Garry Breitkreuz

[Anti-terrorism Act, October 18th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of clarification. On today's order paper under Bill C-15A there is a notice of motion. I am not aware that it was withdrawn. Was that withdrawn?

[Criminal Code, October 17th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I have quite a bit to say and I will go through my points quite quickly.

I would like to compliment the hon. member for Fundy Royal for bringing the bill forward. While it does not meet our party's policy to repeal and replace Bill C-68, it is a step in the right direction. Consequently, our party supports the hon. member's bill.

If even one argument given by the Liberals in the speech that was just delivered before mine were true we might support it, but not one of those arguments is valid or working.

While the gun registry is likely the most costly and useless part of Bill C-68, it is hardly the most objectionable. Bill C-68 trampled fundamental property rights. Bill C-68 breached the privacy rights of at least 3.5 million Canadians without their knowledge. Bill C-68 placed in jeopardy our charter rights to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure. Bill C-68 eliminated our right to remain silent. Bill C-68 reversed the onus of proof, thereby eliminating our rights to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. It infringes on the treaty rights of aboriginal people. It intrudes unnecessarily into the exclusive constitutional jurisdiction of the provinces over property and civil rights, health, safety and education.

Those are just a few of the more objectionable contents of Bill C-68 and the reasons why the whole thing should be scrapped and why we need to sit down with the provinces and responsible firearms' owners and design a system of gun control that will be effective.

On August 29 the privacy commissioner reported a fact that should have embarrassed the government. The media should have jumped on it but they did not. Most provinces and territories have opted out of the administration of the firearms program than have opted in.

On page 11 of his report the privacy commissioner stated, and I quote:

There are 6 opt-in provinces that administer the Firearms Program themselves and 7 opt-out provinces and territories where the Federal Government administers the Program.

So much for the idea of co-operative federalism under this government.

The new B.C. government has expressed its distaste for the gun registry and just last week I heard rumours that it will seriously consider opting out of the administration of the gun registry component of Bill C-68.

If B.C. goes there would be eight provinces and territories that already have opted out. They are trying to send a message to the federal government. Here is quote to show why it must be replaced and repealed in its entirety.

On June 13, 1995, the then leader of the Reform Party stated, and I quote:

I therefore submit in conclusion that Bill C-68, if passed into law, will not be a good law. It will be a bad law, a blight on the legislative record of the government, a law that fails the three great tests of constitutionality, of effectiveness and of democratic consent of the governed. What should be the fate of a bad law? It should be repealed, which is precisely what a Reform government will do when it eventually replaces this government.

Six years later, with more than half a billion dollars wasted and a bloated bureaucracy of 1,800 people, I can say that Bill C-68 still fails the three tests of constitutionality, of effectiveness and of democratic consent of the government. I would like to give, as quickly as possible, 10 reasons why we should repeal it right now.

First, it has already cost at least one life. The Liberals defend their soon to be billion dollar boondoggle by saying that if the gun registry saves one life it will be worth it.

On March 15, 2000, a man in Nain, Newfoundland, who was prohibited from owning a firearm, went to the RCMP, picked up the rifle they had been storing for him and has been charged with killing a 15 year old boy. The aboriginal exemptions and adaptations in Bill C-68 likely forced the RCMP to give the man his murder weapon.

Second, Bill C-68 costs are at least six times higher than promised. According to access to information requests, Bill C-68 has cost more than $500 million and is not even fully implemented yet.

In 1995 the justice minister promised it would only cost $85 million. The Liberals have resorted to using cabinet secrecy to hide the gun registry budgets and economic impact reports from the public, and I still cannot get that information.

Third, Bill C-68 is opposed by the majority of provinces and territories. In 1995 the Liberals rammed Bill C-68 through parliament and down the throats of the provinces. In February 2000 six provinces and two territories challenged the constitutionality of the legislation in the supreme court.

Fourth, Bill C-68 has increased black market gun sales. The justice minister's own group on firearms warned her that Bill C-68 created so much red tape trying to regulate legal gun sales that black market gun sales were on the increase.

Fifth, Bill C-68 is opposed by frontline police officers. Every survey ever taken by the police shows that between 76% and 91% of frontline police officers oppose Bill C-68. According to police sources Bill C-68 alienates honest citizens and diminishes respect for the law. In March the president of the Canadian Police Association stated:

It bothers me that the public would not support me in my line of duty. We've never been at odds with the public before. This issue has done this.

Constable John Gayder wrote:

In fact, the Firearms Act violates every one of Peel's Principles of policing

Sixth, the gun registry is riddled with errors. The Liberals have so badly bungled the implementation of the bill that registration, licensing errors and non-compliance by millions of responsible firearms owners render the data in the gun registry unreliable and useless to police. Aboriginal people are publicly defying the licensing and registration system. The government admits that 320,000 gun owners failed to apply for a firearms licence.

RCMP Superintendent Mike Buisson, director of firearms, advised his staff that 90% of registration applications have errors. Despite this fact daily production quotas have been tripled. Verifiers have been laid off and staff directed to ignore the errors on registration applications. The firearms registry is the biggest garbage collection system in the country.

Seventh, Bill C-68 has taken police off the street. In April a briefing note to the Minister of Justice reported that there were over 1,800 employees associated with the firearms program. This included about 400 employees in RCMP operations in Ottawa.

The report to the minister did not include the hundreds of firearms officers working for provincial, regional and municipal police forces. On September 21, 1995, Ontario Solicitor General Bob Runciman told the Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs:

In national terms, $85 million would put another 1,000 customs agents on the border; 500 million dollars would put an extra 5,900 police officers on the street.

After September 11, should we not be paying attention to where we should be putting our public safety law enforcement officers?

Eighth, Bill C-68 has diverted resources from real policing priorities. More than half a billion dollars wasted so far on this fatally flawed gun registry scheme could have been used for more important police priorities. The police wanted a sex offender registry or a DNA databank for all criminals. One of the Canadian police association's slogans was “Register criminals before firearms”. Is the government listening? No, it is not.

Ninth, Bill C-68 proved that registration does lead to confiscation. I will not go into the details, but it has happened. On November 15, 1997, the Montreal Gazette quoted the Deputy Prime Minister as saying:

This could be the start of a global movement that would spur development of an instrument to ban firearms worldwide similar to our land mines initiative.

In drafting a new law to replace Bill C-68 the Liberal government must understand that it is impossible to make anyone safer by laying a piece of paper beside a gun. What should we do? We should be positive and replace Bill C-68 with legislation based on fundamental principles.

It should crack down on criminals who use weapons, not responsible firearms owners. It should be easy to understand, administer and enforce the system. It should be cost effective and reduce the criminal use of firearms.

It should curtail smuggling and black market sales, not increase them like it has. It should convince the vast majority of gun owners to help the government and the police implement it. It should convince all taxpayers to share the cost because everyone benefits from improved public safety. It should be able to pass a public safety test administered by the Auditor General of Canada. It should respect the exclusive constitutional jurisdiction of the provinces and have their full support. It should respect the fundamental rights of all individuals, especially property rights.

[Anti-Terrorism Act, October 17th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, on September 11 the world changed, but after observing the actions of the government last month I am wondering whether Liberals have changed enough.

While I as a Canadian support an aggressive campaign to combat terrorism in Canada and abroad, as a parliamentarian I have grave concerns. I have grave concerns, first about what is in this bill, second about what is not in this bill, and third about the government's track record in violating the rights and freedoms of law abiding citizens. I will spend the rest of my time explaining these three points.

My first concern is that this terrorism bill shifts the public, the media and parliament's focus to increasing the government's legislative powers rather than to the more pressing problem of lack of resources committed to fighting terrorism and government's misplaced priorities.

On Monday on national television Mr. Reid Morden, the former head of CSIS, stated:

I think that CSIS has sufficient powers under the CSIS act to do its job now if it has the resources to do it. That's always been the problem with both CSIS and the RCMP. They have lots of powers. They certainly don't have enough trained bodies.

I know where they can get more resources and I know where they can get more people to help them do the job. I will explain.

While parliament is focused on the legality and the appropriateness of this anti-terrorism legislation, there is a real danger that we are missing the real priority, which is that the RCMP, CSIS and our Canadian forces need more staff, more training and more equipment.

There is evidence that the government still has not realized what the real public safety priorities are. Here are a couple of glaring examples which I will explain. These are examples of misplaced priorities. Last week the RCMP participated in a roadblock in Alberta, checking hunters for firearm licences. Duck hunters are not a threat to public safety; terrorists are. Also, three weeks ago six RCMP officers raided an office of the Responsible Firearms Owners Coalition of B.C. for putting up signs during last November's election, allegedly in contravention of the Elections Act.

The musical ride has been redeployed to security of the nation so surely these highly trained RCMP officers in Alberta and B.C. should be redeployed as well, from their fight against duck hunters to the fight against terrorism.

The most recent data available through access to information shows that the government has 1,800 staff, a lot of RCMP officers, working on a totally useless gun registry instead of fighting the war against terrorism. The government has already spent over half a billion dollars to register tens of millions of legally owned guns and to license millions of totally innocent firearms owners instead of redirecting these human and financial resources to the fight against a real threat, terrorism.

Why not secure our borders? Why not do the things that the people of this country want to be priorities? Let us put our money where we will get the most bang for our buck.

Yesterday the justice minister gave this assurance to the national media. She stated:

Our legislation is fair in that we are not unwittingly and unintentionally, perhaps, involving those who are completely innocent either as individuals or organizations.

The hunters in Alberta who had their property seized by RCMP officers last week were completely innocent individuals until this government failed to issue licences to tens of thousands of gun owners who had applied for them. They tried to comply with the law and could not.

The responsible firearms owners of B.C. association was also a completely innocent organization until the government passed a gag law prohibiting free speech during an election campaign. This is the same gag law that is now being challenged in the courts while we are spending RCMP resources going after these people.

We have to examine the government's public assurances as closely as we do its legislation. I have had a lot of experience here in the last eight years and I speak from that. We have to examine the government's track record on other pieces of legislation it has passed before we accept its public assurances as a legal commitment.

The Canadian Bar Association, the Criminal Lawyers' Association of Ontario and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have already raised concerns about what is in the bill.

The civil libertarians say the bill could erode democracy and cite the following provisions. First, it would permit the arrest of individuals without warrant if it is believed that would prevent terrorist activity; second, it would compel people to provide information related to terrorism to an investigating judge without charges being laid or a crime having been committed; third, it would reduce safeguards on obtaining and extending warrants for wiretaps; fourth, it would make it illegal to facilitate terrorist activity; and fifth, there would be the unprecedented creation of judicial investigatory hearings.

They even criticized the definition of terrorist activity itself. An article quoted Alan Borovoy of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who said that in the past Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress would have been terrorists under the definition, while today the Kurds of Iraq would likely qualify in their battle against Saddam Hussein's repression. He stated:

I am hard-pressed to appreciate why all this has been considered necessary because I'm very aware of the considerable power that already exists.

He added that some of the relaxed rules for police surveillance are simply “a gratuitous undermining of safeguards” that will do nothing to apprehend terrorists.

These are serious concerns because, as I said before, the government has established a track record of violating rights and freedoms of law abiding citizens while in the pursuit of political priorities rather than public safety priorities.

As an example, just six weeks ago the privacy commissioner of Canada issued a report entitled “Review of the Personal Information Handling Practices of the Canadian Firearms Program”. I made some startling discoveries in this 81 page report. On pages 4 and 7 he reported that the justice minister had ignored the privacy commissioner's suggestions for years. On pages 4 and 5 the privacy commissioner says that the firearms registry ranges from a significant intrusion on privacy to highly intrusive. On pages 5 and 20 he reports that the justice minister has not implemented a promise made to parliament way back in 1997. On page 7 he reports that the justice minister has ignored two recommendations made by parliamentary committee. On page 10 he reports that the justice minister cannot provide a single point of accountability, as she promised. On page 19 the privacy commissioner disagrees with the justice minister's claim that all private and personal information is protected. On pages 20 and 21 he goes on to say that citizens may have to file up to five requests to access their personal information.

On pages 23 to 29 the privacy commissioner found that: the RCMP keeps a firearms interest police database on 3.5 million Canadians a secret from them; the RCMP is violating the Privacy Act with operations of the police information retrieval system; the RCMP firearms interest police database exceeds authority granted in section 5 of the Firearms Act; and the firearms interest police database on 3.5 million Canadians is full of unsubstantiated, derogatory information, unproven charges or allegations and hearsay, and even contains information on witnesses and victims. We must remember that this is a database authorized in 1995 by parliament with the passage of Bill C-68. This was the database that was only supposed to contain information on potentially dangerous individuals.

I cite all these examples to highlight the fact that we need to examine the legislation before us today. The justice minister and the government clearly have not kept their promises to safeguard the privacy rights of law abiding citizens.

What is my point? Laws passed without enough thought by the House and laws poorly implemented by government bureaucrats can result in the violation of privacy rights of law abiding citizens. This is why we have every right to be skeptical of the assurances the minister is giving us today about this piece of legislation. We must remember that the previous piece of legislation I cited was rammed through parliament using time allocation, ending all debate.

In violation of our citizens' privacy rights, Bill C-68 also violated the rights of millions of law abiding citizens, trampling on fundamental property rights, placing in jeopardy our charter of rights to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, eliminating our right to remain silent, reversing the onus of proof and thereby eliminating our rights to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, infringing on the treaty rights of aboriginal people, and intruding unnecessarily into the exclusive constitutional jurisdiction of the provinces over property and civil rights.

I will conclude with what I said at the beginning of my speech. I have grave concerns about some of the things that are not in the bill. The government has not created a national sky marshal service for domestic passenger flights. That does not make sense. The government has not created a comprehensive national border protection service that would include ports police.

The government has not reinstated the death penalty for those convicted of causing death by acts of terrorism. The government has not provided for the extradition of criminals and terrorists using Canada as a safe haven, including extradition of any terrorist attempting to avoid the death penalty in other countries.

The government has not strengthened our deportation laws. The government has not provided safeguards in this legislation that would allow individuals and organizations unjustly caught by this legislation. It has not strengthened property rights. It has not included legislative commitments to provide the resources necessary to the RCMP, CSIS and defence. It has not included the legislation provision to make restitution to victims, and there is no--

[Points of Order, October 17th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, on September 6 the Minister of Justice amended the firearms fees regulations by order in council waiving the fee for registering firearms under certain conditions. I give reference to the Canada Gazette , Part 2, Volume 135, No. 20 SOR/2001-336.

In making these amendments the minister bypassed parliament and avoided using the laying of proposed regulations stipulated in section 118 of the Firearms Act. She did so by using the authority granted her under section 119(3) of the act which states in part:

--if the federal Minister is of the opinion that the making of the regulation is so urgent that section 118 should not be applicable in the circumstances.

Section 119(4) of the Firearms Act states:

Where the federal Minister forms the opinion described in subsection (2) or (3), he or she shall have a statement of the reasons why he or she formed that opinion laid before each house of Parliament.

The minister has had six weeks to explain to the House why it was so urgent to bypass parliament with the regulations. To date, the minister has failed to comply with section 119(4) of the Firearms Act. I appeal to the Speaker to ask the minister when her statement of reasons will be tabled in the House.

I realize that the Speaker does not normally rule on matters involving constitutional law or the common law. However in cases where the constitution or common law contain procedural requirements I believe it is the Speaker's duty to ensure that they are enforced.

The House, through the enactment of section 119(4) of the Firearms Act, ordered the minister to make a statement of reasons and table it in the House of Commons. She has failed to do this, once again showing disrespect for parliament.

I refer the House to Joseph Maingot's Parliamentary Privilege in Canada , page 14, which states:

--the Senate and the House of Commons have the power or right to punish actions that, while not appearing to be breaches of any specific privilege, are offences against their authority or dignity. These may include disobedience to their legitimate commands--

The minister is in danger of being in contempt for a third time. Not only that, she expects gun owners in Canada to obey a law she herself has not complied with.

[Petitions, October 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, the third petition I am pleased to table is signed by 30 citizens in various locations in Alberta. The petitioners are concerned about how Canada Post Corporation affects the rural route mail couriers. In particular, these couriers often earn less than the minimum wage and have not been allowed to bargain collectively to improve their wages and working conditions like other workers in similar occupations, such as private sector workers who deliver mail in rural areas or public sector workers who deliver mail for Canada Post in urban areas.

The petitioners' concerns are directed at section 13(5) of the Canada Post Corporation Act which prohibits these couriers from having collective bargaining rights and that this denial of basic rights helps Canada Post keep their wages and working conditions at an unfair level and discriminates against rural workers.

The petitioners call upon parliament to repeal section 13(5) of the Canada Post Corporation Act.

[Petitions, October 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to present a second petition signed by a number of people from Nova Scotia expressing their concern about the vulnerable in our society. In this particular instance, the petition is about the concerns our citizens have about the disabled and it relates to the Supreme Court of Canada Latimer decision.

The petitioners would like the Parliament of Canada, under section 15(1) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to uphold and continue to uphold the Latimer decision of the Supreme Court of Canada by ensuring a 10 year minimum sentence be served. This would send a strong message to deter other similar criminal acts and would recognize that vulnerable Canadian citizens are equally protected as in an able-bodied society.

[Petitions, October 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I have a number of petitions that I would like to present today.

The first petition supports section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada. This section of the criminal code states that every school teacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child who is under his or her care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.

Section 43 recognizes the primary role of parents in the raising and disciplining of their children. The petitioners recognize that the federal government is under pressure from various sources, including the United Nations, to remove section 43 because we have ratified the UN convention on the rights of the child. Removal of this section would strengthen the role of bureaucrats while weakening the role of parents in determining what is in the best interest of the child and, therefore, would be a major and unjustified inclusion by the state into parental rights and responsibilities.

The petitioners recognize that despite the government's stated attempt to preserve section 43, it continues to fund research by people who advocate its removal. Therefore, they request parliament to affirm the duty of parents to responsibly raise their children according to their own conscience and beliefs and to retain section 43 in Canada's criminal code as it is currently worded.

[Export Development Act, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Alliance members present will vote no.

[Canada—Costa Rica Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, October 2nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, Alliance members present will vote nay to this motion, except for those who may rise and indicate otherwise.

[Nuclear Fuel Waste Act, October 2nd, 2001]

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