Joe Comartin

[Airbus, November 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we know that Mr. Mulroney was paid $2.1 million. We know that he received payments from Mr. Schreiber, as he has admitted himself, of $300,000, and did not disclose that prior to the settlement.

The Minister of Justice is now telling us they are acting reasonably and responsibly. Would it not be reasonable and responsible to ask him if he has begun to conduct an investigation in his own department as to how that payment was made in those circumstances?

[Charter of Rights and Freedoms, October 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we will argue that one another day with my friend sitting next to me.

With regard to land, let me deal with that and expropriation generally. If the hon. member really wants to deal with it, that is where we deal with it. He should look at our expropriation legislation and other provincial and federal legislation. We should clean that up and make it clearer. I am not denying there are economic rights there; I just do not see them as fundamental ones that should be in the charter. There are rights there that need to be protected, but the way to do it is in our expropriation legislation or similar legislation, not by tinkering with our constitutional framework, because that is simply too dangerous.

[Charter of Rights and Freedoms, October 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as this is a private member's motion, there will be a free vote in the House. However, I can indicate, on behalf of the New Democratic Party, that our traditional position on these motions or private member's bills has been to oppose them. I know I will vote against the motion and I expect all members of my caucus will as well.

There are a number of reasons for that. Only having 10 minutes this evening, I doubt I will get through all of them.

Let me deal with the one that I believe, in the context of the Canadian constitutional framework, is the most significant one. It is one that was advocated very strongly back in the late seventies, early eighties as the federal government moved to repatriate the Constitution to Canada, letting us take full control of that. It is the role and the mandate we have between the federal government and the provincial governments.

It is very clear, going back to 1867 when the British North America Act was passed, that property and civil rights were a provincial responsibility, and that never changed. In 1982, when we repatriated the Constitution to Canada so we were completely in control of that as a completely independent sovereign nation, we retained that relationship. This power over property and civil rights remained at the provincial level as it does to today.

For the member for Niagara West—Glanbrook, it is a very fundamental relationship that he in effect is proposing to tinker with, one that is really going down the wrong road.

It was interesting that in 1982 the provinces were very adamant. It was not only the province of Quebec, which does have a somewhat different history with regard to how it treats property rights than what we have in the common law jurisdictions of Canada. All provinces and territories told the federal government “absolutely not”. They said we were treading into their area if we incorporated a property right into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That message was very clear from all provinces and territories.

If I recall my history, I believe the Conservative Party at the time, under pressure from the provinces, similarly did not push to incorporate a property right clause into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I believe that is historically accurate, but I could be corrected. However, we remain in that relationship now. If we go to the provinces today, they will say no. If there is going to be a dealing with property rights in Canada, those are going to be dealt with at the provincial level, not at the federal level, not in the Constitution.

The reason why I believe the New Democrats have traditionally been opposed to this type of motion or bill is it sets up a clash between the Constitution, whose property rights and civil rights are provincial responsibilities and powers, and the charter. It is hard to forecast what the outcome would be. This has happened rarely. In fact, I am not sure if it has ever happened since 1982, where we had that clash between the fundamental rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the powers in the old BNA Act and now the Constitution.

I suggest for my colleague from Niagara West—Glanbrook that he needs to appreciate that fact. We are exposing ourselves to a clash between those two documents. I believe we should not go down that road because of the risks it poses to the relationship between those two documents in our constitutional framework and the structure of our country. It is way too dangerous.

The third point that I would make is that when we actually look at the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and I believe my Liberal colleague was making this point but I want to emphasize it, section 2 deals with fundamental freedoms. What are those? They are the freedom of conscience and religion, freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of association.

Section 3 deals with democratic rights, the right to citizenship, the right to vote. In section 6 we have mobility rights. In section 7, which is where the hon. member is proposing to put this, we have legal rights. If we look at that section and the ones that follow from it, it really is about “the right to life, liberty and security of the person”. Section 8 is the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure. Section 9 is the right to be not arbitrarily detained, the right not to be arrested or detained in a draconian manner. In section 15 we have equality rights.

When we look at the rights I have listed, fundamental rights, democratic rights, mobility rights, legal rights, equality rights and language rights, they are all human rights; the point being made, and I want to repeat, is rights to the person. None of them is economic rights. That is really what the member is trying to incorporate for the first time into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is not what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was designed to do from its inception, nor has it incorporated any of those types of attempts in the last 25 years of its existence. It is the wrong document, the wrong tool to be moving in this direction.

I want to make one final point with regard to the charter and that is section 25.

The member for Niagara West—Glanbrook talked about the role property rights have played historically. That is a somewhat limited perspective on property and how it is treated by various societies. Our first nations did not have the concept of property rights, which the Europeans brought to North America as they occupied it. That has never changed for our first nations. Section 25 of our charter recognizes that. It says that we cannot abrogate those rights that the first nations have had from time immemorial.

I believe strongly that the incorporation of property rights into the charter in fact would clash with section 25, because the first nations in this country continue to this day to look at property rights in a much more collective approach than the individual property rights that Europeans incorporate and which quite frankly are not found in a lot of other jurisdictions in the world. Collective rights with regard to property are seen in a number of other jurisdictions right around the globe. Africa and Asia have not incorporated the European concept of individual property rights. I believe that is what the member is attempting to do. Again, it would clash with section 25.

I want to make one final point and maybe a recommendation to my colleague. He pointed out, and rightfully so, some of the abuses that have gone on, both at the federal and the provincial levels with regard to expropriation of property rights, and they are valid points. I have a hard time with the gun registry, but I will leave that for a moment.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, October 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it would probably have taken about 10 minutes for me to explain this to the member and perhaps to the public watching.

I have two quick points. The dangerous offender section in the code has been used about 300 and some times. When this happens, when people are found to be dangerous offenders, they go to jail and they never get out. I believe only about 18 out of 350 have ever been released. This is what we are faced with.

We should imagine ourselves as a judge having to tell people that they have to prove why they should not go to jail because this is what the Criminal Code states that.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, October 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, anybody who has been in the House for any length of time knows the government controls the order paper. The order in which bills are brought forward is entirely in the hands of the government, and there is nothing the opposition parties can do in that regard. I sometimes think that is a mistake in our system. On the basis of democracy and in a minority government situation, that rule should not be there. Opposition parties should have more control over what comes before the House, but this is not the case. The government completely controls this.

The member is right in terms of bills sitting on the order paper, and I will use Bill C-27, the dangerous offender bill, as an example. It sat on the order paper for almost six months. The bill was introduced in the House in the fall of 2006 and did not get to a vote for second reading and go to committee until well into the spring of 2007. For a good six months, it just sat on the order paper. That is a good example of how backlogged the justice committee was at that point.

As I mentioned in my opening comments, a more efficient approach would have moved the bills along much faster. Let me just emphasize that point and explain what happens.

When bills get to justice committee, there is a tendency to call the same witnesses on specific points. I have been saying in the House that the bills should have been bunched together. The government should have done that originally. It cannot be done now because these bills would be delayed again.

The Canadian Bar Association was forced to appear before the justice committee eight or ten times. Representatives could probably have come once or maybe twice, spoken on all the points and given us their input.

This goes back to consultation in terms of the member's question. The Conservative government has refused to consult with a number of groups because I think it sees them as ideologically unfriendly. Conservatives talk to members of police associations, but do they talk Canadian Bar Association? Maybe some. Do they talk to criminal defence lawyers, who have some significant input to provide on these bills? Hardly at all.

I could go down the list of some of the groups that deal with people who have been charged and convicted of crimes. For women, there is the Elizabeth Fry Society. For men, there is John Howard Society. The government does not talk too much to these people.

That delays the process at committee. These groups come forward at committee to tell us what they think the problems are with the legislation, and that is the first time we hear about it. Perhaps it could have been taken care of by consultation before it ever arrived at committee.

I have already mentioned the issue of street car racing. All parties in the House supported that and we put it through as quickly as we could.

With respect to the age of consent legislation, I fought with the former Conservative justice minister, my colleague from Manitoba, and convinced him that we should put it in. We tried to put it into the child pornography bill in 2005. It resurrected itself in the age of consent bill, Bill C-22, that finally came before the House. The bill went all the way to the Senate. Now it is back before the House and we have to go over it all again.

[Tackling Violent Crime Act, October 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I did not realize we were going to be moving on this quickly, which is a good development because it will move these bills along, as opposed to the government's approach, which has been one of delay.

In that regard, I want to do a quick resumé of what has happened in this Parliament starting in roughly mid-February of 2006, at which time we were faced with a large number of crime bills by the government. I took the opportunity to go through the list of bills that have been dealt with in one form or another.

The list was quite lengthy, starting with Bill C-9, which was a bill on conditional sentencing. That went through both Houses and has royal assent. There was one on the Judges Act, Bill C-17, and it also went through all stages. Another one relating to DNA identification went through all stages. As for Bill C-19 on street racing, a particularly emotional point for the Conservative Party, we got that one through. There was one on criminal interest rates, Bill C-26, and it got through. There was one, Bill C-48, which dealt with international crime syndicates and the need to fight corruption at that level, coming out of the UN, and it got through. The next one, dealing with the illegal recording of movies, went very quickly through the House with all parties cooperating. It never even went to committee.

In addition to that, we have had Bill C-22, which actually is part of Bill C-2, the bill that is before us now, passed at second reading in the Senate. It went through the House all the way to the Senate. We have had Bill C-10, an important bill on mandatory minimums, go through this House and into the Senate, where it was at first reading.

Similarly, Bill C-23 went through this House and got to the Senate, but it is not part of this bill. I am not sure if the government is going to bring that one back or not. On Bill C-35, which was the bill dealing with bail reviews involving alleged gun crimes and the reverse onus being placed, again, it got through all the work in this House and went to the Senate.

The final bill with regard to work that we had done and which was almost through this House was the bill dealing with impaired driving. That had cleared the committee and was coming back to the House. It would have been back in the House if we had not prorogued in the middle part of September.

These are all the bills we have had from the government. The final bill was still in committee and we had just started on it. We had three or four meetings taking witnesses on that bill, which deals with dangerous offenders and amendments to recognizance in the Criminal Code.

In addition, there were at least four to six private members' bills, all of them coming from the Conservative Party interestingly enough, which we dealt with and passed or dealt with in some fashion. One had to be withdrawn. We dealt with those as well.

All of that work was being done at the justice committee, with the exception, and this is really interesting, of two bills that went to special legislative committees. Because the justice committee's workload was so great, we moved them into special committees. However, we worked on those bills and got them through.

All of that is work we have done in a little over 18 months, yet in spite of that, there are two things the government does. It constantly complains about the length of time it takes, in regard to which the Conservatives could have done much better by originally having omnibus bills. I have said that in the House to the point where I am almost sick of hearing it myself, and I am sure everyone else in the House is, but it is the way they should have conducted themselves. Of course, though, because of their political agenda of wanting to highlight each one of these bills, they did not put them together. They finally came to their senses and realized that it is a way of moving bills through the House more rapidly.

However, we did all of that work, and now what we are hearing, which is the second point I want to make about the government, is that the delay is the fault of the opposition. That is absolutely false.

One can see from the length of the list of bills we have had to deal with, plus the private members' bills, plus working on two legislative committees in addition to all the work that we have done at justice, that nobody in the opposition has done any delaying. The delay with regard to the five bills that are incorporated now into Bill C-2 is entirely at the feet of the government. It prorogued and that cost us a month.

It is interesting to note what could have happened in that one month's time. It is my opinion that all three of the bills that were in the Senate would have been through and ready for royal assent, which again is in the hands of the government. If the government had conducted itself with any kind of efficiency, those bills probably would be law today.

The fourth bill, the one dealing with impaired driving, which again is part of Bill C-2, would have come to the House in the middle part of September when we came back. There was not a great deal of debate, and although I and my party have some reservations about it, we in fact would support it.

The bill would have had some debate in the House at report stage and third reading, but it would have been through the House and at least at first reading in the Senate now, perhaps at second reading. It is not beyond the pale to think that the bill also would have cleared the Senate and would have been ready for royal assent.

This bill bothers me. Of all the ones we have, this one bothers me the most because of the conduct of the government in dealing with the individuals, including the police officers and police associations, who lobbied really heavily to get this legislation, and in particular the families and supporters of MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. It bothers me that the government would have misused the loyalty and the support that those groups had given to the bill by leading them to believe that somehow it was the opposition that was holding it up, when in fact it was prorogation. Now there is this tactic of combining that bill with the other bills to actually slow down its passage. Otherwise there is a reasonably good chance it would have been law by now, and if not, it would have been in its final stages at the Senate and it certainly would have been law by the end of the year.

That is much less likely to happen now. It is more likely that this bill will not get final approval and royal assent until well into the spring, no matter what the government tries to do. Quite frankly we will do whatever we can to be cooperative in moving these bills forward.

Our party was quite prepared to have all four of those bills that I have mentioned which form 80% of Bill C-2 back at their original stages, again so they would be law or on the verge of becoming law, that is, receiving royal assent today, as opposed to what is likely to happen now. It is going to be into the new year and maybe well into the spring before these bills become law, assuming of course that the government does not collapse and there is an election, which is another problem.

The government has delayed it, and in addition, it has clearly pushed it back at least until the new year, with the real possibility of an election intervening and a number of these provisions never seeing the light of day until after the election, when we would come back and start the process all over again.

That is reprehensible conduct on the part of the government. The only reason the Conservatives are doing it is so they can stand up in public and say, “We are tough on crime”. They do the macho thing. They beat their chests. They do the King Kong thing as if they are coming out of a jungle. The reality is that the delay is all at their feet.

I am really angry when I think of all the work that so many groups have done, the victims of crime in particular, and now are being misused by the government in such a way.

I am not going to take up much more time but I do want to address the final bill that was at committee. Former Bill C-27 is now part of Bill C-2. It deals with two amendments to the Criminal Code. One would be on the provisions relating to dangerous offenders and the other is with regard to recognizance.

With regard to recognizance, I think I can safely say that all the opposition parties are in support of those provisions. They give additional authority to our judiciary to deal with people who are out in the community on their own recognizance, but we can put additional conditions on them.

The bill provides for things such as requiring them to wear a monitoring device. There is a number of other provisions that would substantially improve security in our communities regarding people who have now been released from charges and who have already served their time. It is a substantial step forward and one that has been needed.

I have said this in the House before, that when I started practising law back in the early 1970s we needed it at that time. Successive governments have tended to shy away from it. Our judiciary has attempted on a number of occasions to introduce these types of control devices, if I could put it that way, in terms of sentencing or conditions imposed on people and it has consistently lost in our courts of appeal. It required legislative intervention. The provision is in this bill and we need to pass that and get it into play so our judges can do a better job of helping protect Canadians, which they want to do.

The other part in this provision, the old Bill C-27 now part of Bill C-2, is with regard to dangerous offenders. We have significant problems with this. Originally when the bill came before the House as Bill C-27, all three opposition parties indicated that on principle they had to vote against it because it has a provision of reverse onus with regard to the dangerous offender.

All of us believe that that part of the bill would suffer a charter challenge that would be successful in striking it down. What I do not think the government has ever understood is that not only would it be struck down, but perhaps the whole dangerous offender section would be struck down. Just as we saw with the security certificates where the Supreme Court said that if it could not be fixed, they were all going down, the same type of thing could happen in a ruling on dangerous offenders. The government has never understood that.

Ultimately, the opposition parties decided that there were perhaps ways of amending this in committee to improve the use of the dangerous offender section, because we know we need to do that, and at the same time make sure that the section was not jeopardized by a successful charter challenge at some point in the future.

We were working on that when we ended in June. We fully expected that was one of the bills for the special legislative committee and that we would be back and working on it in September, that we would complete the witness testimony and improve the bill by way of amendment and if not, then I suppose we would have been faced with a conundrum of whether we could support it or not. That is where we are at this point.

That bill needs significant work in order to be sure that we do not lose the entire dangerous offender section of the Criminal Code. We will be doing that work as soon as we can get the committee up and running again and the bill into the committee.

It is very clear that the government, and I do not say this about the opposition parties, is prepared to play politics with public safety. The Conservatives want to be seen as the champions and they are prepared to take these kinds of manoeuvres of delaying these bills by incorporating them all into Bill C-2 so that they can do that. They want to stand up in the House and in the media and out on the hustings and say “we are the champions of it”, when in fact the truth is just the opposite. They were guilty. They are guilty of delay. The opposition parties are not.

[International Trade, October 26th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we have heard from the Minister of International Trade that he wants Canada to become a strong exporter of manufactured goods, yet he continues free trade negotiations with Korea. In 2006, $1.6 billion in Korean-made automotive products were sold here, while a mere $11 million in Canadian automotive products were sold in Korea.

Wood pulp, coal and other commodities are our top exports. Manufactured goods hardly factor into the relationship. With an existing trade deficit of $2.6 billion with Korea, we have already lost 15,000 manufacturing jobs. Economic studies have determined that a Korea-Canada trade deal would result in an additional 30,000 lost jobs.

The ratio of trade in the auto sector is 150:1 in Korea's favour, and this new deal would not change that ratio at all.

It seems quite clear that the minister and the entire Conservative government are willing to trade away high skill, high wage jobs in our manufacturing sector so they can ship more of Canada's natural resources offshore.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, we were joking a little as I finished that I was just getting wound up, and I was getting wound up around being critical of the government.

I want to go back to how I started my comments this afternoon, which was about trying to reduce the passion around this issue. Although I am being critical of the government because I think it has gone down the wrong road on this, I want it to be seen as constructive criticism rather than a diatribe against it.

However, I am concerned and I actually was angry at the government because of the process it embarked upon with regard to Bill C-21.

We know that the Conservatives sought legal opinions shortly after they were elected. They were told by legal counsel at that time that they had to bring in a bill. They looked at various ways, through regulation or other methodologies, that would have avoided a vote in this House. Ultimately, they determined that they did not have a choice, that the democratic process had put the long gun registry in place and only the democratic process in the form of a bill and a vote in this House could do away with it.

As I had said earlier, the Conservatives introduced the bill into the House exactly a year ago today and have not done anything since then to bring it forward, which is anti-democratic. I am bothered that they took that approach. However, they compounded their inaction with regard to Bill C-21, in the sense of bringing it forward, having a debate and having a vote twice, by publishing and putting into place amnesties for individuals who had long guns who would no longer be required to register them. If they came up for re-registration, they would not need to do that.

There are a couple of things with that. The amnesty provisions within the Criminal Code, in my opinion, were never designed for that purpose and it is really abusive to use them in that way. Amnesty is to be used in very limited ways, mostly for individual crimes rather than in these circumstances where a whole group of people were exempted from the application of this legislation as it existed and as it continues to exist today.

They granted that amnesty and at the same time made the decision not to collect fees. That has cost the Canadian taxpayers now over $20 million per year. We are into the second year and we are approaching the $40 million mark that it has cost the Canadian taxpayers.

The obvious question is why the government would have taken this approach, given the Conservative Party's long antipathy toward the long gun registry. Why would it sit on this? The very simple answer is that it knows it does not have the votes in this House to support this piece of legislation, even at second reading and to send it to committee.

Instead of that, it has engaged in a campaign to avoid its democratic responsibility to bring this matter to this House in a timely fashion and to let this House decide, to let the elected officials in this country decide whether in fact we were going to have a long gun registry. It has avoided doing that and I am highly critical of it for doing that.

Even though we are having this debate tonight until 10 p.m., I do not see it going any further than that. We will not have a vote on it this week and the House is scheduled to end on the 22nd, this Friday. The House will return in the fall and I have no sense that this bill will be brought back in the fall. To some significant degree, the government is avoiding the issue.

The essential point I want to make is that we need to lower the passion around this issue in this country and this does not do it. In fact, it is just the opposite. It feeds it, both for those of us who are opposed to the gun registry and those of us who support it.

In the remaining time I would like to briefly address the bill. The bill is pretty straightforward. Although it is some 10 or 12 pages long, it is very basic. It would amend the Firearms Act. It is legislation that refers to long guns and in effect it would systematically dismantle the long gun registry in this country if this bill were to go ahead and become law at some point in the future.That is all it would do. I suppose I should not say that because it would do a bit more, but that is essentially what the bill would do, which why those of us who feel the long gun registry performs a function are opposed to it.

In that regard, there is no question that the debate around whether this has reduced violent crime in this country is a debate. There is not sufficient evidence on either side to absolutely control that question. There are strong arguments that I voice on a regular basis that have convinced me that the long gun registry has had a substantial impact in reducing violence in this country.

The evidence, I believe, is incontrovertible that the suicide rate has been reduced substantially since 1996 when the long gun registry began to have an impact. Certainly in the period of time from 2001 to 2003 when it really began to have an impact, the suicide rate went down.

The accidental death rate dropped dramatically, in the 20 percentile range, as a result of the controls that the long gun registry imposes upon the storage, transportation, et cetera, of long guns.

It is interesting as well to look at what happened. It was one of those unintended consequences. I certainly did not hear anyone during those debates on the long gun registry legislation speak to this. One of the unintended consequences of the legislation, because it costs money to register, or at least it did before the Conservative government got hold of it, was that it dissuaded people from keeping their long guns when they had to register them. It also had the effect of dissuading people from buying long guns knowing that they would have the ongoing cost of registration.

In that regard, there was a pretty extensive survey done at one point that showed that in the previous year of the survey being conducted slightly more than half of the people who owned long guns in this country did not use them. We have this image portrayed of us making it difficult for hunters to use their long guns for hunting and other recreational purposes, including target practice. The reality is, from what we have been able to ascertain, that continues to be the case. A large number of long guns, slightly more than 50%, in any given year, are not used at all by the owners of those guns,.

To go back to the point of that unintended consequence, when the legislation came into play, people who had to begin to pay fees gave up their long guns rather than pay the fees because they were not using them and had no use for them.

One of the fears, of course, if the long gun registry is done away with and the requirements for storage and the sequence that we follow in terms of enforcing and patrolling that legislation, is that we will see an increase in mishaps, at least in accidental deaths. Suicide is another issue but the fear is that accidental deaths will go up because casual owners, not the hunter who is devoted to a recreational pastime, but the casual owners, who on a whim in many cases buy long guns, will not be careful in how they store the guns and, in effect, protect their families, friends and the environment from the accidental use of the guns. We will see an increase in accidental deaths and for that reason alone it is well worthwhile to keep the registration in place.

One of the other statistics that is very clear, which my colleague from the Bloc mentioned in his address, is that the number of violent crimes within domestic settings between partners, almost all of it males serviced on females, has dropped dramatically as we got rid of that many guns. We got them out of the households where they should not have been. We restricted the use by other people who should not have been owning them.

Some of that will continue. I do not want to mislead the public in that regard. This legislation would continue to require people who own guns to be registered and screened.

What should we be doing to improve the registry of both handguns and long guns? I believe the government has gone wrong by spending so much energy, including the amnesty and including forgiving the fees. Rather than doing that, if it had been spending time and effort and doing analyses of what we should be doing, we probably would have had some significant impact.

I want to talk about the Dawson situation. The long gun that was used, which looked like an assault rifle, at one point could have been banned as an assault rifle because there are provisions within the legislation now that say this type of a gun, if it looks this way, which is the kind of wording and essence of the legislation and the regulations, is banned. That was during the Liberal government administration. There were a number of opportunities but because of the opposition that was coming from those people who opposed the long guns, the Liberals were not prepared to take those administrative decisions to get guns like that out of the hands of people who, as my colleague from the Bloc said, have this fascination with guns.

I do not want to taint all owners of guns that way but it was one of the places where we could have done better as a government. We did not do that because of the opposition to the long gun registry. We should be doing that. There are other assault rifles appearing in this country that should be on our prohibited list and no one should be allowed to own them, rifles similar to the one used in the Dawson killings.

We should be tightening up quite dramatically the screening of everyone, whether they own a handgun or a long gun. There are simply too many other possibilities. I want to point to one of the suggestions that has been made, which has come out of the province of Quebec, around screening people by getting the gun clubs more on side, requiring them to provide information and, in particular, concerns, if they have them, over individuals who have gone through the training process that they needed to go through in order to get themselves and their weapons registered in this country, requiring them to do more in that regard.

The financial reason that they should be required to do that is because they benefit from the use of guns in this country at the clubs they run, whether they are private or non-profit. They have an additional responsibility and I believe it is one that we should be imposing upon them and should be enforced. That would have some significant difference. Again, in the Dawson situation we should have done additional screening with regard to military records. It is quite clear in that case that it would have brought forward to the registrar that this individual had a problem and that may very well have prevented that.

We can go down the list. There are a number of other areas where we could be doing much better. The concentration that we have done on simply getting rid of the long gun registry is a major error. We should be doing much more work in these other areas of screening and getting other guns out of circulation that really have no purpose in a society such as Canada.

I urge all members of this House in the debate that will be taking place through the rest of this evening to try to limit the passion, look at the facts and to argue from whichever side, because there are facts on both sides of this, but to reduce the passion and hopefully that will spill out into the rest of the country.

[Criminal Code, June 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I must admit that I am getting some encouragement from the Conservative Party member to make a good speech, but I think the member's definition of a good speech on this topic would be substantially different from my definition of a good speech on this topic.

I want to begin by acknowledging the passion that this issue has raised in this country, including yourself, Mr. Speaker, on a number of occasions. To some significant degree, it is unfortunate that this issue is at times so clouded by passion rather than by reason and fact.

To a significant degree, members of the Liberal administration need to take a good deal of responsibility for this because, quite frankly, of their mismanagement of the long gun registry in particular, and the manner in which they dealt with the registration of firearms in this country.

It is important that we look at the history of the registration of guns. If we go back, even at the turn of the century there was some requirement if people were carrying a gun to register it. However, the real registration system began in 1934 for, using various terminology, but what we would now refer to as restricted weapons as opposed to prohibited, those weapons that one could legally own and did not need to register, which, from 1934 on, were generally handguns.

The real controversy arose, and I say that objectively in terms of the history of the registration of guns in this country, after the massacre at the École Polytechnique in Quebec when we moved to require the registration of long guns. That was when the real passion arose in the country. To a significant degree, that anger against the long gun registry was generated by, in some cases, gross mismanagement in the system and the cost that went along with that system.

It is quite clear that we need to look at the facts. I do not want to be overly critical of the people who are opposed to the long gun registry because there are some of those within my own caucus. I want to acknowledge, perhaps at this point, that if this bill ever gets to a vote, although I have some doubts about that with the current administration, our party has decided, because of some long-standing opposition from some of our members and their constituents, that in our party this will be a free vote, not a whipped vote.

Those of us who are opposed to this bill and in support of the long gun registry will stand in this House and vote against this bill and vote in favour of retaining the registry. Those within my caucus who are opposed to this registry and in favour of this legislation will stand and vote accordingly. That decision has already been made and taken some time ago.

I am happy to say that a substantial majority of my caucus is opposed to the bill and in favour of maintaining the long gun registry. I want to be very clear about that because of the history that we are prepared to take that position because we do believe the long gun registry does have some validity in reducing injury as a result of the use of long gun weapons in this country and in reducing certain types of crimes.

Having said that, we are very clear that this needs to be managed well, whether it is a Liberal administration or the current Conservative administration. There are some problems with the system and Ms. Fraser, our Auditor General, made that very clear in her report in 2006.

In spite of the fact that the government has moved to transfer the registry to the RCMP, I am very concerned that it has not looked at some of the significant improvements that the registry requires. I say that not just with regard to the long gun registry, but with regard to the handgun registry as well. Some significant improvements are required and are necessary and we are capable of doing them but we are not seeing that from the government. Its approach has been to simply dismantle the long gun registry.

I will be critical again, although I do not want to be overly passionate about this, but I am angry at the government for the position it has taken. This bill was tabled in this House exactly one year ago today, on June 19, 2006. Since that time, the government has had the opportunity to bring the bill forward for debate and for votes. I would estimate roughly 100 days and maybe more than that. It has not done so and I think that is to its discredit for not having moved on this earlier. The debate is going on in the country, the passion is still there and we need to deal with it.

[Airport Security, June 18th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this program is going to cost us $3 million per year. The no-fly list will catch many innocent Canadians and ruin business and recreational travel plans. Worst yet, it is the victims' responsibility to get their names off the list. It will take at least six months, if they ever can do it.

This so-called safeguard will not protect ordinary Canadians, despite what we hear from the minister. If the government will not scrap the no-fly list, will it at least set up an ombudsman's office with the authority to have access to all the files and the power to immediately get names off that list that should not be on it?