- Member of Parliament
- Caucus Chair
- NDP
- Cowichan—Malahat—Langford
- British Columbia
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Madam Speaker, the Conservatives are going off on a completely ridiculous tangent right now.
My hon. colleague talked about the firearms advisory committee. I would ask him to find where, in Bill C-21, that is mentioned. I will give him a hint. It is not there. He should take a look at the public safety website because he would see that the firearms advisory committee is a body that already exists.
At the risk of repeating myself for the nth time today and yesterday, I would challenge my hon. colleague to name one rifle or one shotgun that is in this bill that would be prohibited. I ask the member to give me one model, unlike all of his colleagues before him.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Laurentides—Labelle had very thoughtful remarks on this bill. I have found over the course of the debate that there has been a lot of muddying of the waters, where Conservatives and people on social media are bringing up the firearms advisory committee, which I will state for the record is a body that already exists. They talk about how the government is going to use that body to strike out firearms. That is a power that the government already has under the Criminal Code.
I would like my colleague to reflect on that as part of the misinformation out there. A lot of people are trying to confuse those existing powers with those found in Bill C-21. Could the member clarify that those are in fact very separate elements?
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Mr. Speaker, that was, frankly speaking, an embarrassing speech.
First of all, the firearms advisory committee is a body that already exists. It is separate and apart from Bill C-21. Furthermore, the hon. colleague knows that the power to reclassify firearms already exists under the Criminal Code.
I am willing to bet that if I challenge that member to name one rifle or shotgun that is going to be prohibited by Bill C-21, she would be unable to do so. I am going to sit down now and give her the opportunity to do just that.
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Mr. Speaker, I wish I had the ability to answer in a more fulsome way. I was not at the committee. All I can do is reiterate what I said in my speech, that if we look at the public statement that comes from the National Association of Women and the Law, it took the time to say that with the amendments that were adopted at committee, it feels that this bill would make it much safer for women who are in difficult and dangerous situations involving a firearm.
The National Association of Women and the Law has a lot of credibility. I valued working with it. I take a public statement like that on the current version of Bill C-21 at face value and accept its ultimate judgment on this bill and what it would do for women in violent situations.
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Madam Speaker, I have spoken to sport shooters, and they just simply want to be able to continue their sport. I would redirect my hon. colleague to the testimony that we had from none other than the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. They said that a handgun freeze is absolutely one method of reducing access to these types of firearms, but they also qualified that by saying they support allowing law-abiding handgun owners to practise their sport.
The NDP is on the same side as the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.
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Madam Speaker, I was listening to my colleague talk about hunters, farmers and indigenous communities. For the House's benefit, could he name a specific rifle or shotgun that would now be prohibited because of Bill C-21? The way I read the bill, it references any rifle or shotgun that is manufactured on or after the day on which the bill comes into force. If he is going to go on about the Canadian firearms advisory committee, I would remind him that the power to reclassify firearms already exists under the Criminal Code, and it is completely separate from Bill C-21.
Can the member enlighten the House on a specific rifle or shotgun that would be affected by Bill C-21? I await his answer.
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- May/9/23 7:54:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the member for Hamilton Centre has a very thoughtful question, and he is extremely right. I am very fortunate to live in a riding that does not suffer from firearms violence, so I personally have never had that opportunity to grieve with families in my riding.
However, that does not take away from the testimony that we have heard at committee. It really goes right to our hearts when we hear survivors talk about their personal experiences, or the loss of a close personal friend or loved one within their family. All of us would do well to remember that ultimately our main goal is to make our streets safer for those people.
The member is also very right in raising the issue of ghost guns. We have heard testimony from multiple police agencies that this is an exponentially growing problem. The fact that people could construct a fully functioning firearm with zero traceability and no serial numbers or anything, all with the benefit and aid of a 3-D printer, is a very scary prospect. Police are on the record asking us to tighten up the legislation so we clamp down on who is able to import trigger assemblies, barrels and slides, and all of the other components that are necessary to manufacture a working firearm.
That is the important part of this bill that a lot of people are missing in all of their focus on the other aspects of this bill. There is still a lot in this bill that law enforcement has specifically asked for, and which I believe needs to be put up on a pedestal, on an equal plane of importance as all of those other elements.
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Madam Speaker, it is hard to find the words to start given how long I have personally been involved with this piece of legislation. I know there are a few select members of this House who would agree with me. I think for each one of us, this has been our own personal odyssey, and to get to this point is really remarkable. All of the different twists and turns that this one bill, Bill C-21, has taken are going to be studied in parliamentary procedure for years to come.
I have had the privilege of representing my riding of Cowichan—Malahat—Langford for three terms, now being in my eighth year, and I have discovered that in my time here, Parliament has demonstrated that it is indeed the last place to go for an open, honest and logical debate on firearms. A lot of the debate we have seen on this bill and on firearms regulations, policy and legislation in general has done a very real disservice to Canadians. Both sides of the issue have torqued up their arguments. There has been blatant misinformation and labelling, and this has really descended the level of debate into something that I think a lot of Canadians would quite rightly be disgusted by. It is very difficult in this place, when we have all of these torqued up emotions and political agendas, to have a reasoned debate on firearms. That certainly has been the story.
I know a lot of people on Twitter are following this debate very closely. I would say that the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security is probably the most watched committee of them all, and I know that my words right now are being analyzed and tweeted about, even in real time. I just want the people who are listening to brace themselves, because I have equal amounts of criticism for both the Liberals and the Conservatives as to why we now find ourselves in this place.
I first want to start by talking about the committee, because ultimately today's motion is one of instruction to the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. One could be forgiven for thinking that all this committee does is study policy and legislation surrounding firearms, because that is indeed all it has really been consumed with since the bill was referred to the committee late last year. In fact, we started Bill C-21 at committee in October 2022, and here we are now, well into May 2023, and we are still only at the clause-by-clause part of the bill.
I think it is useful for people to understand what the mandate of this committee is. It is responsible for reviewing legislation, policies, programs and expenditure plans of a whole host of different government departments and agencies that are responsible for not only public safety, but national security, policing, law enforcement, corrections, the conditional release of federal offenders, emergency management, crime prevention and of course the protection of our borders. When we are doing things like the estimates for the spending plans of Public Safety Canada, quite often we have representatives included from the Canada Border Services Agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Parole Board of Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
What I am trying to underline here is that this committee is an extremely important committee of the House of Commons, and all the work it does in all of these different areas in looking after our intelligence gathering, law enforcement and border protection has been sidelined by the incredible amount of time that has been consumed. Time is our most valuable resource in Parliament, and once we spend it we do not get it back.
Because of the shenanigans that have occurred with respect to Bill C-21, the public safety committee has quite correctly been prevented from examining all of these other different areas, keeping tabs on those different departments, examining different pieces of legislation and keeping tabs on what the government's policies and practices are going to be with respect to other key areas. That is an important element that we first need to establish when we are talking about where we are today.
As many members will know, including members in my own community, I used to be our party's public safety critic. I found my time on that committee to be personally quite valuable. I found that the subject matter we were dealing with was quite intellectually challenging and stimulating, and it is important work.
I know from my interactions with other members of the committee, whether on the Liberal, Conservative or Bloc Québécois side, that they all conducted themselves very well, and I enjoyed my working relationships with them. That even goes for our work on Bill C-21.
Believe it or not, there was actually a time when Bill C-21 was progressing through committee in relatively good order. We concluded roughly eight meetings with witnesses. The committee then had time to come forward with its amendments, and there seemed to be an acknowledgement that aside from a few differences with a few clauses here and there, the bill was probably on schedule to be reported back to the House for report stage and eventually third reading sometime in December.
We then got to November, and all hell broke loose. This was when the eleventh-hour amendments were dropped by the Liberals. I should correctly say “the Liberal government”, because I do not think they were, by design, from the Liberal members of the committee. They did come from the government.
I do not want to go into the details of the bill too much, because I think that is a well-trodden path and a well-known story, bu allow me to take this moment in my speech to levy what I think are some well-earned criticisms on both the Liberals and the Conservatives. I know some of my colleagues will probably laugh at this, particularly the member for Hamilton Centre, because he has heard me joke about this before.
I often feel like the character Mercutio in Shakespeare's play, Romeo and Juliet, when he is expressing his frustration with the Capulets and the Montagues, because I feel that same frustration with the Liberals and the Conservatives. It is difficult sometimes to watch the shenanigans between those parties and the way our level of debate around this issue descends into the depths and scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
Let me start with the Liberals. One day, someone is going to write a book about this sorry episode, and it is probably going to be titled something like “How Not to Amend One's Own Legislation”. It is going to be a warning guide for governments in the future on what not to do and how not to spring a surprise on an unsuspecting committee when they have not done their homework, when they have not done consultation and, most importantly, when they have not consulted with the members of the committee who are actually responsible for shepherding those amendments through.
I want to caution members: My comments are not, in any way, directed to the colleagues I work with, but more to the Liberal Party brain trust. I understand the reasoning behind where they are coming from. Gun violence in our major urban centres is a very concerning thing. It needs to be dealt with appropriately. I want to take a moment to acknowledge the extreme grief that is out there within so many families who are dealing with a loss due to firearms violence.
Sometimes the road forward for the Liberals has been paved with good intentions, but it has led to some pretty awful results. I would ask them to step back and try and heal some of the wounds that exist in that divide between urban and rural Canada. We need to understand that yes, firearms violence is a big issue, but there also has to be a level of respect afforded to Canadians who are lawful firearms owners, who play by the rules and who have done everything right. I would encourage the Liberals to consult more with their rural MPs.
When the Liberals introduced those amendments, one of the groups that were leading the way was indigenous communities—not only hunters and farmers, but indigenous communities, not the least of which was the Assembly of First Nations. In an extremely rare move, the AFN came out with a unanimous emergency resolution on the last day. That is almost unheard of. They were going after the government for those ill-thought-of eleventh-hour amendments.
No consultation had taken place. One could make a legitimate argument that the Liberals, in bringing in these amendments, were not respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or even the legislation we have passed that enshrines that within our own laws to make sure that all federal laws are in harmony with the declaration itself. It went against the spirit of that.
Now I will turn to my Conservative friends.
What do we say about the reams of ridiculous hyperbole we have seen from that party on Bill C-21? The bill has been a fundraising boon for the Conservative Party. That giant sucking sound we hear is Conservatives hoovering money from the harvest of their rage-farming operation around the bill, and I think a part of me wonders whether the Conservatives do not want to see the bill go forward because it has been so financially viable for them. The evidence is all out there. I do not think there is any interest at all in trying to move the legislation forward, because doing so would essentially stop the goose from laying golden eggs for them. It has been an incredible money-maker for them.
When I look at some of the misinformation that has been put out by the Conservative Party around the bill, I see they are fanning flames of rage over amendments that no longer exist and incorrectly saying that the government wants to take away all their guns. It is just completely off-the-wall bonkers stuff that can be easily disproven, and it is completely not helping the standard of debate we expect of our parliamentarians. It just makes the rest of our jobs harder when we have to fight that completely untrue disinformation that is being actively fanned on social media.
Yes, it is a sorry state due to the actions of both parties in so expertly playing politics with the bill, and that is a large part of the reason we are here today.
We know that the problematic amendments were withdrawn by the Liberals. That is fact number one. All current owners of long guns in Canada are not going to have those firearms impacted, because the problematic amendments were withdrawn. What we now have being proposed as an amendment to the bill would go after firearms that will be manufactured in the future, after the bill receives royal assent. There is also an important amendment, I understand, that would make sure that nothing in the bill takes away from the rights of indigenous peoples. That is recognized and affirmed under section 35 of our Constitution.
Of course, there are incredibly important amendments dealing with the exponentially growing problem of ghost guns. This is a problem that has been brought to the committee's attention repeatedly by law enforcement agencies. I would hope that more attention is paid to those particular amendments, and of course we, the remaining members of the House of Commons, have to reserve our judgment on the bill until we see the final version that the committee ultimately reports back to us.
Now let us turn to the motion of instruction and what it would do.
First of all, we have to understand that as of this morning, the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security had already spent approximately five hours on clause-by-clause consideration. If they had been able to complete their meeting this afternoon, and I know it was interrupted by a series of votes, that would have brought the total to eight hours, which is roughly equivalent to four full meetings. The motion being debated today would add a further 17 hours to that, bringing it to roughly 25 hours, which is the equivalent of 12-and-a-half meetings.
I understand from the member for New Westminster—Burnaby, our member on the public safety committee, that he has tried multiple times to extend the sitting hours of the public safety committee so that Conservatives, the Bloc and New Democrats could have additional time to look at the amendments that are being proposed by various members. I understand that in each of those instances, these attempts were either rejected or filibustered so that the committee ultimately could never get to a vote. To hear Conservatives complain that they are being silenced in the House when they have, in fact, had multiple opportunities at committee to extend the sitting hours of that committee does come across as a bit rich.
I would say that because I have had my staff look at bills similar in size and complexity to Bill C-21, Bill C-18 comes to mind. That particular bill, when it went through clause-by-clause study at its committee, had seven meetings, the equivalent of 14 hours, for clause-by-clause study, so that is more than enough time to get through it.
I know from my own experience, because I used to be a member of the public safety committee and have seen a lot of these amendments, that are a lot of them are very technical, small changes to the bill, especially the parts that deal with ghost guns. Not a lot of debate is going to be required on them. In fact, the committee can probably get through them in short order because they are repetitive and many different areas of the Criminal Code and the Firearms Act have to be updated to make sure that those existing statutes are in harmony with each another.
The other thing I want to turn to in my final three minutes goes back to the earlier part that I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, the overall mandate of the public safety committee. We have two really important pieces of legislation waiting in the wings, waiting for their turn to be examined at the public safety committee. They are Bill C-20 and Bill C-26.
Bill C-20 is going to create our first-ever public accountability and transparency network that is independent of the RCMP and the CBSA. In fact, the CBSA has never had an independent oversight mechanism. Looking at the public safety committee's report from the previous Parliament looking at systemic racism in policing and looking at all of the instances of injuries and sometimes death that have happened to people who had been in the custody of the CBSA, we see that these are important measures. We have had so many racialized Canadians, so many indigenous Canadians who have been calling out for these types of oversight measures for years. Why should those pieces of legislation continue to be pushed back while we draw out this process on Bill C-21?
Bill C-26 is an important piece of legislation, which I will be the first to admit needs a lot of work at committee, but it is going to really bring in line a lot of the cybersecurity requirements that are needed for some of our critical sectors, be they in banking, transportation, energy and so on. It is going to be a requirement for many of those private actors to bring their systems in line with a standard that is acceptable to the federal government. Again, a lot of work is needed, but no one in this House can deny or absolve themselves from the fact that these are important issues that deserve to have their turn at the public safety committee.
My ultimate motivation for this motion today is to get Bill C-21 on its way. We have had enough time at the committee. It has occupied so much time at the public safety committee, and it is time for the public safety committee to move on to other bills that are equally important to many other Canadians.
In conclusion, I ultimately am going to reserve my judgment on Bill C-21 until I see what the committee reports back to the House, but I will not agree to let that committee continue to be bogged down, especially when there is so much other important work to be done.
With that I conclude. I welcome any comments and questions from my colleagues.
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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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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, 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, 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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