44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 9, 2022 10:00AM
- Jun/9/22 9:53:20 p.m.
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I do have other members who want ask questions. This is questions and comments, not debate. I will allow the hon. member for Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia to respond.
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Madam Speaker, I can see that my colleague is very familiar with the file, and I thank her for that. Of course I talked about the negative first and left the positive to the end, but I did not have time to get to the positive. I must admit that Bill C-21 does actually contain some good measures, such as the the red flag and yellow flag measures. As I pointed out earlier, the minister has been very attentive to various groups and what they were calling for.
I said that I would work constructively with the government to improve any aspects that are perhaps less positive. When it comes time to vote, we will see whether the Bloc Québécois will support this bill.
I would also have liked to see something on assault weapons in this bill. What we heard from the Prime Minister at his press conference was that the buyback program would be postponed and that public consultation would begin later. A lot of work remains to be done on this, unfortunately, and we can talk about that at another time.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with many of the points that the member made. I appreciate the respect she has for legal gun owners, unlike some members of the Liberal party.
Can the member tell the House what we heard in committee about Akwesasne and gun smuggling and whether this bill will resolve the problem?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her French, which I must say is excellent. I thank her for making the effort to ask this question.
Indeed, this subject concerned me in committee. The opposition parties cannot invite as many witnesses as the government, but I still made an effort to invite the band council for the indigenous communities of the Akwesasne territory and the Akwesasne Mohawk Police Service to appear.
They came to explain their reality to us. They are often demonized in the media and accused of being complicit in this arms trafficking, which is definitely not the case. They asked to be partnered with other police forces in this fight, and that is exactly what the Quebec government did today by giving them the means to act. Unfortunately, that is not what Bill C-21 does for them.
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Madam Speaker, I enjoy serving with my colleague on the public safety committee.
During the course of her speech, she very much highlighted the problems with smuggling and Canada sharing a border with the United States, which is the largest gun manufacturer in the world. We know that gun smugglers are finding creative ways to get them into Canada. There was a story last month about criminals using a drone to bring handguns into Canada.
Therefore, it is going to require a set of policies. We have to work with our U.S. partners to tackle the supply, but I want to know about the demand side. Those guns are coming into Canada because there is a demand for them. I just wonder if the member can inform the House on some of the policies she thinks would be best to tackle the demand side of the gun equation here in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I really appreciate my colleague's question. Those were recommendations from the report that members of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security agreed on. The government must invest more in community services to prevent youth from committing crimes and joining gangs. These changes do not happen overnight; they are a long-term proposition.
Mental health issues are another factor. Young people are radicalized or join gangs for many different reasons. I think it is important to invest in that kind of measure as well. It is complementary.
I feel compelled to ask the federal government once again to invest in health, to give Quebec and the provinces the means to take care of things by transferring the money they are entitled to. That has not yet happened, unfortunately. We need that money to take action for young people, to address mental health and to tackle guns.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Avignon—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia for her speech.
According to Statistics Canada, 75% of gun deaths, the vast majority, are unrelated to gangs or crimes. They are suicides. Harvard research refutes the misconception that people who are determined to kill themselves will find a way, but the lethality of the chosen method is important.
Does my colleague think Bill C‑21 will reduce the number of suicides?
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question, but it brings another question to my mind. How did these gun owners get them in the first place?
Did they get them legally or illegally? That question needs to be asked.
Of course, it does not help that there are so many guns already out there. The fact that people have guns in their homes without any real restrictions, that they do not keep them out of the hands of children or prevent children from having easy access to them, certainly does not help.
I do agree that Bill C‑21 has a noble objective: to take as many handguns as possible out of circulation. This will certainly have a positive effect, since an individual who does not already have a licence will no longer be able to obtain a handgun. We will wait to see the figures, but we hope this will have a positive impact, because we are working together to improve this bill.
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Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the speech from the member, and I enjoy working with her on public safety. Reference has been made several times in tonight's speech to the study coming out of the public safety committee on guns, gangs and drug smuggling.
One piece of evidence that we heard from quite a few witnesses, including Statistics Canada, is that we do not really know the source of guns used in crime. Anecdotally, we think that most of them come from the United States of America, but we do not know for sure. I wonder if the member could comment on the gap in evidence or in data.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question.
That is something we addressed by asking public safety agencies to invest more in tracing in order to determine, once they are seized, where these guns are coming from.
However, once again, we need to give the police a way to seize these weapons and then share the information with other police forces. We need to make it easier for them to work together to obtain this type of information.
As the member said, it is hard right now to know where these guns are coming from. We can guess that many of them are from the United States, but were they brought in legally or illegally? Often, they came in illegally.
As for this sharing of information between security agencies and police forces, I think that improvements need to be made. Of course, this takes investments. That is what we recommended in the report, and I hope this will produce tangible results.
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Madam Speaker, I am pleased to be joining colleagues from all parties in this debate tonight on Bill C-21.
I want to acknowledge the time I have enjoyed as the NDP's public safety critic. It is a big responsibility. There are many different departments to keep track of. I also want to say in deference to previous speakers that I have enjoyed working with the minister on a number of issues and with my Conservative and Bloc colleagues. I will echo previous comments tonight that we do enjoy a good working relationship. If we look at previous Parliaments, that might seem a bit odd for the public safety committee because we do deal with some fairly explosive issues where there is not always a lot of agreement to be found.
I come at this debate tonight as a representative of a rural riding. My riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford is about 4,700 square kilometres in size. A lot of the constituents whom I represent are responsible firearms owners. They enjoy going to the range. They enjoy using firearms for hunting and other recreational activities.
However, it has to be stated, and this is a key difference between Canada and our southern neighbours, that owning a firearm in Canada is a privilege. By far the vast majority of firearms owners in Canada respect that privilege. They use their firearms in a very safe and respectful manner. Gun safety and the careful operation and storage of guns have always been paramount to the constituents that I have spoken to.
Indeed, I do have a lot of friends who are firearms owners. I grew up with firearms. My father has several that he inherited from his childhood. I have enjoyed spending time at various ranges throughout my riding. A few years ago, I was a guest at the Victoria fish and game club. Under the careful supervision of someone with a restricted possession and authorization licence, I was shown how to safely use a handgun at the range. There a lot of people who do enjoy the target shooting aspect of it.
I have seen a lot of debate on firearms before and during my time in Parliament and it is a pretty explosive issue. It can be very often used as a wedge in our political system. I want to find a way to talk about the legislation before us in a respectful way, one that lowers the temperature and where we can depolarize the debate while maybe seeking to make some parts of the bill better at committee.
I am trying to walk the line between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberals sometimes have a tendency to put forward a bill, hold it up as a shiny trophy, and say it is going to fix the problem. The Conservatives on the other side tend to have a knee-jerk reaction to firearms legislation and their default position is to oppose. This is an issue where we have to walk the line between those two, where we recognize that legislation is important. We cannot simply say no for the sake of saying no, but we also have to realize that legislation by itself is not going to solve a problem as complex as gun violence. It has to be part and parcel of a whole range of things.
Bill C-21 in this Parliament does share the same number as the previous firearms legislation in the 43rd Parliament, which was also Bill C-21. That bill, however, never advanced past second reading. Unfortunately, it was allowed to die on the Order Paper when we had, in my view, the unnecessary election of 2021. There was a lot of hullabaloo about the introduction of that bill, but not a lot of effort was put forward by the government to advance it in any meaningful way.
Here we are again. We are in the 44th Parliament. We are in June. We have been at this for quite some time and we are only now just getting to the first round of second reading debate on the bill.
There is an important human element to this debate. Many lives have been lost in Canada to rising gun crime and we have to acknowledge that many communities are feeling unsafe.
Canadians want their government to act to prevent tragedies, not just respond to them. That is the proactive piece of the puzzle here, not just reacting to the bad news we often see. We need to demonstrate that follow-through and commitment to addressing firearms violence. That is where I think Bill C-21 comes into play. Not only is the smuggling of illegal firearms a big problem in Canada, but there is also a very real issue with the domestic diversion of legal firearms and the way they can find their way into the hands of criminals.
I am proud to be a member of a party that has supported the goal of getting military-style assault weapons off the streets. I support the plans for a mandatory buyback. That is a significant improvement over the voluntary buyback that was proposed in the previous Parliament, because we want to find a way of making sure that these weapons are forever off of our streets and do not pose a danger. Back in 2008, Jack Layton, our leader at the time, was the first political leader in Canada to propose giving municipalities the power to ban handguns within their jurisdictions.
I think whatever side of the spectrum we fall on with respect to this debate, we can all agree it is time for the government to get serious about tackling gun crime. We have different ideas on how that is to be achieved, but I think we agree on the same basic premise.
I want to give a nod to the public safety committee. The great report that we tabled earlier this year has been referenced in a few speeches tonight. That report was the result of 50 witnesses over seven meetings. We had numerous representatives from different police services across Canada, criminal defence lawyers, community organizations and also important government bodies like Statistics Canada. I want to acknowledge the Bloc Québécois for bringing forward that motion for a study. It resulted in 34 recommendations. We are awaiting a government response. I know that takes time, but I am looking forward to reading the government's response to those solid recommendations.
We had a number of recommendations. We realized that Statistics Canada needs additional resources. It has reported that there are gaps in its reporting. There are limitations in its knowledge about the firearms that are used in crimes. We need more information and details about particular firearms, their exact type, who owns them, how they are stored, whether the owners are licensed, and so on.
There was also a recommendation about increasing funding to the Canadian criminal intelligence service to enable comprehensive intelligence sharing across all police services so we can improve their effectiveness in tracing firearms. There was a recognition that smuggling is a significant contributor to gun and gang violence in Canada and that more resources must be allocated to combatting it. Also, the Government of Canada, as part of its prohibition on firearms, should implement a mandatory buyback program. That was a recommendation in the report that was supported by committee members.
In addition, I also think that because the report also illustrated the context in which we operate, this problem is not going to be solved by legislation, funding or a shift in policies alone. It is a multi-faceted issue that is going to require reflection, a comprehensive set of solutions, including data collection and research, prevention and intervention, coordination and collaboration between all levels of government, law enforcement and civil society actors.
We know the statistics have not been favourable. That has been mentioned by a few of my colleagues. We know that the rates of firearms-related violent crimes started an upward climb in 2014, with the largest documented increase between 2014 and 2015. Between 2019 and 2020 there were notable increases, including in southern rural British Columbia, the northern part of Ontario, rural Alberta, the Northwest Territories and Nova Scotia. This is the important part: Handguns were the most serious weapon present in most firearm-related violent crimes between 2009 and 2014, and also between 2015 and 2020.
I now want to focus on the smuggling, which we know is a major problem. It is a consequence of our sharing a border with the United States. The problem, and this goes to the data collection, is that we do not have an accurate figure. It might even be impossible to ever get an accurate figure, because for every successful interdiction, there are so many that will get through. It is simply impossible to extrapolate what the full problem is in that regard.
In this conversation about firearms and the root causes of gun and gang violence, we have to know that there are so many different factors at play here. This is far from a black and white issue. During our committee study, we learned from great testimony from witnesses that things like poverty, inequality, racism, mental illness, social isolation, substance abuse, extremist ideologies, education and health, are all factors which in some way contribute to the phenomenon of gun violence and how bad it can be in some communities.
There is also a very strong correlation between the drug trade in Canada and firearms violence. I think this is important. This House has recently been seized with the issue of Canada's drug laws. We have seen reference to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in another government bill, Bill C-5, which sets out a declaration of principles.
The member for Esquimalt—Saanich—Sooke was able to successfully amend that to make sure that criminal records for simple possession will be sequestered after two years. That is an important amendment. The member for Courtenay—Alberni, my friend and neighbour to the north, has his very important private member's bill, Bill C-216.
Almost every single police agency that was before our committee spoke of the interwoven nature of the drug trade and the gun trade. The simple fact is that there are obscene amounts of money that can be made in the drug trade. The introduction of fentanyl and carfentanil has completely changed the profitability game. Every single witness who was talking on this subject said that gang members involved in the drug trade feel the need to have guns on their person to protect their turf and their trade because of the competitive nature of it.
One of the most successful ways we can tackle gun problems in Canada is to enact bold, progressive policies to deal with the demand side, to deal with people's addictions and to make sure we are not harming the people who are out there being nabbed by police for simple possession. Instead, we should be trying to make sure that we are relieving them of the criminal stigma of substance use. We should be drying up that demand so that gangs are not competing for that turf. That is a big scourge for many of our big cities in Canada, and until we see bold policy to deal with this, I fear that years from now we are still going to be having the same conversation about gun violence in Canada.
Let us now turn to some of the main features of Bill C-21. By far, the one that has garnered the most attention is the handgun freeze. It is essentially going to prevent the chief firearms officer from approving the transfer of handguns to individuals. It will effectively ban the buying, selling, transferring and importing of handguns to anyone other than certain businesses and exempted individuals.
To be clear, my technical reading of the bill is that if Bill C-21 were to receive royal assent tomorrow, anyone who is a current RPAL holder and owns a handgun will still be able to lawfully use that handgun just as they did today and yesterday. That will have no change.
It will impact people who are seeking to buy new handguns, but again, exemptions are carved out, for example, if someone can demonstrate that they need a handgun for their line of work. I know foresters who will not travel out into the bush in grizzly country unless they are carrying a handgun. That will be considered an exempted individual.
If someone is a professional target shooter and belongs to an Olympic-qualified organization, we might look at amending that and broadening the scope. The person would still be allowed to use a handgun, and so on.
I acknowledge that smuggling is a huge problem, but we have also had witnesses talk about the problem of the domestic diversion of legal weapons and people using their licences for straw purchases. I think, if we were to completely ignore that side of the equation, we would be doing a disservice to Canadians and to the whole question of public safety on this issue.
The other big aspect of Bill C-21 is the red flag and yellow flag regime, which would basically allow anyone to bypass the police and go directly to a provincial court judge to request the immediate removal of weapons from an individual who they believe is going to pose a danger to themselves or to others. I will note that, in the way Bill C-21 is written, there is an improvement to this aspect of the previous bill, because it would allow a judge to protect the privacy of an individual applying for that emergency prohibition. The judge could also have the option of holding hearings in private and sealing court documents. That is an important improvement to the previous version of the bill.
However, we know organizations such as PolySeSouvient still have problems with how this section is written. I believe that at committee we are going to have to take a deeper dive into whether this can be improved upon.
We also know that members of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians were not fans of the previous red flag law. They said:
...placing the onus on a family member of a depressed person, a demented parent, or the perpetrator of domestic violence to go through the court system is a largely unworkable and unwelcome hindrance to getting guns temporarily out of the home of those in crisis.
Others said that the current version of Bill C-21 was “a big, evidence-based step towards reducing gun injury and death in Canada,” so kudos to the government for getting that from physicians who deal with gunshot wounds on a regular basis. They still want to see the particular details of the new red flag law and how it is actually going to work. Of course, the yellow flag law would allow the chief firearms officer to temporarily suspend and review an individual firearms licence while that eligibility is determined.
I want to end on airsoft. In my riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, there is a massive airsoft community and people love this sport. I had previously only participated in paintball, so I know the fun and the thrill of it, and people who engage in airsoft as a sport love what they do. It is a great outdoor recreational activity, and these people are concerned by the provisions in this bill that are targeting replica models.
We have to find a way to have members of the airsoft community come before our committee. I think we have to have a conversation with the government on how we can find a workable solution so that people are not unfairly targeted for participating in a sport they enjoy. I think there is a middle ground in there somewhere. I acknowledge the concern that law enforcement has with replica airsoft rifles. At a distance, it is not easy to tell whether it is a replica or the real thing, and we certainly did hear at committee that some people had been successful at converting airsoft guns into fully functioning firearms, so that is a very real concern out there.
I know I am in my final minute, so I will just conclude with this: The firearms debate is never a black and white issue, and I know there are a variety of opinions on this topic, but I am going to try to thread the needle. At this point in the debate, I am going to signal my support for getting this bill to committee, because I do not want to just throw it out at this stage. I believe it deserves a closer look, and I believe all members, including my Conservative colleagues, deserve to have the opportunity to focus on the particular sections of the bill, bring forward their witnesses and have an adult conversation about the direction we want to take our country in and what we ultimately want to see out of this.
With that, I will conclude. I appreciate this opportunity, and I look forward to questions from my colleagues.
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Madam Speaker, I would ask my hon. colleague whether this really simply comes down to a question of values. I have shot an AR-15. I have shot handguns at the range, but I do not need to have one at home.
As a privilege in Canada, would he agree that, really, it is a privilege that should no longer exist, and that some firearms just simply do not belong in civilian hands?
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Madam Speaker, he mentioned the model AR-15. It is a firearm that has become synonymous with some of the most brutal mass shootings imaginable in the United States. We have to be careful. Canada and the United States are two very different countries when it comes to our firearms laws, but I would agree that certain models of firearms have no place in our society.
I am not talking about non-restricted firearms, or the people who are out there hunting and shooting with their bolt-action rifles or shotguns. I am talking about those ones that can cause death as quickly as one can pull a trigger.
With Bill C-21, though, the debate is not on the way a firearm looks but its functionality. We have had this debate at the public safety committee. It is something that is still unresolved because there are models of firearms out there, semi-automatic rifles, that have the same capacity and same function as firearms that were banned by the OIC, but they are still legal.
We need to have a conversation about where we are drawing the line and how we are actually going to define what a prohibited firearm is. That is a conversation that we still owe to Canadians.
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Madam Speaker, first, I would like to acknowledge the member's speech. He spent a lot of time talking about the root causes and the need to address those. To me, the key thing is to sort out the poverty, the drugs, the gangs and the crime in the country if we really want to get down to reducing gun crime.
I would like the member to clarify something. He mentioned that he thought it would be statistically impossible to get to some of the data. I want to remind the member that every legal handgun in Canada is registered. Whether they are straw purchased or not, they are registered, so it is not difficult to figure out how many legal handguns are involved in gun crimes in this country.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with my hon. colleague. I do not have the statistics in front of me, but I can assure my colleague that I have seen them. I was reading them in preparation for the speech. The issue, though, is when it comes to legal firearms, handguns or long guns that have been stolen. The discrepancy is with the ones that were reported missing and ones that were reported stolen versus the ones that were recovered. Yes, handguns especially have been registered and they are in the system, but there is a discrepancy between the ones that were reported stolen and the ones that were actually recovered. We know that some of those legal firearms are still out on the street. They could potentially be used to commit crimes and they may never be recovered. I think that is the discrepancy I was referring to.
He is absolutely right. We do not know what we do not know. If we are going to have an adult conversation about this, the Government of Canada needs to give Statistics Canada the proper resources so that we can paint a picture, not only for the citizens of Canada, but for the law enforcement that does that important job for us every single day.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague spoke about AR-15s and the mandatory buyback program for assault weapons. I did not have time to talk about this in my speech earlier, but I would like him to comment on how the government has decided to proceed.
The government started by banning 1,500 guns effective May 1, 2020. Today, the list of banned guns has grown to nearly 1,800, including the AR-15, which is quite popular and was used in certain unfortunately notorious shootings. However, guns that function much like the AR-15 are still being sold. For example, the WK-180 uses the same ammunition and is still on the market.
The gun lobby, gun shops and gun sellers are finding ways to get around these regulations. Even if we continue to add gun models to the blacklist, others will come on the market. We proposed including a definition of a prohibited assault weapon directly in the Criminal Code. That way, they could all be put in the same basket and would be banned all at once instead of one by one. What does my colleague think about that?
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Madam Speaker, I remember in May 2020, when that Order in Council was issued, I got a lot of feedback from my constituents in Cowichan—Malahat—Langford. Overwhelmingly, their frustration was with the suddenness of it: the fact that Parliament never had the opportunity for its elected representatives to debate it. Their preference, overwhelmingly, would have been to have Parliament debate that issue.
I acknowledge my colleague's concern on the lack of a proper definition. I think that both she and I will have questions for the government members on the committee about what they intend to do and whether that loophole is something that needs to be fixed in Bill C-21, and I will be looking forward to the Liberals' response in that regard.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for the information that he brought to the debate and also for the tone, which I think is quite constructive. The member recognized that there are many lawful gun owners in Canada who have a culture of responsible use, but that we nevertheless have a serious problem with gun crime in Canada. Part of that has to do with the diversion of legitimate weapons out of the homes of responsible owners and into the hands of those who would use them to harm Canadians.
We have heard some discussion in the House tonight from Conservatives, which I welcome, talking about the root causes of crime. I also remember that their government, first of all, made the classification system for prohibited weapons and took it out of the hands of Parliament so that cabinet could do it directly, which is something they later complained about. I remember that the Conservatives cut hundreds of jobs from the CBSA and over $140 million in funding. I know that they defunded a number of programs that addressed questions of poverty. In fact, when we talk about things like a guaranteed annual income and various other kinds of supports that would help people living in—
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- Jun/9/22 10:29:06 p.m.
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This is questions and comments, and the hon. member has already been going for one minute. I have other people who want to ask questions, and so I will go to the member for Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for an answer.
I would ask members to maybe look at me so that I can give them the signal of when to wrap up.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the member's intervention, and I will focus on his remarks about the CBSA.
It is true that the CBSA is still recovering from those cuts, but I think we also need to have a conversation about its role and responsibility. Currently, the CBSA is limited to operating at Canada's ports of entry, and if CBSA officers see illegal activity that is happening outside of a port of entry, they have to call the RCMP in. This can sometimes result in some snafus between the two agencies working together, so we may need to have a conversation about expanding the mandate of the CBSA and also providing the funding so that CBSA officers can do their jobs and keep those illegal firearms from coming into Canada.
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