Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to the Senate amendments to Bill C-10.
I have a couple of issues before I begin the main premise of debate. I am always amazed when I hear members in the House of Commons referring to the Senate. It is obvious to all of us that it is an unelected body. However, it does have certain powers. Those powers are laid out in the Constitution and bound by points of order and procedure in this House and in the Senate.
I would beg to differ with the points of order that were raised already whether or not the Senate has the right to divide this legislation and send it back. That has been answered by the Speaker and I will delve deeper into that in my speech.
The point that I find remarkable is that the same people in this place who like to talk about Senate reform, and we all agree that we need some Senate reform, do not want to discuss giving the Senate more power. I do not think we can have one without the other. If we are going to seriously discuss reforming the Senate, perhaps someday making it an elected body, then we have to give it more power. It has to be able to introduce legislation much like it can right now but on a more timely basis. It has to be able to question in a thorough and complete way legislation that comes from this House.
The Speaker has already recognized the Senate's right to divide this piece of legislation. We may or may not agree to that and continue to raise points. I do not think that is the point. The hon. members are missing the point quite frankly. The point is that this split is based upon the fact that it is a flawed piece of legislation. Therefore, the entire piece of legislation should be thrown out and examined in its entirety.
The government is asking us to concur with amendments made by the Senate in regard to Bill C-10, an act to amend the Criminal Code (cruelty to animals and firearms) and the Firearms Act. As I have already mentioned, the entire piece of legislation is flawed. However, and key to some of the arguments that have been made already, without consent of the House the Senate split Bill C-10 into Bill C-10A which deals specifically with the firearms portion of the legislation, and Bill C-10B which examines cruelty to animals.
There has been a lot of debate in this place on whether or not there have been any precedents for that and obviously members have not thoroughly read and examined former precedents. During the debate on Bill C-103 in 1988 Speaker Fraser ruled at page 17,384:
The Speaker of the House of Commons by tradition does not rule on constitutional matters. It is not for me to decide whether the Senate has the constitutional power to do what it has done with Bill C-103. There is not any doubt that the Senate can amend a Bill, or it can reject it in whole or in part. There is some considerable doubt, at least in my mind, that the Senate can rewrite or redraft Bills originating in the Commons, potentially so as to change their principle as adopted by the House without again first seeking the agreement of the House. That I view as a matter of privilege and not a matter related to the Constitution.
In the case of Bill C-103, it is my opinion, and with great respect of course, that the Senate should have respected the propriety of asking the House of Commons to concur in its action of dividing Bill C-103 and in reporting only part of the Bill back as a fait accompli has infringed the privileges of this place.
With this, some members have taken the present case as an infringement upon the privileges of this House and as such are suggesting the split should be denied outright.
In his ruling, Mr. Speaker Fraser also stated:
However, and it is important to understand this, I am without the power to enforce them directly. I cannot rule the Message from the Senate out of order for that would leave Bill C-103 in limbo. In other words, it would be nowhere. The cure in this case is for the House to claim its privileges or to forgo them, if it so wishes, by way of message to Their Honours, that is, to the Senate informing them accordingly.
On December 5 the present Speaker of the House pointed out that he agreed with Mr. Speaker Fraser:
--that privilege matters are involved where the Senate divides a House bill without first having the House's concurrence, this is not the case in this instance. Our concurrence has in fact been requested.
That is the entire point around Mr. Speaker Fraser's decision.
Today we are looking at the amendment of the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake, which reads:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:
“, in relation to the amendments made by the Senate to Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (cruelty to animals and firearms) and the Firearms Act, this House does not concur with the Senate's division of the Bill into two parts, namely, Bill C-10A, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (firearms) and the Firearms Act, and Bill C-10B, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (cruelty to animals), since it is the view of this House that such alteration to Bill C-10 by the Senate is an infringement of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons; and
That this House asks that the Senate consider Bill C-10 in an undivided form; and
That a Message be sent to the Senate to acquaint Their Honours therewith”.
From Speaker's ruling of December 5, it is clear that the action by the Senate is not out of order based on the 1988 ruling which in turn was set upon the June 11, 1941 case where the Senate consolidated two pieces of legislation into one.
The key in both the previous cases, being the request of the Senate to seek the consent of the House in regard to the consolidation of the split. The Senate as in this case asked for concurrence.
It is clear that this legislation in its own right is as flawed as the firearms registry itself. It would seem to me that we do not need to seek out precedent to reject the bill.
We can have all the discussions that we want to have. The facts cannot be changed of precedents that have been taken before this day. They are already there. The Senate has asked for the concurrence of the House and is within its rights to do that. That is not my point.
I would make it clear that the point here, and I think Parliament has missed the point entirely, whether it is in concurrence or not, is it is a poor piece of legislation. It is severely flawed. It has been changed by the Senate because it could not even swallow it. the Liberal majority in the Senate could not swallow it. The Senate sent it back to the House. We should send it back to the Senate again with a clear message that this type of legislation is poor legislation. It is not clearly thought out. It is unworkable and it should not be concurred in in the House, not on the basis of the point of order but on the basis of it being a poorly written, poorly thought out piece of legislation.
I will paraphrase that. It is unacceptable. We should send the message back to the hon. senators stating that we cannot accept this split based on the fact again that it is a piece of flawed legislation. It should be examined in its entirety in the same way it was rammed through this place and the same way the members of the government stood and supported it.
Let us take a look at it again and see if the government wants to support it again. I suspect some of the Liberals may have come to reason.
It is one thing to waste the amount of money that has been wasted on this bill, but probably the greater issue here is not only the billion dollars that has been spent, which could have been better utilized in other areas, but we should be clear that this has nothing to do with gun control. Had the minister responsible paid a little closer attention to the Auditor General's report, he would have noticed that the Auditor General clearly stated that the rationale behind the audit was to flesh out the cost of implementation, not whether gun control was the issue.
Unfortunately for Canadians, the audit remains inconclusive because financial information from the minister's department was not forthcoming, and is still not forthcoming. We could not get it at committee or at public accounts. We have tried several different ways to get this information but obviously the minister does not have to share that information with Canadians because the government is too arrogant to understand that Canadians count, that voters are important and that they have a right to know what is going on behind closed doors. This audit, which remains inconclusive because financial information from the minister's department was not forthcoming, found the problem more serious than simple cost overruns.
The Auditor General stated:
The issue here is not gun control. And it's not even astronomical cost overruns, although those are serious. What's really inexcusable is that Parliament was in the dark.
The government has learned nothing. That it has taken the $72 million it lost out of the existing operation appropriations to manage the shortfall in the program resources is again unacceptable. The majority of Canadians are in favour of gun safety. What they are not in favour of is more Liberal rhetoric about how the program saves lives. It does not. The 13% increase in homicides with firearms over the last four years show us that no lives have been saved. To suggest that this ineffective registry would make our streets or communities safer is a misnomer.
When questioned about where the money has been spent in the past, the government has told us not to worry about it, that it has everything under control. Liberal transparency is simply not enough. The former minister of justice shirked his duties when he convinced his cabinet that this program would save lives and plowed ahead with implementation anyway. When it became evident that this program was fatally flawed, the next minister covered it up and they back channelled money through the supplementary estimates. We have had this debate and I suspect we will have this debate again, but it is back in the House with the government members ready to close their eyes and stand and vote in support of the unsupportable.
Now we have another minister telling us to trust him. However I can say that one party in the House, the Progressive Conservative Party, has no intention of trusting this minister, or perhaps a new minister or any of the government ministers on this bill. Where did they gain the trust of Canadians on a cost overrun of $1 billion, on a propaganda war of misinformation? What part of that equation gained the trust of Canadians? What part of the registry has worked? No part that they have touched has worked.
Regarding safe handling and safe storage, yes, most of us are in agreement that it has worked quite well but the long gun registry has not worked. It cannot work and it will not work because the government will never convince all Canadians to sign up for it. There are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who are in contravention of the law today and they will stay there. They are not registering their long guns.
Will it put this to the solicitor general's department at some stage, go out and arrest all these people and fill the prisons and the jail system with them? Maybe it will make a special internment camp somewhere. It is absolutely ridiculous, shameful actually.
We can get into the war of words on whether it is a point of precedence, point of order or procedure, how Mr. Fraser ruled or did not rule or how Speaker Milliken ruled but surely that is not the point.
Surely the point here today is that this is flawed legislation. We have a responsibility in this place, all members in the opposition and members of the government, to throw it out of the House because it has not worked. It has been part of a propaganda war of misinformation that the government excels at. The issue here is to throw the entire bill out on the merits of the bill, not on the question, in my opinion at least, of whether the point of order may or may not have been correct.
Is the amendment incorrect is the issue. It is not whether the Senate has the right. It has done it. The Speaker has ruled on it. We have it in front of us. Let us get rid of the bill on the basis of the poor quality of the bill, on basis that the government has misled the public and on the basis that the government should be ashamed that it has not done better to protect Canadians.
