st, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, in yesterday's report by the auditor general on the Canadian Wheat Board, Ms. Fraser stated that she could not look into the mandate of the wheat board or its monopolistic single desk selling system.

These glaring omissions in this audit are the things that farmers want to know about. The Canadian Wheat Board is a monopoly with no transparent operations, so in light of this an audit needs to be done to find out whether the board is maximizing the return to farmers.

The questions the auditor general should have answered are: Do farmers get a good deal in comparison to producers in competing countries? Are taxpayers being well served by the board's handling of its own operations? Would farmers benefit more if they could bypass the board and add value to their product by processing grain and marketing it independently? Would organic producers of quality wheat and barley benefit if they could market their own product?

Finally, farmers want to know how they benefit in a monopolistic situation when they are forced to buy expensive television advertising during the winter olympics through the Canadian Wheat Board. All of these subjects must be looked at immediately.

[Economic development, February 28th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I was trying to listen carefully for an answer and it really was not there. The exact opposite of what the hon. member just stated is true. Verifiers have been dismissed. The accuracy in the system is now worse than it has ever been. Now to lay the whole blame in the lap of a gun owner is completely wrong-headed.

I will submit a couple of quotations. The first one from February 7, 2001, is by the president of the Canadian Police Association, Constable Grant Obst. He said:

--a lot of Canadian cops who believe in the “concept” of a gun registry have profound doubts that the one being run by CFC [Canadian Firearms Centre] will ever offer police the information they needed to fight crime. “They're not happy with the information-fathering,” he said. “They're asking themselves, will the information be accurate?”

As I have shown today, the information in the gun registry is not accurate despite what the government has said. I am asking the minister again--

[Economic development, February 28th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, on November 6 the solicitor general and the former justice minister failed to answer my question about a firearms registration certificate being issued to an individual who does not own the firearm in question. Because the RCMP was responsible for the error, I asked the solicitor general:

The privacy commissioner is investigating a number of firearms licences that were issued with the wrong photos. Now we have a documented case of a firearm being registered to the wrong person. The unhappy recipient complains, “I do not want to be responsible for a firearm that I do not possess”. Could the solicitor general please explain how the registry of firearms made such a potentially catastrophic mistake?

For some reason I still do not understand why the former minister of justice would not let the solicitor general answer his own question and she did not answer the question either. In her response the minister chose to play politics rather than to address a very serious error in the gun registry that threatens both the privacy and safety of a Canadian citizen. A strange response for a minister who claimed to be fully accountable and responsible for the entire Canadian firearms program.

Since this incident was documented in November we have had another firearms owner complain to his member of parliament that the same thing happened to him. He wrote on the bogus registration certificate:

Never registered this gun. Never owned this gun. Never even seen this gun.

Perhaps the new Minister of Justice will take more seriously the consequences of the bungling by his bureaucrats.

Earlier today I issued a news release documenting just a few of the more recent errors in the gun registry. These errors were documented by the minister's own department and provided to me in response to an access to information request. Other errors were reported in newspapers or to me personally.

I have in turn notified the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and the Auditor General of Canada of these errors and their consequences for the rights and safety of Canadian citizens.

Here is a short list of the errors I uncovered and made public today: there were 300,000 unclaimed guns in the old handgun registry; the gun registry lost track of more than 38,000 licensed gun owners; 832 duplicate firearms licences were issued; 28 duplicate firearms registration certificates were issued; there were 57 registration certificates for 16 guns; re-registration of 10 handguns resulted in a 50% error rate; a muzzleloader was registered as a single-shot machine gun; 3 rifles were registered to the wrong man; a handgun was registered to the wrong man; 2 rifles were registered as shotguns; 6 identical registration certificates were issued for 1 handgun; registration forms were sent to a wrong address; there was a woman's photo on a man's firearms licence and a man's photo on a woman's firearms licence; and 3 Winnipegers got the wrong photo on their firearms licences.

On Monday the new Minister of Justice proudly proclaimed to parliament that the gun registry works well. The minister should look again. His own department's documents prove otherwise. Here is a huge list of serious errors and we need an answer.