Joe Comartin

[Criminal Code, October 20th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I would have to say that this bill does not address that issue. Generally speaking, this is a bill that deals with identity theft occurring at arm's length by strangers.

The type of problem that my colleague is asking about is much more common. I saw this in my own practice repeatedly. It occurs in one of two ways. Individuals have themselves authorized by way of powers of attorney to take control of the assets of the elderly person, or they have been appointed by a court to do that and then they abuse that fiduciary relationship. That is controlled by other sections of the Criminal Code and, quite frankly, more so by common law in the civil courts.

The other situation, and I think he was making some reference to this, is simply where the abuse amounts to extortion, threats or actual violence against elderly persons to force them to sign a cheque or sign over assets under that kind of duress. These amendments to the Criminal Code do not address that area at all.

[Criminal Code, October 20th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, the answer generally would be yes. In a situation involving probate, where someone has passed away, the executor or trustee of the estate would have the same protection, so if somebody was trying to impersonate that person, they would have the same protection. That would be as equal an offence as if they were trying to impersonate the deceased person. Yes, that protection is there for them.

In terms of the situation where individuals are still alive and someone is operating under a power of attorney or a court order and authorized to take over control of their assets because they are no longer capable, the protection would extend to the trustees and the attorneys in those circumstances.

[Criminal Code, October 20th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I rise in general support of this legislation. It is important to set this in a historical context. This is legislation that is badly need in this country and that need has been identified for the better part of the past decade.

We saw an initial attempt by the former Liberal administration in the 2004-06 Parliament to bring forward this kind of legislation. We saw it reincarnated under the last two Conservative Parliaments and we are finally getting to it now.

Following up on some of the comments of my colleague from the Bloc who just finished speaking, it is important to view this in the context of the focus of the government on other areas of, as the Conservatives see it, reform in sections of the Criminal Code when in fact the areas covered in this legislation should have been given priority. This legislation should have been in our laws. It has been in a number of other jurisdictions, for example, in the United States, England and Australia, for a number of years, well ahead of where we are at this point. In fact, those countries continue to be ahead because there are one or two significant gaps in this legislation in terms of dealing with what every member of the House knows is a serious problem with regard to identity theft.

We have all heard the horror stories. We have heard the estimate of at least $2.5 billion a year in losses as a result of identity theft, primarily of credit cards and debit cards, small personal loans, that area. That is one of the gaps in this legislation and I will spend some more time on it.

We also heard that there is a corresponding value loss with regard to real estate transactions, both in terms of residential and commercial property. We have a similar loss of $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year. This bill does not address that area at all. I will come back to that because there is definitely more work that needs to be done at the federal level in that regard.

The bill is a significant step forward in combatting this type of crime. It introduces some expanded concepts of what official identity documents are. One of the problems police forces, prosecutors and judges have had in enforcing the existing provisions of the Criminal Code is that the code did not cover new developments in official identity documents.

We have expanded what those are significantly. There is a lengthy list in this bill and hopefully in the law when it comes into effect that will make the prosecution of these offences much more effective and efficient.

A second major thing this bill does is it addresses what we know is a huge problem. It involves a way that small street gangs as well as more expansive organized crime gangs get identity documents. They steal them out of people's post office boxes or their residential mailboxes. We have made that a specific crime. It is very clear what the offences are. They involve not only committing the theft but being in possession of the documents stolen.

There is protection for people who would be entitled to obtain documents from people's mailboxes. For instance, if people are away on vacation and their neighbour picks up their mail, the neighbour would not be in breach of the code. That is a major step forward.

I say this because of personal experience. One of my neighbours was confronted with this problem a few years ago. In talking to the police at that time about their investigation. Criminals were targeting systematically specific residences where they knew people were not home during the day, oftentimes where there was only one adult in the family. It was obviously well organized and the criminals were very efficient in gathering that type of personal information, which they then used to commit crimes of fraud and forgery, et cetera.

The third area that is addressed in the bill has to do with identity information. This is a reflection of the need to modernize the code. People involved in mostly more sophisticated organized crime will gather information, as extensive as including DNA samples, in order to establish a totally false identity but with that degree of certainty in order to prove they are somebody else.

We have set out a very long list of what that identity information is. It includes fingerprints, DNA and all sorts of more technologically advanced sampling that we can do than when these sections of the code were made law as much as 100 to 150 years ago. Those are major steps forward in the bill.

From that perspective my party is quite prepared to support it. In fact, we are going to be supporting the passage of this legislation.

There remains problems and I want to deal specifically with the issue of the gap in not addressing the whole issue of identity theft as it affects real estate transactions. I repeat what I said earlier. The amount we are losing in that regard is as significant as the amount we are losing on the other issues that the bill addresses. It is in the range of $2 billion to $2.5 billion a year.

There is no question that there is responsibility on the part of provincial governments to deal with this. For instance, I know from practising law that the law societies across the country have dramatically increased the responsibility of lawyers and notaries to identify accurately the clients who are sitting in front of them that they in fact are the people they claim to be. We have taken that on as an additional professional responsibility.

Real estate agents similarly have had quite significant additional responsibilities imposed on them in identifying the purchasers and vendors in real estate transactions.

There is a role for the federal government. There are specific sections now in the Criminal Code that deal with the issue of fraud and forgery with regard to real estate transactions. They are clearly out of date.

One of the witnesses whom we heard from at the justice committee was a witness on behalf of the title insurance associations of Ontario. They tend to be one of the major victims because at the end of the day they oftentimes are the ones who end up having to pay when there has been an identity fraud transaction. The witness clearly pointed out the inadequacies of the existing sections in the code and even had a model from experiences in the United States, which the government has opted not to pursue. I forget which state it was but it was one of the more advanced pieces of legislation which effectively makes that type of transaction an illegal transaction and makes it much easier to get a conviction. It has been very effective in that state which is one of the southern states in the United States. It is something that we need to do.

I intend to pursue that because the indication I have had both from the justice minister and the Conservative Party is that they are not going to be moving on that. They are leaving this responsibility entirely in the hands of the provinces. That is not the role the provinces should be playing, so we will be moving ahead to bring that before the House, hopefully within the next month or so.

It will modernize the Criminal Code so that it deals with the modern criminal activity that is going on. The code clearly is inadequate in that regard.

There is another point I want to raise in terms of the legislation and the way it is worded. I am quite concerned that on identity information there is one section that deals with how that information is used. It is proposed section 402.2 of the Criminal Code, clause 10 of the bill. The term “the reckless use of this identity information” is used. Being reckless is almost like a criminal negligence type of concept; being so reckless that it amounts to a crime.

The Supreme Court of Canada has had difficulty with that terminology in the past, and I am worried that this section may not be effective. I proposed an amendment to it, based on recommendations we had heard from the Canadian Bar Association. That did not get majority support at the committee. The wording is still in there. I caution the government in the course of this speech to monitor this. I think it will pose a problem for our police and prosecutors to get convictions, if the court treats that terminology the same way the Supreme Court has in another major case. That is a problem.

The other one caused me a good deal of concern as well. I credit the Canadian Bar Association for bringing this to our attention. There are two sections which in effect allow a very wide scope of officials to procure false documents. It is in section 7 and then again in section 9. Section 9 is less problematic because it limits the scope of that section to police officers, who are already defined elsewhere in the code in section 25.

Section 25 sets up a regime where it is recognized that from time to time our police officials will be required to break the law. This is a relatively new section. It is only about 10 or 12 years old, I believe, but it has a whole regime of how that is regulated, how it is supervised by senior officers and when it is permissible. It requires reporting to this chamber on an annual basis, in effect, the use of criminal activity to combat criminal activity. I believe it has worked quite well, and I say that from having looked at the reports. Actually, the justice committee did a review of section 25 two or three years ago and came away quite satisfied that it was working very well.

Section 9 exempts police officers from the provisions of the bill, but it does not have the regulatory function that section 25 has. It clearly also exempts them from section 25. I got no satisfaction from the responses we got as to why they were doing that. I believe that the police officials should be regulated by section 25. It has worked. We may want to modify it to some slight degree in terms of the reporting function in particular, but it is a tool that has worked very effectively and allows the police to conduct criminal activity in order to catch criminals, but it has safeguards to prevent it being abused.

The other section, though, was even more problematic, and that is section 7 of the bill. Section 7 basically provides a defence to anybody who provides an identity document “as long as it is requested by a police force”. I do not have any particular problem with that. It also stipulates “the Canadian Forces”. Every single soldier in this country could ask for a forged document. Then it goes on, “or a department or agency of the federal government or the provincial government”. Every single employee of the provincial and federal governments could ask someone to prepare a forged document. They could go to MasterCard and Visa and say, “I want a fraudulent card in this name”. They would not have to give any explanation. They would just have to say that they are a public official, a teacher, a social worker or a worker at the LCBO, in the case of Ontario. All of those are entitled to ask for forged documents. The person can give it to them without having to worry about committing an offence.

Corresponding to that, because of the way the rest of the bill works, the person asking for that document is not, I believe, committing an offence. It is wide open to abuse, up to and including rogue police officers. I am not worried about the police force. I quite understand the need for the police force to have that. I still think police forces should stay under section 25.

This does not require approval by a senior official in the department or provincial ministry. Anybody can ask for a forged document. I received no satisfaction. It is problematic. I agree with the government that this section has to be monitored.

As I said earlier, we are going to support the bill because the rest of it is badly needed, but section 7 is wide open to abuse. We need to monitor it very closely.

We have needed what is covered by the bill for the better part of seven years. Police and prosecutors have been telling us how badly they need this provision. It is a shame that we have given priority to other amendments to the Criminal Code and put this on the back burner. We badly need to get this done, get it through, and get it into place, so our police and prosecutors have the tools they need to prosecute these offences.

[Justice, October 19th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, when one hears the minister stand in the House, take advantage of the right he has to make a ministerial statement and put forth the ongoing ideological rant from the Conservatives about being harsh on crime in this country, they should look at the history of what has happened to see how serious they really are.

We wasted a whole year. The justice committee did not meet for a whole year, from March 11, 2008 until March of 2009. In every case, it was because of an action by the government. Initially, the chair of the committee filibustered and refused to call meetings. We wasted the whole of spring 2008 on that.

In the fall of 2008, the Prime Minister unilaterally decided that he would call an election, in breach of his own law. In December 2008, the government took the position that it would prorogue because it was afraid of what the opposition parties would do to it.

At any of those times, did the Conservatives ever ask themselves about the legislation that was needed to deal with crime right across this country? No, they did not. We have them up here again today. This year, they have been really slow at introducing any new bills into the House and then getting them to committee.

The committee missed a whole year of being able to do anything and every one of those delays was because of the conduct of the government, not any lack of work or co-operation by the opposition parties. When he stands in the House and says those things, we should look at his credibility.

[Criminal Code, October 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, like other members who have risen to address this issue, I think it is a very painful one for all of us. It is certainly a very emotional one, and it is one to which there is no clear solution.

I will start off by saying, as I have regarding the previous incarnations of the bill, that I am opposed to the bill, and I am opposed to introducing into Canada assisted suicide at this time. I want to say that philosophically I understand the arguments. I have to say I may even be inclined in extreme cases to agree that we need, in those rare cases, an assisted-suicide system. However, that is not where we are at as a society now. I believe it would be a tragedy and a major mistake if we moved to assisted suicide in this country at this time.

I must admit I deliberated quite extensively over whether I should support the bill to get it through second reading and to committee, and ultimately I decided that I was philosophically opposed to it at this time, but more important, I decided that the debate we would have around the bill is not the debate that we need in the country.

The misinformation that we have around assisted suicides and around end-of-life decisions is quite grotesque. We heard from my colleague the member for La Pointe-de-l'Île.

Surveys showed that 70% to 80% of Canadians support euthanasia, but when people are provided with an informed amount of information, that changes dramatically.

I am going to make these two points with regard to the information that is needed. One, the reality is that we do not train our doctors. I have been told to be careful about being overly critical of them, but it is the reality of our medical training. We do not train our doctors anywhere near sufficiently in pain control: pain control techniques and mechanisms and pharmacology.

I come from a community that has a hospice, which I believe is the best in the country. It has been in place for almost 25 years. It has gone out of its way to train local doctors by mentoring. Unfortunately, there was a pain specialist who recently retired. It has been training its doctors in this area, but it is an exception to the rest of the country.

There are all sorts of doctors, including some specialists I think should know better, who believe sincerely that there are a large number of cases in which they cannot control the pain and provide people with dignity at the end of their lives.

I want to quote from a statement made by Dr. Balfour Mount, whose name I think everybody in the country would recognize as being the leading doctor in palliative care. He started palliative care. He teaches at McGill University in Montreal.

We know from what has gone on this past summer in Quebec that physicians' associations there are looking at whether they are going to come onside the euthanasia position. This is what Dr. Mount said:

--the debate should be about the doctor's role in accompanying a terminally ill patient towards the inevitability of death, offering as much dignity and medical assistance as possible.

That is not the same as saying that we should kill people.

Mount said he is profoundly against euthanasia because it is simply not needed...

What he was saying is that it is not needed in the kind of care he is able to provide and that he has provided for the better part of 30 years, as is the case in my community.

I have spoken to Carol Derbyshire, who is the head of the hospice. She said the hospice does not get requests for assisted suicide. They provide the care, not just to the patient but to the family. She was very clear on that. She has seen any number of surveys that say one of the major reasons, aside from pain, that people want assisted suicide in their regime is that they do not want to be a burden on their family, their society, their community. If we can build that system to make sure they do not have to be concerned about that, we take away any desire to terminate their lives arbitrarily and at an earlier date than would be natural.

We need to look at our system right now. Like the previous speaker, I want to be somewhat critical of prior governments. At this point, approximately 20% of our population is covered by meaningful palliative care, hospice and a home care system. That is all we have in the country. Then there is another 15% or maybe 17% who are covered by partial assistance at the end of life.

As an aside, one of the other things Carol said to me is that we have to shift the debate from dying to living out our lives. She is trying to come up with a phraseology that I may be able to use.

However, that is what it is about. It is about providing that system, and we are not doing it. In the last few months the government has cut more funding, the last of the funding it was providing for palliative care. It was mostly for research and helping the provinces set up standards. That is the second cut. Now all funds at the federal level have been eliminated to aid the provinces in establishing educational standards and training standards for palliative care in hospices. The government has cut it all.

The other thing the government has not done, which is another area we need to be working on, is expanding EI benefits for family members who are caring for their parents or a sibling or spouse in need of that kind of assistance.

We have so severely restricted those funds as to make them almost meaningless. That is another area where we could be doing something that would take away the need for this kind of legislation.

We need to train our doctors much better, and we need to build the system. Until we do that, we should not be looking at this kind of legislation. I say that because I have also studied the situation in the Netherlands, Belgium and Oregon fairly extensively. Although they all have different systems of determining when doctors can assist suicide or an individual can get assistance for suicide, the same result is true in all those communities.

I know there are disputes over this, but it is the analysis that I have brought to bear, and I think it is an accurate one. In spite of how we build that system, and I say that about the legislation my colleague has brought here, that is not what actually happens. Should we make the mistake of passing this kind of legislation, we are in effect giving our approval to doctors who are willing to do this, to family members who want it and to those individuals who are still capable of making a decision. They will simply figure out ways of working around the legislation.

I respect my colleague from the Bloc extensively. The work she has done on foreign affairs and human rights in this country is almost beyond compare. I do not know if anybody's work is superior to the work she has done. However, I think she is wrong on this one.

I say this as a practising lawyer. I look at the terminology that she used, in particular where we are assessing the patient. She has set out a standard in this legislation about apparent lucidity. That is the terminology. That does not exist anywhere else in the law that I am aware of. If this test were to be applied, it would be easier for a person to commit suicide than it would be for somebody to take over control of their finances. That is simply wrong.

I am running out of time. I think we do need a fuller debate on this, but not in this context. It has to be in the context of people living out their natural lives, and what we, as a society and legislators, have to do to ensure that can happen.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, October 2nd, 2009]

What is the total amount of government funding, since fiscal year 2004-2005 up to and including the current fiscal year, allocated within the constituency of Windsor—Tecumseh, listing each department or agency, initiative, and amount?

[Criminal Code, September 30th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I was prepared to give my Bloc colleague another minute, but I will go ahead now.

This issue that brings us before the House today is one that obviously gives all parties, all members of Parliament, and all Canadians for that matter, a great deal of concern.

I know from my own experiences, in dealing with people who are depressed or confronting great problems in their personal lives, just how vulnerable they are. I do not think it is possible for any of us, without actually having been to that depth of depression and levels of vulnerability, to really appreciate that, but it is very real. I suppose most scary in this regard is the fact that there are perpetrators out there who would prey upon that vulnerability. We have seen that in the case of the Ottawa student and in several other cases as well.

It is quite appropriate and very timely that this motion is before the House. I believe the government, the Department of Justice in particular, needs to be looking into this area and seeing if there are ways that we can tighten up either under the Criminal Code or in other areas to, as much as possible, prevent this type of predatory activity.

I do have a couple of suggestions in that regard. In particular, when we deal with the Ottawa case of Nadia Kajouji, that person has in fact not been charged. Like the member for Kitchener—Conestoga, I have been following the case very closely. The person has not been charged and it begs the question of why not.

If in fact we find that the U.S. federal government and the state of Minnesota in particular do not have mechanisms in place to charge him, then it is crucial that we put those mechanisms in place here in Canada. It would take a two-phase approach to this.

First, we would have to create a specific crime dealing with the issue of this type of counselling over a broad range of telecommunications and have wording broad enough to cover telecommunication developments that are still coming.

Once we have done that and made it a very specific crime in Canada to counsel suicide in this way, we then would have to be clear within our extradition treaties that that would be an offence for which we could extradite people from any place in the world, if in fact the crime had been committed either in Canada, that is, it was perpetrated here, or it was perpetrated in Canada on one of our citizens or residents.

We have some precedents for that, particularly in the sexual assault cases elsewhere in the world, that we will prosecute in this country under any circumstances. There are a couple of other precedents, so this is doable, but it is something that we would be pressing the justice department to look at once this motion gets to committee.

The other area in which we could be doing some work is simply looking at section 241 of the Criminal Code, which is the section that deals with counselling of suicide. We also could be looking at the criminal negligence sections. It may be more convenient perhaps, more in keeping with those sections, to create a new offence there of counselling suicide using telecommunication mechanisms that result in death. That may be a better tool, a better section of the Criminal Code to look at.

Those are two areas that we could be dealing with, specifically with the Criminal Code and our extradition treaties.

The other area that I believe we have to look at, and this is more along the lines of prevention as opposed to reacting to the crime having been committed, is the regulation of the Internet. My colleague from Timmins—James Bay was telling me today, and I was not aware of this, that one can actually go online to certain websites where people are actually demonstrating their attempts to commit suicide. He believes that on one or two occasions a suicide has actually been committed live, with people watching and not intervening. In addition, we know from any number of cases of the number of suicide chat rooms that are on the Internet.

There are some lessons to be learned from what we have done to combat child pornography on the Internet. We need to compel those who provide service to the Internet to monitor these chat rooms. Some of these chat rooms are actually beneficial because they are a form of counselling. They aid people in their depression and help them with their mental health problems.

However, if this counselling actually crosses the line into counselling the act of suicide, then those sites need to be shut down. The servers who provide that service need to be directed that it is their responsibility to monitor these sites and shut them down if actual counselling of suicide is identified. That has begun to be fairly effective in the child pornography area.

Canada is taking some lead in this in terms of tracing those sites and then shutting them down. There is some precedent for us to be able to follow.

The combined approach of both strengthening our provisions within the Criminal Code to deal with the crime within this country or even extra-territorially and working much more preventively with the Internet is absolutely imperative.

I have been following some of the debate on this issue in the United States. There has been an ongoing debate there about limiting freedom of speech within that context. But as we said with the child pornography issue, there is no issue with another freedom where that kind of abuse is going on.

The same arguments could be made both nationally and internationally to restrict those sites and shut them down if there is this kind of active counselling of suicide.

Those are the suggestions I have for my colleague from Kitchener—Conestoga. I congratulate him on moving as rapidly as he has on this issue. I urge the government to pick up on these suggestions and on his motion, and perhaps we will actually get some meaningful advancements in preventing these types of suicides.

[Criminal Code, September 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am hearing from the member that that is wrong. I heard from her when she stood up to attack the police chiefs and the leadership of the police associations in this country by calling them people who sit behind their desks and do not know what is going on in the street. Every single one of those men and women who lead the chiefs of police and the professional police associations came off the street. There is not one of them who did not come off the street. They know what they are talking about.

The information I just gave the House on the incident in Mayerthorpe came directly from Mr. Momy. I invite the member for Portage—Lisgar to have a meeting with him. Maybe she would find out that in fact they have surveyed their membership on an ongoing basis. The last time there was a survey was in 2004. That survey was based on if we had the gun registry under financial control, which we were beginning to achieve at that time--I think we had finished it around 2005-06--the police officers across the country by an overwhelming majority said to get the costs under the control and if that was the case, and it is now, then they support the long gun registry.

It is impossible to go through this in any kind of detail, but I want to cover one more point on the cost issue.

I have studied this extensively, as I sat on the public safety committee for a number of years. We know that we brought the cost under control. It is irrefutable, and we heard it from the Auditor General, from the RCMP which is administering the registry now, and from some of the other speakers today, that if we get rid of the long gun registry, the savings would be somewhere between a minimum of $2 million and a maximum of $5 million.

Again, we heard from the member for Portage—Lisgar, who has brought forth this bill, that we should be using all that money, and of course the Conservatives think in terms of the $2 billion, which is a totally fabricated figure, mostly coming from the member for Yorkton—Melville. The savings this year, and for the last three to four years, would be in the range of $2 million to $5 million. I will use the example of a police officer on the street. Somewhere between $150,000 to $200,000 a year has to be spent for the officer's wages, benefits and all the required equipment. It costs between $150,000 to $200,000 a year to equip and staff one police officer in this country. If we do the math fairly quickly using the figure of $200,000, we would get 10 more police officers and if it is the higher figure of $5 million--my math is going to fail me here--it would be 25 police officers.

If we do that we are going to see a proliferation of long guns in the country. After we brought the registry in and we were charging people to register their long guns, the number of weapons in this country dropped dramatically, we think by as much as several million and maybe as high as seven million. Corresponding to that drop we saw a drop in the number of suicides and accidental deaths, and that one was very significant. We saw fewer deaths as a result. We can do all sorts of analyses but there is no other explanation for the drop in the suicide rate and the drop in the accidental deaths as a result of the use of long guns than the fact that there were fewer of them in our country.

There is not a Canadian, and I do not think there is a member on the opposite side, as strong as they are against the long gun registry, who would say that spending between $2 million and $5 million on the long gun registry to save 20 or 30 and maybe as many as 100 lives from suicides and accidental deaths is not worth it. Again, if we get rid of the long gun registry, other than some attempt by the member for Yorkton—Melville in a previous incarnation of this bill, that being Bill C-301, there is nobody who wants to either curtail the use of and certainly not get rid of the registry that registers restricted weapons, mostly handguns. That savings is minimal. We need the long gun registry in order to ensure that we do not have a proliferation of guns back in the hands of people who are careless with them. That is really what the number of suicides and accidental deaths mean to us.

Mr. Speaker, I am really sorry that I ran out of time. I think there is work that can be done on the registry, and in fact on the acquisition certificates, that would make it a better and more effective system. That is what we should be driving at, not getting rid of the long gun registry, because getting the long gun registry out of our system is going to save very little money and we are going to have additional deaths in this country.

[Criminal Code, September 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am now hearing from the member for Yorkton—Melville who has been consistently on the side of refusing to deal with the facts.

Let us just deal with one fact regarding police officers. This comes from a letter from Mr. Momy, who is the current president of the Canadian Police Association. From 1999 to 2008 there were 15 police officers killed in this country. Like the member from the Bloc, I was at the funeral of the woman police officer just outside Montreal, Quebec. We took time off from the election in 2006 to go to that funeral. It was a tragedy for her family. She was an exemplary police officer. She was one of those 15 officers that had been killed over a 10 year period. Only two of those officers were killed with handguns. The other 13 were killed with long guns.

We could say that the firearm registry was in effect during that period of time, and ask why it did not stop those killings. There is a simple answer, and if the member for Portage—Lisgar was willing to deal with the facts she might know this. Throughout most of that period of time, the long gun registry was not being enforced. As a result of that lack of enforcement, we had significantly additional deaths, including among our police forces.

Let me state another example of the effectiveness of the long gun registry. Another tragedy in our country was the death of those four RCMP officers in Mayerthorpe. We know from the same letter and from other sources that the key mechanism used in determining that the two men, who were subsequently convicted of aiding and abetting, had been involved in aiding and abetting the perpetrator of that crime was the long gun registry.

[Criminal Code, September 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, in the almost nine years since I have been elected, I do not know how many times I have spoken in the House and a lot more in committee, both in the justice committee and in the public safety and national security committee, on the issue of the gun registry. What has consistently frustrated me from the very beginning is the lack of willingness of those who are opposed to the gun registry to deal with facts rather than emotion, to deal with the gun registry on a factual basis rather than as some kind of iconic devil out there that has been perpetrated by prior Liberal governments against farmers and people who enjoy hunting. I know I will not make a difference today to those people, but I believe it is absolutely paramount that we deal with the facts.

There is absolutely no question that guns continue to be a problem in our society. No member of the House who has spent any amount of time studying the issue will dispute that fact.