44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 20, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, I want to note that it seems that Bill C-21 was brought in on the back of American politics. I am wondering what the member has to say about importing American politics into Canada.
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Madam Speaker, that could not be further from the truth. As the hon. member knows, gun control was a big issue during the last election campaign. In fact, the gun lobby chose to come to my riding twice to distribute pamphlets to try to make sure that I was not re-elected to be able to take action like that contained in Bill C-21.
To say that we are following events in the United States is simply not true. Having said that, I think it is irresponsible for any of us to think that we are immune from that kind of gun violence here in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I congratulate the parliamentary secretary on this step forward. Obviously, the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of the bill. That said, as we have made clear for the past few weeks, we would really like to see improvements to Bill C-21 in committee.
As I said earlier, finding a solution to curb organized crime is nearly impossible. That has been documented. According to the Montreal police service, 95% of handguns used in violent crimes come from the black market.
How is it possible that with all this information we cannot improve a bill to address the whole problem instead of just part of it?
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Madam Speaker, I look forward to working with my colleague and any amendments that may be put forward by the Bloc.
It is important, as I mentioned in my speech, to recognize one bill will not fix everything when it comes to gun crime. Certainly, we heard testimony at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security about issues at Akwesasne, the ability to patrol that border and the need for financial investments in the police service at Akwesasne.
The investments we have already made with the RCMP and with the border are important, but certainly there is more we can be doing. I look forward to working with the Bloc to ensure that we do.
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Madam Speaker, I have a great amount of respect for my colleague. As she knows, the NDP supports the goal of getting military-style assault weapons off the street with a mandatory buyback of prohibited firearms. We also welcome the announcement that the government is getting serious about cracking down on gun crime.
However, we received letters and calls from hundreds of concerned airsoft owners and businesses who simply do not understand why there is to be a prohibition on the importation, exportation and sale of airsoft guns under this legislation. Maybe my colleague can share who the government, when it prepared the bill, consulted with from the airsoft industry, those who are directly impacted by this bill, and if it is going to consult with the airsoft industry?
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Madam Speaker, I would invite the hon. member to speak to the police service in his riding. When police officers are responding to a call, they have only seconds to be able to know whether they are dealing with a real gun or whether it is an airsoft rifle. Unfortunately, the rifles used at airsoft ranges look so much like the real thing that police do not have the opportunity to check to see and people have lost their lives.
Police officers are put in a very difficult position. I look forward to hearing from the airsoft industry. I am sure its members will be speaking to us at committee when we study the bill, but I would invite the hon. member to speak to the police in his area about the challenges it has with airsoft rifles.
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Madam Speaker, I am sure the hon. parliamentary secretary heard the question I asked earlier to the member for Guelph. The first version of this bill, before it died on the Order Paper, was a voluntary buyback program. We have now moved to it being mandatory. I would appreciate any light she can shed on the government's change of heart.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her work on this issue. It has been a pleasure to work with her on this. The executive director of the National Firearms Association said that we would have to rip his two AR-15s from his cold, dead hands. That is the reason we had to go to a mandatory buyback program.
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
It is always a pleasure to rise in this House to speak to legislation, even bad legislation.
I will be frank. I think Bill C-21 has about as much chance of stopping gun violence as there is of me crossing the floor to join the Liberals. It is just not going to happen. The bill will not work because it is the wrong approach, and the sad thing is that the government knows it is the wrong approach. It knows it will not work, but it is doing it anyway.
I will talk about why it is doing that in just a minute, but let us be clear. Gun control is an important issue. Everyone in the House has agreed that we need sensible gun control, but in this legislation there is the same problem we have come up against every time with the government, and that is that, when it decides it wants to tackle gun crime, it completely ignores the problem. It goes after law-abiding citizens rather than doing the hard work of going after the bad guys. This is because it is easier to control the behaviour of those who already obey the law than it is to deal with those who do not.
Conservatives are eager to tackle this issue. We want to have common sense laws. There are even things in this bill we can get behind, but instead of a serious and honest conversation, we get virtue signalling. We get a Prime Minister who is so eager to import U.S. culture wars into Canada that he politicizes tragedy for his own political benefit rather than taking concrete steps to protect the lives of Canadians. Why is that?
I need to remind the Prime Minister that we do not live in the United States. He is the Prime Minister of Canada, not a pundit for MSNBC. I am not so naive as to think that what happens in the U.S. does not affect us, particularly with the saturation effect of U.S. media, but every time some controversial issue or potential wedge issue pops up south of the border, it would seem that the Prime Minister rubs his hands with glee and wonders how he can weaponize it and use it to divide and control Canadians, whether it is abortion, race, gender, immigration or, what we are talking about now, guns. He seeks to take U.S. issues, import them to Canada and weaponize them to stigmatize and divide Canadians. These are serious issues, and we need to address them, but we need to address them as Canada's Parliament. They are uniquely Canadian issues, but the Prime Minister does not want to do that because it is easier to control people through fear, anger and division than it is to convince Canadians based on the merits of a particular argument.
I spoke in the House last week on the subject of control and how the government wants to pick winners and losers. We see it in the economy. We see it in the media. We see it in society. One group gets federal funding because it agrees with the ideologically of the government and another group does not. One media outlet gets federal funding and the next one does not. Certain people can have their charter rights to travel because they have agreed with the ideology of getting the shot or the second, the third or the fourth. Those who question the government based largely on consistently inconsistent and conflicting information from government sources, not to mention the principle that personal medical choices are private, lost their jobs. They were stigmatized and demonized again and again, and it is still happening.
When certain folks had enough and drove to Ottawa to express their opposition to his overreach, the Prime Minister would not meet with them. He ran away and hid. He and his ministers spun a narrative about these individuals. They said things in the media that have been proven to be false again and again. Where is the accountability for that misinformation? He enacted the Emergencies Act, not, as we now know, on the advice of law enforcement, which is another untruth, but because he had to control. He crushed those people with the full weight of his powers. Why did he do that? It was not because of science or any credible threat, but because of control. He wants to control what we do, what we think, what we can see online.
It was the Prime Minister's father who stated that the government has no business in the bedrooms of Canadians. The government not only wants to be in the bedroom, but also in every other room. It wants to be on every device, and every speech and every thought, and I am not so sure if the government is doing this out of a sense of insecurity. A relationship where one side refuses to listen to the other and always needs to be in control is not a healthy relationship. A relationship where one side belittles and demeans the other is not a healthy relationship. A relationship where one side uses a power differential to force submission is not a healthy relationship. It is an abusive relationship, and right now the relationship between the government and Canadians is not a healthy relationship.
The government has abused power and continues to abuse power, aided and abetted by the New Democrats, who, for a lack of fortitude and courage, are willing to compromise their convictions and sell out to Canadians for just a whiff of power. This is not about public safety. It is about the government controlling the little people, the law-abiding people. Every time government adds to its power to exercise control, individual Canadians lose some of theirs. It only exacerbates and perpetuates the problem.
I look at this bill. I look at how the government went about that process and how it has conducted itself in the past two years, and all I see is another attempt to control law-abiding Canadians. Now, with my remaining minutes, I would like to shift gears a bit because I do want to talk about violence.
There is no greater evil than to perpetuate violence. It is why our criminal justice system reserves the most serious sentences for those who inflict harm on others. However, violence is not a political issue. It is not an issue of hate, but it is an issue of the heart. In my faith we call it sin, which is the corruption of the image of God in humanity. It is a moral defect, the natural expression of which is to inflict harm on ourselves and others. It is a condition and a state of being from which we must be healed if we are ever to find wholeness and peace.
It is a heart issue, and the interesting thing about a heart is issue is that we cannot legislate it. We cannot legislate against what is in a person's heart. We can try, and the government has and will continue to try, and fail, because laws do not fix hearts. Laws cannot eliminate the anger, loneliness or hopelessness that individuals who commit heinous crimes feel, but what laws can do is attempt to control the external factors that contribute to the anger, loneliness and hopelessness that lead to an individual committing such heinous acts. To that end, I would like to offer a few brief suggestions.
We are never going to be able to fully eradicate violent crime, but if we want to get serious about curtailing it, we need to start with our kids. As parents and grandparents, we need to know what they are watching in the media and on social media. We need to know what they are consuming in their minds, which eventually finds its way into their hearts, and the video games and entertainment many of our children and grandchildren are accessing.
We know kids are impressionable and that, even as young adults, people are still developing until their mid-twenties. We know what habitual consumption can do and about neural pathways that habits and patterns create in the brain.
“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”, and we can naturally extrapolate that the body acts. To put it in simple terms, what we put in is likely what will come out. There is an expression that was quite familiar when computers first became very prevalent: “Garbage in; garbage out.” Studies have shown, consistently, the direct correlation between violent video games and being not only desensitized, but predisposed, to violence. As early as the year 2000, which was 22 years ago, a study by the American Psychological Association revealed “that even brief exposure to violent video games can temporarily increase aggressive behavior in all types of participants.”
We see similar patterns when it comes to sexual violence. There is no limit to the depths of depravity and dehumanizing behaviour individuals, including children, can view with just the click of a mouse. That is why in the House we have continually called on the government to take action against Quebec-based MindGeek, which owns Pornhub, one of the largest producers of pornography in the world, including illegal content that is racist, misogynistic and violent, as we have shown in the House in the past.
We recognize that pornography not only isolates individuals, but also creates unhealthy and unrealistic depictions and expectations of sexual behaviour, which leads to violence against women. We know this, but when a young person, or for that matter an older person, is routinely exposed to violence and pornography, they will develop radical and racist views, and that is what many people are consuming for hours a day, day in and day out. We should not be surprised when violence follows.
There is the story in the Bible of the very first murder. It is recorded in the Bible, and it is the story of Cain killing his brother Abel with a rock. The problem was not the rock. We do not read the story and say, “If only God had tougher rock control policies.” The rock was a tool. Jealousy, anger, feeling sorry for himself and feeling hard done by were what motivated the irrational rage that brought on the inability to get past himself and his own desires.
Cain lost control and acted out of his emotions. The problem was not the rock; the problem was the heart.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member said during his speech that “personal medical choices are private”. He spoke a great deal about control.
Does a woman have control over her own body and are a woman's medical choices of sexual and reproductive health and abortion private and a choice between a woman and her doctor?
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Madam Speaker, if the hon. member was listening carefully, she knows that I was actually trying to talk about Bill C-21. That is the gun control issue, the control that the government is seeking to have over law-abiding Canadians who enjoy the sport of sport shooting, who are hunters or farmers who need firearms to conduct their business.
This bill directly attacks individuals like that and makes their lives miserable. Why does the government do it? The government does it because they are easy targets. They are not really criminals.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to change my question, actually.
As I was listening to my colleague, I thought he was absolutely right about how humans should be filled with love, not hate. If that were the case, we would not be here debating what the government can do to make people's lives miserable or just for kicks or whatever.
That being said, it seems to me that until such time as everyone is filled with love and goodwill, prevention is obviously in order. By that, I mean that, when something is amiss, situations should be monitored closely and there should be a list of gangs so that preventive action can be taken and people can be shown a little more love to help them feel even more at ease in their heart and soul. I would like my colleague to comment on that.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member from the Bloc actually goes to the root of the whole issue here, which is what the Liberals and the NDP are failing to do. She is addressing the actual problem that is the heart of the issue.
Certainly, as I said in my speech, there need to be proper controls but reasonable controls, controls that will actually be effective and that will actually work—not controls that target law-abiding gun owners and farmers and hunters, but controls that go after gangs and seek to address the illegal importation of firearms into the country.
Those are the things that this legislation should address, and it does not address them.
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Madam Speaker, my question is really around the importance of a healthy CBSA.
We know that we need to have enough people on the ground watching for the guns that are coming over the border. I represent a region with a lot of people who have guns for shooting at the range and of course for hunting. I also represent 19 Wing and I want to acknowledge the work that it has done to address some of the serious realities of drugs and guns being transported across the border.
The Conservative Party, in the last government that it formed, cut over 1,000 CBSA workers' jobs. This was a major concern then. I just do not understand how they can talk about wanting to take this challenge of getting illegal guns off the streets if they are not willing to make sure that the people are there to staff that effort.
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member was doing so well with that question to start with, until she started criticizing and spouting off information about cuts to the CBSA. The public accounts show that this is actually not the case and that those cuts were not made.
I do share the member's concern with properly funding the CBSA. It does a tremendous job. We expect a lot from it and we want to make sure that it is properly funded and that there are adequate resources for it to do the job of stopping the illegal importation of guns and weapons into Canada from the United States.
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- Jun/20/22 1:15:40 p.m.
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The member for North Island—Powell River is rising on a point of order.
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Madam Speaker, perhaps many would think that this is a point of debate, but I do think that when a member is referring to a woman parliamentarian and indicates that she is “spouting off” instead of stating her position, maybe we should look at more respectful behaviour in the House.
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Well, it is not a question of debate. It is actually a question of how we address colleagues in the chamber, and it would be very helpful if members are respectful to one another when speaking in the chamber.
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Madam Speaker, I found the hon. member for Provencher's discussion of issues of the heart and issues of the law compelling.
This quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King is relevant:
It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behaviour can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me.
I wonder if, in that regard, the hon. member thinks there is a role for the state in regulating gun ownership.
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Madam Speaker, I think I said something very similar to what the member quoted from Martin Luther King in my speech. I thank her for reiterating that laws cannot regulate the heart, but certainly the actions that proceed from what is in an individual's heart can be regulated.
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