44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 9, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, one of the greatest risk factors in a violent intimate relationship is gun ownership. Just by virtue of having a gun in the home, the lethality of intimate partner violence increases by 500%.
A femicide occurs every two and a half days in our country. It routinely follows documented incidents of intimate partner violence, and it disproportionately affects indigenous women and women living in rural areas.
Intimate partner violence and gun violence intersect, and they intersect in deadly ways. That is why Bill C-21's new red flag law is crucial: It would ensure that anyone who is proved to be at risk of harming themselves or those around them would not be able to possess a firearm licence.
There are still too many women in this country who live in fear. These new provisions would save lives, and I hope everyone in the House will support the bill's speedy passage.
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Mr. Speaker, Conservatives believe that meaningful and effective steps must be taken to end gun violence and gun crime in Canada. Canadians need to be safe, and victims of domestic violence need to be protected. While there are aspects of Bill C-21 that we can agree on, specifically on domestic violence issues, the rest of the bill falls short and would do nothing to end gun violence.
Will the Liberals agree to split Bill C-21 into two bills? One would be to protect the victims of domestic violence, while the other aspects of the bill would be reworked to offer real and effective solutions to gun crime and gun trafficking.
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Mr. Speaker, speaking as a member of Parliament for downtown Toronto and as a mother of teenagers who live in my riding, I want to say very clearly that we will never water down our measures on gun control. We know that these are essential to protecting Canadians, and I just wish the members opposite would stop their posturing and join us in savings lives.
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday there were another three shootings in less than six hours in Montreal, and the Government of Quebec has said that it has not yet received the money it was promised to combat gun violence.
Quebec is putting in the work. For example, it has announced a special patrol to combat gun trafficking in Akwesasne. Ottawa, however, has not even sent Quebec the money it was promised. How shameful.
When will the government finally transfer the money it promised Quebec? Montreal has a gun problem right now, not “one day”, “maybe”, “if we have the time”, “if it is not too hot” or “if it is not raining”. The problem is now. I also want to inform the minister that this has nothing to do with Bill C‑21.
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- Jun/9/22 2:56:22 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I assure my colleague and all members of the House that we are in communication with my counterpart, Minister Guilbault, about implementing these programs to prevent gun violence.
I hope that the Bloc Québécois and all members of the House will allow us to start debate on Bill C‑21, which contains several concrete measures that will help the member's community.
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Mr. Speaker, there have been consultations, and I believe you will find unanimous consent in the House for the following: That, given that the debate on combatting gun violence needs to be depoliticized, centred on the rights of victims and the safety of communities, the House call on the government to divide Bill C-21—
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- Jun/9/22 7:15:44 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Mr. Speaker, my colleague's intervention this evening was an important intervention. Obviously, the concern on our side is that, on the one hand, we see with Bill C-21 an appearance, real or otherwise, that the Liberals are increasing firearms laws, but on the other hand, with Bill C-5, there is actually an option for those offences to be minimized and not have mandatory sentences. An example the member mentioned was the illegal use of a firearm in the commission of a crime, and there is a whole series of things.
I am wondering if he could comment on this: on the one hand, giving the appearance, as the Liberal government is doing, of strengthening gun laws, which will have no effect, and, on the other hand, diminishing that and allowing criminals to be even more emboldened, more brazen in their activities.
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- Jun/9/22 7:57:30 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, my colleague and I work together on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, notably on the gun control file.
Every time I hear my Conservative colleagues ask questions about Bill C-5 in question period, I hear the Minister of Public Safety respond with something about Bill C-21. I find that somewhat unfortunate because they are not the same thing.
Although I quite like my colleague, we both know that our opinions differ on this subject. For example, the Bloc members are big believers in rehabilitation and social reintegration. I think that Bill C-5 will help with that.
However, I think my colleague will agree with me that this is not the time to be introducing this bill, given the rise in gun crime across the country. We are trying to find ways to combat that situation.
What message does my colleague think is being sent to the public by introducing this bill at this time?
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- Jun/9/22 8:13:05 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. As my colleague already said, the issue is with when this bill was introduced. There is an increase in gun crimes. Yesterday we learned that 173 women and girls were killed in Canada in 2021 alone. That is a lot.
People are conflating Bill C‑21, which has to do with firearms, with this one. They are conflating serious gun crimes with simple drug possession. They are conflating everything and making questionable associations. There is an important distinction between these two bills and between gun crimes and the simple possession of drugs. This needs to be simplified. The timing of this bill is strange, however.
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- Jun/9/22 8:14:04 p.m.
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- Re: Bill C-5
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question. My comments were about crimes related to drug use, but there are also gun crimes that are important in the bill.
The other bill she mentioned is a firearms bill. I think people with legal firearms are targeted most of the time. We will see if that is a problem. Unfortunately, gun crimes are committed against women. If those firearms are illegal, I think we need to tackle illegal arms trafficking in Canadian society.
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Madam Speaker, I know the minister is approaching this issue from a very personal position, and I appreciate that, but I think we have to be very clear. I think the minister would agree with me that Bill C-21 by itself is not going to solve the very complex problem of gun crime. It is going to require a whole host of measures working together.
At the public safety committee, our first study in this Parliament was on gun and gang violence, and witness after witness was correlating the rise in gun crime with the drug trade. The government, just a few short weeks ago, did vote against Bill C-216, which would have decriminalized personal possession, set up a national strategy and set up expungement. I do not want to get into a debate about that, but I think the onus is now on the Government of Canada to explain what its next steps will be to address the incredibly high profit margins that exist in the drug trade that are driving the violence in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
It is the highly addictive nature of fentanyl and carfentanil and the massive profit margins that are leading to gangs competing with one another for that turf. That is driving a lot of the gun violence. In the absence of supporting Bill C-216, can the minister tell us what the next steps are to address that very specific problem?
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Madam Speaker, I am very honoured to put words on the record concerning Bill C-21.
We have a very serious gun violence problem in the country, one that Conservatives across the country are deeply concerned about. I have to say that when there were rumours that this announcement from the Liberals was coming forward and it was going to be a big splashy event at the Château Laurier here in downtown Ottawa, I was looking forward to hearing something that could really make a meaningful impact on this devastating issue that has ripped families apart and taken innocent lives. However, I was left feeling deeply, deeply disappointed. It was a missed opportunity to provide real hope for Canadians that gun violence would go down.
What is interesting is that since the Prime Minister formed government seven years ago, gun violence and violent crime in Canada has consistently gone up. It has never been so bad since I have been alive when it comes to the gun statistics in this country and those killing each other with guns in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Vancouver. It is a serious, serious issue. That is why I felt so let down by the government's announcement, because it will not make any meaningful impact on gun violence and we so desperately needed a meaningful announcement.
I am going to mention a couple of crime statistics, because they are very alarming. Homicide rates went up 7% from last year. That is a consistent increase, year over year over year, 7% more from last year, so now two out of 100,000 Canadians are victims of a homicide. Violent crime, again, is up 5% in the last six years. Firearm-related offences increased for the sixth year in a row. These are stats from last year, so we will see what they are this year, but from the police reports, it sounds like it is going to be one of the worst years on record. Homicides are at a 30-year high and at least a third of them are committed with firearms.
I represent a riding in Winnipeg. It is ranked the violent crime capital of Canada, frankly, year over year, so I know first-hand the devastation that gun crime and violent crime cause in communities, especially our vulnerable communities.
In fact, in Toronto, in 2014, before the Prime Minister came to office, there were 177 instances where firearms were shot illegally. Now that number is up to 462. Is has gone from 177 to 462 in Toronto. Clearly, the Liberal approach is a resounding failure when it comes to keeping our communities safe. It is a fact that our communities are less safe. Canadians are less safe since the Prime Minister took office. Again, the Liberals had the opportunity to address that at their announcement, but they failed to do so.
In Winnipeg we have serious concerns. Winnipeg's North End is a predominantly indigenous community that suffers significantly with addictions, homicides, violent crimes, domestic abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse. In fact, in Manitoba, child and family services remove the most children per capita than anywhere else in the world, and at least 90% to 97% of them are indigenous. Our prisons at all levels are filled with indigenous youth. It is a serious problem that we are facing in this country.
We have also the missing and murdered indigenous women. Indigenous women in Manitoba are most impacted by those horrendous statistics, and yet we have Bill C-5 from the government. On one hand, the minister said in his speech that he is increasing maximum penalties for firearm offences, some of them, to send a message to criminals, while on the other hand, his colleague is eliminating mandatory prison time for serious firearm offences.
We are talking about robbery with a firearm. If a person robs someone at gunpoint, there is no guarantee that person is going to prison now. The individual may actually get to serve house arrest in the community where the person caused the violent crime. Extortion with a firearm and firing a firearm with the intent to injure someone, that is, shooting at someone and planning to hit them with the bullet, no longer results in mandatory prison time under the Liberal government. There is using a firearm in committing a crime, and I could go on. In fact, someone who is a drug trafficker will no longer face mandatory prison time under Bill C-5.
On one hand, the Liberals say they are getting tough on criminals. On the other hand, they are letting them completely off the hook, allowing them to serve, perhaps, house arrest in the communities they have terrorized.
There is the removal of the mandatory prison time for drug trafficking, which is deeply related, as my NDP colleague referred to in his question, to gun violence in the country. Just last year, over 7,000 Canadians died from drug overdoses, mostly opioids, that is, fentanyl, carfentanil. It was more deadly for young people to die from a drug overdose than COVID. That is how serious the drug epidemic in this country is.
We all have different approaches on how to solve that, but I would say that removing mandatory prison time for the individuals who push drugs on vulnerable Canadians, who traffic drugs into this country, is the wrong approach.
They are responsible for murdering thousands of Canadians, especially in B.C. It is especially an issue with young people, so the government's approach to firearms and violent crime, despite the rise in statistics, does not make sense.
Then we have the government bringing forward this handgun freeze. The minister has consistently said that we are stopping this trend with the handgun freeze, but we know that the handguns used in Toronto gang crimes are not from legal gun owners. They are smuggled in from the United States, and I will get to that.
What I think is particularly interesting is all the individuals, particularly police, who have come out to say that handgun bans and buybacks will not work. They will not work to address the rising gun violence in this country.
In fact, I will start with an interesting quote here by an individual who said, “The long-gun registry, as it was, was a failure.... There are better ways of keeping us safe than that registry which...has been removed.” We are not talking about the registry today, but it was a gun control mechanism that was brought in formerly by a Liberal government, so I think it is relevant.
This individual said, “I grew up with long guns, rifles and shotguns.... The RCMP guarding me had handguns and I got to play with them every now and then”, although the RCMP was “very responsible” around him. He said, “I was raised with an appreciation and an understanding of how important in rural areas and right across the country gun ownership is as a part of the culture of Canada.” It was a very important person who said this. He continued, “I do not feel that there's any huge contradiction between keeping our cities safe from gun violence and gangs, and allowing this important facet of Canadian identity which is having a gun.”
That was the Prime Minister of Canada, back in 2012 or 2013. Wow, how times have changed.
In reference to a handgun ban, another important individual of the Liberal government said, “I believe that would be potentially a very expensive proposition but just as importantly, it would not in my opinion be perhaps the most effective measure in restricting the access that criminals would have to such weapons, because we’d still have a problem with them being smuggled across the border”. That was the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, the former minister of public safety. Those were his words.
There is also the deputy chief of the Toronto Police Service, Myron Demkiw, who deals with this on the front line and puts his life on the line dealing with criminals shooting guns in downtown Toronto. He and his officers put their lives on the line to keep communities safe from gun violence. In reference to guns, he said, “They're not domestically sourced. They are internationally sourced. Our problem in Toronto is handguns from the United States.” I asked him about the handgun ban and the buyback proposed by the government, which is going forward, and he said, “Investing in what you described is certainly not going to deal with the crime problem we're facing in Toronto as it relates to criminal handguns and the use of criminal handguns. We believe an investment upstream is a very valuable focus of resources.” When I asked him if we should invest more in police or if we should ban guns, that was his response. Clearly, he does not believe it will be effective, and he is someone at the epicentre of gun violence in this country.
In fact, I have pages and pages of quotes from frontline officers, who deal with this more than anybody else, who have said that bans will not work because they do not tackle the problem.
We recently studied this issue, guns and gangs, at the national security and public safety committee, for which I am the vice-chair. We had a very robust debate. We had police experts. We had crime experts. We had community advocates. Not one recommendation in that report was to ban handguns, because none of the experts, none of the police experts and none of the community anti-gang experts said that that would be a solution. All of them said that that would not work, because we know from the Toronto police that over 85% of the handguns used in violent crimes in Toronto are smuggled in from the United States. This is a serious and growing problem that the government has failed to address.
I am an MP from Winnipeg. Recently, I took a tour of the Winnipeg police headquarters, where they showed me a half-a-million-dollar drug bust: all these deadly opioids, piles of cash and a very long table with all the firearms they had seized from the gangsters who were responsible. They are making these busts monthly. I took a look at all the guns. They said that, number one, every single gun on that table was already prohibited, not just restricted but prohibited. No one would have been able to legally get those guns in the country, no matter what kind of licence a person had. The second thing they said was that all of them were smuggled in from the United States. Then they showed me a map of the train tracks across North America, major rail lines that went all the way from Mexico, all the way through the central United States, all the way to Winnipeg.
They suspect that a significant number of the drugs and the guns from the United States that are killing Canadians are coming in on rail, so at committee I asked the border agents why they cannot stop it. They said they do not have the capacity, beyond checking one one-millionth, which is effectively none, of the railcars coming into Canada. We also have very little capacity to check marine ports of entry. We are struggling on retention issues at the border. We need many more border officers and much increased and improved technology to stop gun smuggling. All experts agree that this is where the problem is coming from.
The current government has spent more money than any government in history, actually all combined, if we look at deficits. If it really wanted to solve gun violence, it would be dumping billions of dollars into the border to shore up our security, because of course we share the longest undefended border in the world with a country that has more guns than people. Therefore, we have to get real about the Herculean effort it is going to take to stop this problem, which I think every single person in this House agrees we must do.
I am going to talk about police. I mentioned the police. We know that, particularly in rural Canada but in cities as well, the police are struggling to respond to calls. If there is a break and enter in Winnipeg, it may take them a month to come and investigate it because they are so overwhelmed with gun violence and violent crimes. That is how bad it is getting. Do not even get me started on the calls for service in rural Canada. It is unbearable for people in rural Canada.
The answer is that we need far more police and far more investments in guns and gangs units in this country. If we talk to police officers on the front lines, they will say that they are strapped and cannot keep up with demand. Drug and gun deaths are going up and they need more help. Therefore, it is about border security investments and police guns and gangs unit investments. That is what would make a real difference in reducing gun violence, significant investment.
As well, at committee we had a number of remarkable people from the grassroots community in Toronto. One of them, Marcell Wilson, was a hardened criminal who was rehabilitated. He turned his life around and started the One by One Movement. The One by One Movement saves at-risk youth in vulnerable communities from joining a life of gangs and following a life of crime. This man and his organization are saving young people from this life of crime. There is a similar organization in my community, called the Bear Clan Patrol. It really focuses on Winnipeg's north end, which is dealing with a lot of trauma. There are community organizations like this all across the country. They need significant investment and support from all levels of government. That is a long-term solution for the gun violence we are seeing.
I think there is a lot we can agree on with respect to this. The minister talked about red flag laws, increasing the penalties for those who try to smuggle guns into this country, and a few other minor things that I think all members of this House can agree on, so today, in very good faith, we talked to the other parties and we brought forward the following motion. I was not allowed to read it because I was cut off, but I will read it now into the record. This motion was to be brought forward so we can depoliticize this issue. Conservatives firmly believe, as do nearly all firearms owners in this country, that the current government does not have an interest in solving gun violence but wants to stigmatize and divide Canadians on this issue. Therefore, we wanted to take the politics out of it and say that there are parts of this bill we are really keen on, so we can work together, get them to committee, study them and get them passed. Let us quicken the process and save lives, hopefully, if they are effective, which we will find out at committee. Let us put the really difficult political issues through the debate in the House. This is not something that is foreign. We split bills. That is a possibility. It is a democratic tool that we have.
I wanted to say, before I was cut off by Liberal members, that given that the debate on combatting gun violence needs to be depoliticized and centred on the rights of victims and the safety of communities, the House should call on the government to divide Bill C-21 into two parts to allow for those measures where there is broad support across all parties to proceed separately, namely curbing domestic violence and tackling the flow of guns over the Canada-U.S. border, from those aspects of the bill that divide the House. That is fairly collaborative, I would say.
I have to say that Liberal, Conservative, Bloc and NDP members on the public safety committee have worked very well together. We really tried to put our politics aside and we came up with a really great guns and gangs study that we all signed on to. Can members imagine all parties signing on to a guns and gangs study? It is unheard of.
That is how we can work together and how I have shown that I can work together with others on this issue to create real solutions. When I attempted to do that in the House today, the Liberals shot it down, so I will take no lessons from them about playing politics with this. We made a good-faith effort today and they shot it down.
I also want to talk about some of the people who are impacted by this ban. The minister said something very odd recently on the news. He said that this bill does not impact law-abiding citizens and it does not impact law-abiding gun owners. I am not sure if he has read his own bill, because this bill, the handgun freeze, impacts only legal owners. It impacts only people who follow the law.
I will remind the House that those who possess RPAL, the restricted licence, need to be trained, vetted and background-checked. They are some of the most background-checked individuals in the country, and with good reason. Conservatives support very strict gun laws in this country. Only the most responsible, law-abiding citizens should ever come near a gun.
We have a situation where those individuals are the only ones being targeted by this. It is not the criminals in Toronto. They do not care. They are laughing about this handgun freeze. They already own them illegally. They are carrying them around and shooting up their communities illegally now. Do members think they care about a handgun freeze? They are laughing; it is ridiculous.
I would like to talk about some of the individuals who are impacted by this, because I think it is pretty important. Some of them are in the sport shooting community. There is a large sport shooting community. For folks who are watching at home, if they do not own a firearm or have never been around one, I understand this is very foreign to them. I understand. I am not a sport shooter myself, so it is not something that necessarily impacts me.
However, it certainly impacts our Olympic sport shooting community, which has thousands and thousands of sport shooters below it: associations, provincial competitions, national competitions, international competitions. This bill would end that sport in Canada, a sport in which we have competed at the Olympic level for well over a hundred years. The Liberals say they have consulted, but I am hearing from the very large, law-abiding sport shooting community that it has not had a call from the minister. The Liberals are not giving any dignity to these individuals, while ripping apart a major part of their cultural heritage in this country without even a conversation.
The Liberals are trying to push this through at committee with no debate, with a sneaky UC motion at committee. They do not even want to debate it. They want to do it today and completely eliminate any dignity from a large part of this country that values sport shooting and is proud of it. These people pass down their firearms to their daughters and sons. That is all eliminated. I just do not understand how the Liberals can bring forward something like this with no consultation with the community it impacts the most, because it is not impacting the illegal community. It is not impacting the individuals who are killing people in our cities.
If one looks at the crime stats and the trends since the Prime Minister took office, one would think the Liberals would bring forward a bill that would go after the problem, but no, they have chosen politics. They have chosen to go after the individuals who are least likely to commit crimes. Lawful gun owners are actually three times less likely to commit crimes, because they are so vetted and so background-checked, as it should be.
It is infuriating. I cannot tell members how many calls I have received from across the country, from women, educated people, professionals, doctors, pilots and academics who engage in sport shooting. They are asking why they are being attacked again by the government and why the government is not going after the problem. It is spending billions of dollars. The sky is the limit. Why is it not spending it in the cities so we can save people?
It is unbelievable. I can go on and on about this. I am very passionate about it, as I am sure we all are from our own perspectives, but I am willing to work and collaborate on the elements of this bill that we do agree on. That was shot down today, but maybe the Liberals will agree another day.
I would like to move an amendment. I move:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “That” and substituting the following: “Bill C-21, An Act to amend certain Acts and to make certain consequential amendments (firearms), be not now read a second time but that the Order be discharged, the Bill withdrawn and the subject matter thereof referred to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.”
The purpose of my motion is to say we have to go back to the drawing board. This is not going to work. It is not going to solve gun violence. Conservatives will work together on the committee to solve gun violence in this country. We will collaborate and bring forward real solutions to tackle the problem, which is criminals and gangs smuggling guns in from the United States and hurting our communities.
Rest assured.
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Madam Speaker, I agree with my colleague's comment about it not being true that the opposition parties never propose anything. The Bloc Québécois has been proposing a joint peacekeeping unit with the United States for months. Today we learned that Quebec invested $6.2‑million to address this issue, even though borders are a federal responsibility. It is a little strange, but things are not moving quickly on the federal government side.
The Minister of Public Safety tells us that Bill C‑21 will address the dramatic increase in daily shootings in Montreal and elsewhere in Canada. However, I read Bill C‑21, and it deals with weapons that are legally purchased in Canada.
I may be mistaken, but from what I understand, criminal gangs are behind these shootings, and they get their illegal firearms from traffickers. I could be wrong, though, because the Minister of Public Safety seems to think that criminals buy their guns at Canadian Tire or some other gun shop before going out to shoot up schools or other places.
Does my colleague think I am mistaken or does she also think that criminal gangs, and not local businesses, are supplying these guns?
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Madam Speaker, I enjoy working with my colleague on the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. She is quite right that we have a good working relationship.
I have two questions. The first one is that through a technical reading of the bill—because she did talk about lawful gun owners—my understanding of Bill C-21 is that if it becomes law, current owners of handguns could still legally use them. People could still go to a range to fire handguns under the supervision of an RPAL holder, especially if the range owns a collection of handguns. I am just wondering if she can clarify whether that is her understanding of the bill as well.
My second question is about this being a very complex problem. She quoted a lot of police officers. Let me also quote from Staff Sergeant Michael Rowe of the Vancouver Police Department, who also appeared before the public safety committee. He identified straw purchases and the diversion of legally owned handguns as also being big problems.
Therefore, two things can be true here: We can have a problem from gun smuggling, but there is also a problem from the illegal diversion of legally owned handguns. If we ignore that and focus only on the smuggling problem, we are doing a disservice to public safety. Would she not admit that domestic diversion is also a problem, as was clearly identified by Staff Sergeant Michael Rowe of the Vancouver Police Department?
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Madam Speaker, I have enjoyed working with the hon. member on the committee.
On his second question, there is no data available on how many guns in this country are diverted from legal owners, or stolen, as they said. This is sort of a red herring argument.
There is, of course, anecdotal evidence to suggest that this may be part of the problem. I do not believe the officer in question said it was a huge part, but certainly there are methods we can use to reduce straw purchases. One of them is safe storage. We can incentivize safe storage. For the guns legally owned, like the ones I own and the guns others in this place own, the more we can incentivize safe storage in gun safes and the like, the less we will have that as an issue. That should be part of this debate. How we can incentivize safe storage should be part of this bill, because that would make a meaningful impact on something that contributes a very small part to this problem.
Again, I have three or four pages of police saying this bill will do nothing.
On the member's first question, what I am hearing from sport shooters and the elite sport shooters is that this bill would be the death of their sport. There are thousands of these sport shooters. Actually, the Filipinos in my community love sport shooting. They compete provincially, nationally and internationally. They told me they are devastated by this bill. It means that the handguns they bought and the guns they inherited from their fathers, which they plan to give to their daughters and pass along, and these are expensive devices, will no longer be legal.
The opposition is sighing and making fun of this. This is exactly the lack of respect for legal firearm owners that we have seen from the Liberal members. They say, “Too bad, so sad for them.” That—
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Madam Speaker, we hear a lot from the government about its input measures. The Liberals spend more than anybody else. That is their common response. Since the bill has been introduced and since the Prime Minister contradicted the earlier quotes he himself made in 2012, which the member mentioned, I am curious about something.
We have heard claims that Bill C-21 will reduce gun crime in our cities, but we have been unable to nail the government down on the actual targets that this measure will hit in terms of crime reduction in the cities. There is not much use in introducing this kind of legislation unless there are actually specific targets that we think it will hit. Could the member comment on whether, either in committee or in the discussions she had with the department and other officials, the government has set any actual goals for what this will do in having a positive effect in reducing gun crime?
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Madam Speaker, I would like to address the disrespect from the members opposite.
When my grandfather was a young boy, he saved up every penny to buy a rifle that he could go hunting with to sustain his very poor family. He cherished this gun, and when he was dying in palliative care—
I am speaking to the member, actually, through you, Madam Speaker. Perhaps you can learn something about gun culture in this country and the importance of it in—
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Madam Speaker, when he was dying in the final weeks of his life, he brought this gun. It was wrapped up very nicely. He brought it and the cleaning tools to our house. He died about a month later. He brought it and he gifted it to my father, something very symbolically important that goes back over the five generations that we have lived in rural Canada, struggling to sustain ourselves until the two most recent generations. He gave it to my father, and my father will give it to me.
This is a very critical and important part of this discussion that is missing, that needs to be respected, that is lacking and is being laughed at by members opposite. This is why people get so divided and upset about this. It is because there is no dignity given from Liberal members to rural Canada and the heritage that we, with every fibre of our being, believe in—
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Madam Speaker, first and foremost, I would like to congratulate the minister and the government for putting forth this legislation. I know that Canadians, and especially my constituents of Brampton North, have been feeling for a while that enough is enough and that governments need to take action on gun crime and gun control. In 2019, the government put forward action to ban assault rifles, and that process is ongoing. This legislation will complement that action.
From the member's speech, I know she cares about this issue very much. The member specifically mentioned smuggling over the border and illegal guns coming into the country. Would the member support this legislation, since a large portion of the legislation has to do with that very piece? We are increasing maximum penalties from 10 years to 14 years with this piece of legislation, and much more goes hand in hand with this. The government previously put $350 million in to strengthen the RCMP and CBSA, and $250 million—
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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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